Three Lawyers, Working 10 Times Faster: How Bitfury Runs Legal for an Investment Firm

Key Highlights

• A $1 billion pivot in the focus of the business left just three lawyers covering global operations
• Transaction documents are roughly 80% completed by the in-house team before delivery to outside counsel
• Transactions move up to 10 times faster than previous workflows allowed
• Reliance on outside counsel down more than 50%; 10 or more hours back per attorney per week

About Bitfury Group

Founded in 2011 as a Bitcoin miner, Bitfury Group is one of the pioneering technology companies of the blockchain era, having spun out NASDAQ-listed Cipher Digital and Hut 8, as well as LiquidStack and Axelera AI. In November 2025, it launched a $1 billion initiative to transition from a technology provider to an investment firm backing ethical, mission-driven innovators. The pivot saw the organization become considerably leaner as it embraced AI and other technologies to enhance productivity, speed, and quality across its operations.

Opportunity

Running leaner applied to every function, and Legal was no exception. Bitfury’s Legal team consists of just three lawyers supporting Group Operations across multiple jurisdictions, against a deal pipeline that sets its own pace.

“Before adopting AI tools, we experienced real capacity pressure,” says Grigol Abashidze, Head of Legal. “Routine drafting, review, and due diligence risked either consuming disproportionate internal resource or requiring us to engage outside counsel for matters that did not truly warrant partner-level input.”

Going outside was the release valve, and an expensive one. A full external team from day one — partners, associates, and juniors alike — meant paying firm rates for drafting and research Bitfury’s own lawyers understood better.

“Embedding tools such as Harvey into our day-to-day work is essential to managing a high volume of legal work efficiently and accurately,” says Abashidze. “It frees us to focus on the strategic matters that come with Bitfury’s evolution into an investment firm.”

Harvey stood out as a way to insource more work and keep it with the people who understand Bitfury’s objectives best.

Solution

With Harvey, Bitfury’s Legal department has experienced a compounding gain in efficiency across drafting, investment diligence, and expertise development.

Near-final drafts before outside counsel review

Bitfury’s lawyers now draft and refine transaction documents in Harvey for Word, handling the structuring and analysis themselves.

“Rather than bringing in a full external team from day one, our in-house team now uses Harvey to prepare a substantially complete work product, typically around 80% of the way to a final draft,” Abashidze says. “We then engage partners at outside counsel solely for review of that specific transaction.”

The engagement inverts. Outside counsel no longer builds the document and bills for the assembly. It is now responsible solely for reviewing specific transactions. This enhancement in internal efficiency has significantly reduced Bitfury’s spend per transaction.

Diligence that scales with deal flow

Investment diligence runs through Harvey’s Vault. The team uploads data room materials and surfaces the key risks, obligations, and red flags across a target’s documentation. Workstreams that previously stretched three people or forced the team to seek outside help to manage the volume now sit within the team's own capacity.

Foreign regulations, learned in-house

Foreign jurisdictions are no longer a reason to engage local counsel. “When we need to get up to speed on specific foreign regulatory requirements, such as those in Canada, we use Harvey to build that understanding internally,” Abashidze says.

Impact

Without Harvey, Abashidze estimates the department would need at least three more full-time lawyers, plus materially higher spend on outside firms for work the team now handles itself. Instead, three people move through transactions as much as 10 times faster than they did previously.

Results

• Transaction speed increased to as much as 10 times the previous rate
• Reliance on outside counsel down more than 50%
• 10+ hours of time saved weekly

Reliance on outside counsel is down more than 50%. Bitfury is no longer billed for junior associate drafting, research, and administrative time on most matters, so spend per transaction has fallen sharply. Every attorney recovers 10 or more hours a week, and that capacity goes into structuring and negotiating Bitfury’s own investment transactions.

The shift reaches the firms Bitfury still hires. While assessing how technologically advanced a firm is has always been part of how Bitfury selects counsel, its own AI-enhanced processes now set the benchmark.

“We expect AI tools to play an increasingly central role in how legal teams operate — enabling small, agile teams like ours to support complex, global operations without the traditional dependency on outside counsel,” says Abashidze. “We see Harvey remaining a core part of that evolution.”