How Clayton Utz Found a Pivotal Courtroom Answer in 40 Seconds with :Harvey:

Key Highlights

• A leading Australian full-service commercial law firm with over 1,700 employees in offices across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Darwin
• Disputes span thousands of documents, and fact-finding relied largely on memory
• The firm loads relevant documents into Harvey Vaults and tests for accuracy prior to hearings
• With Harvey, a junior lawyer found a courtroom answer in about 40 seconds in a tax dispute the client won
• Lawyers prompt Harvey agents to make complex contract updates

About Clayton Utz

Clayton Utz is one of Australia’s leading full-service law firms, with over 170 partners and more than 1,700 people across six offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra and Darwin. This national platform enables the firm to mobilize the right expertise for each matter, drawing across practices, sectors and geographies to deliver integrated outcomes.

As a full-service firm, Clayton Utz advises across the full breadth of legal services required by complex organizations and covering all core areas relevant to client’s operations through a coordinated, whole-of-firm approach that combines technical excellence with sector insight.

Clayton Utz has long-standing relationships with leading international law firms across key global markets, enabling them to work with best-in-market advisers internationally where required, while remaining conflict aware, flexible and focused on delivering the best outcomes for clients.

Opportunity

Some of Clayton Utz’s disputes can run for years across thousands of documents. Finding a critical fact within such a large document set relied largely on a lawyer’s knowledge and recalling which keywords to search. “You might not get to that search until after court, and by then it’s too late — the witness is out of the witness box,” said Roxana Carrion, Partner on the Disputes team at Clayton Utz.

Transactions often ran on tight timelines, and one client that brought the firm a competitive bid asked about Clayton Utz’s AI capabilities from the start. Internally, the firm was aligned: Clayton Utz needed an AI platform that could serve as the foundation for its workflows.

“We wanted something that we could build on and make our own,” said Simon Newcomb, Partner and Head of AI at Clayton Utz.

Solution

From the courtroom to the deal room, Clayton Utz uses Harvey to extract key information at a moment’s notice. Lawyers build agents, Playbooks, and Vaults to create a custom knowledge layer that applies the firm’s expertise to Harvey’s AI solutions.

A Vault Primed for the Courtroom

In a major tax dispute in the Supreme Court of Queensland, the firm represented an energy and resources client. The case involved complex valuation evidence spanning hundreds of documents.

Luke Furness serves as Special Counsel on the Disputes team at Clayton Utz. Two weeks before a key hearing, Furness and his colleagues set up shared Harvey Vaults, testing them to ensure the document set was clean.

During the hearing, the judge asked the senior barrister a question that cast doubt on the case. Furness recognized counsel didn’t have the answer.

A junior lawyer using Harvey found it within 40 seconds.

“I didn’t know the answer until the junior lawyer tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Here it is,’” Furness says. “You could actually see the surprise from the barristers and from the judge.” In the end, the client won the dispute.

From Diligence to Completion

On a competitive bid for a national infrastructure business, a Clayton Utz Property team ran the target’s leases and licenses through Vault against a contract review template that the firm workshopped with the client.

Documents continued to arrive in the data room as the deal progressed. “Harvey’s speed allowed us to keep up with the pace of information and digest it fairly quickly. It was a real edge for us,” said Samy Mansour, Partner on the Corporate M&A team at Clayton Utz.

Harvey provided verification equally quickly.

“There’s no point making requests for specific pieces of information if we have to manually go back and validate the source,” said Lauren Parnaby, a lawyer on the Corporate M&A team at Clayton Utz. “With Harvey, the actual text from the document is a click away.”

Harvey’s recommendations closely aligned with the firm’s view of market-standard terms, helping the team move faster to what the client wanted most: the options and a recommendation.

Expertise Built Into the Platform

The firm’s practice experts and knowledge management colleagues collaborate to build Harvey agents, Playbooks, and curated Vaults that draw on Clayton Utz’s own data and subject matter expertise.

In negotiating IT contracts, Newcomb’s team has used Harvey’s long-horizon agents to update a base document to reflect the outcomes tracked in a complex issues table. “That is not something we could have done six months ago,” he says.

Creative agentic usage extends to the firm’s new talent as well. A graduate lawyer on one of the Public M&A teams collaborates with the Corporate M&A team on a five-stage Harvey due diligence agent that runs from scoping and request lists through to the final report.

Impact

Results

• Harvey took 40 seconds to answer a pivotal question from the bench, later resulting in a win for the client
• Transactional teams use Harvey to keep pace with high document volume and can verify source documentation with ease
• Long-horizon agents enable better outcome tracking during contract negotiation
• A graduate lawyer built a five-stage due diligence agent

Furness calls the 40-second answer “a really pivotal moment” that dispelled the judge’s concern, ultimately helping secure a win for the client in the tax dispute. “The momentum shifts in your favor,” he says. The barrister and the client have since asked how they can use Harvey in other matters, and Furness now applies the same setup-and-test workflow whenever he brings the platform into court.

Across the firm, that speed becomes time for judgment. On the competitive bid for a national infrastructure business, Harvey’s output helped the team quickly give its client the full range of options before Clayton Utz’s lawyers weighed in with a recommended path forward.

“Being able to get the information as quickly as Harvey can gives us more time to go and make the judgment calls, which is really what the client’s paying for,” Carrion says.

Agentic work is spreading across Clayton Utz, where lawyers build and share several workflows daily. On IT contract negotiations, Harvey’s long-horizon agents produce strong drafts of the updated base document. On the M&A front, a new agent covers the entire due diligence life cycle.

Newcomb sees the lawyer’s role moving gradually away from pure execution, with more weight on design, strategy, review, and accountability. “We can see a line of sight to new capabilities that are going to take our ability to provide legal services to the next level,” he says.

“Harvey does fantastic things out of the box, but it really shines when you combine it with market-leading lawyers, decades of institutional IP, and a trusted brand.”