How Foley Hoag Turns Efficiency Into Client Value With Harvey
“We didn’t adopt Harvey just to save time. We adopted it to help our lawyers focus on the work that actually drives value — judgment, creativity, and strategic insight for our clients.”
Hathaway Russell
Co-Managing Partner at Foley Hoag
About Foley Hoag
Foley Hoag is an international law firm with more than 310 lawyers across offices in Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Denver, and Paris. Founded in 1943, the firm advises public and private clients across a wide range of disputes and transactions.
The firm pairs a collaborative culture with deep expertise and continually adopts new ways of working to deliver precise, strategic legal advice while staying competitive as client expectations and market dynamics evolve.
Opportunity
As a highly regarded mid-sized firm, Foley Hoag values individual judgment, lawyer autonomy, and a deeply collaborative culture. As competitive pressure increased and the pace of technological change accelerated, the firm moved to preserve those strengths while operating with greater efficiency.
After a rigorous evaluation of generative AI solutions, Foley Hoag selected Harvey for its legal-first foundation, secure enterprise infrastructure, and multidisciplinary team of AI engineers and Big Law-trained lawyers and legal engineers.
“Rather than selecting a tool optimized for narrow use cases, we chose a long-term partner,” said Heidi Pemberton, Director of Knowledge Management and Innovation. “We wanted to build firmwide GenAI fluency, identify the use cases that would truly transform how we work, and share feedback to help shape the product.”
Solution
Foley Hoag completed a firmwide rollout of Harvey in under one month, paired with mandatory ethics training and a coordinated communications program. Sponsorship from the firm’s Managing Partners and the Executive Committee reinforced that Harvey was a strategic investment. “A critical element of our strategic vision was diving into an enterprise license across the entire organization – attorneys and business services – so that all personnel would learn together and share ideas and insights across the firm” said Mark Haddad, Partner and Executive Committee member.
To drive adoption, the firm:
- Launched a dedicated Harvey intranet hub
- Hosted regular office hours and workflow clinics
- Appointed AI Ambassadors within practice groups
- Introduced brief peer-sharing “Harvey 5” segments in meetings
- Published a recurring Harvey Spotlight newsletter
Peer-led adoption exceeded the firm’s original goals. “We expected that busy lawyers would be cautious about changing established workflows,” said Pemberton. “Fostering opportunities for regular peer-to-peer sharing made the difference — colleagues spoke candidly about what worked, what didn’t, and how Harvey fit into real matters.”
In a survey of 55 Foley Hoag lawyers, 50% reported saving an average of five hours per week using Harvey, and 15% reported saving an average of 10 hours per week. Lawyers reinvest that time in deeper analysis, stronger work product, and faster client responsiveness.
Now, over one year into Foley Hoag’s firmwide deployment, Harvey’s flexible platform supports broad GenAI fluency and cross-practice collaboration. Frequent feature updates, paired with hands-on training and guidance from the Harvey team, have driven adoption to more than 94% of Foley Hoag lawyers.
Core Harvey Use Cases Across the Firm
Use Case | How Harvey is Used | Results and Impact |
|---|---|---|
Associate Review Process | The Professional Development team created a workflow that synthesizes multiple partner reviews into a structured first-draft summary, including development areas. Partners review and refine outputs to ensure accuracy, fairness, and clarity. | Significant attorney time savings without compromising review quality, freeing senior lawyers to focus more time on core legal work. |
M&A Due Diligence and Disclosure Schedules | Lawyers upload data rooms into Vault, where Harvey reviews contracts, creates tables, analyzes terms, and generates first-draft disclosure schedules. Associates validate flagged issues with citations. | Reduced review cycles by at least one third, broader document coverage within client budgets, and margin protection on fixed-fee and competitive matters. |
Litigation | Using Workflow Builder, litigators reviewed pretrial documents to identify and compile proposed post-trial facts. | In a two-day trial, one team achieved savings of at least 8–10 associate hours and a clear assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the trial evidence. This assessment enabled the team to compress post‑trial settlement discussions with opposing counsel that ordinarily would require weeks into only days. |
IP Allowance Academy | Harvey workflows help senior associates design and continuously update training resources for patent agents and technical specialists. | Junior team members handle complex tasks earlier, improving training outcomes and supporting fixed-fee caps. The program was shortlisted for the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers North America Award (People and Skills category). |
Articles and Client Memos | Associates, supported by business development staff, use Harvey to draft and refine client alerts and memos. | Reduced time to produce polished, client-ready communications by 40-50%. |
Business Services | Lawyers use Harvey to draft and update bios and other marketing materials. | Meaningful time savings redirected to client work and business development. |
Knowledge Management and Market Insight | Knowledge Management and Innovation lawyers use Vault to consolidate firm and market work products, surfacing deal terms, trends, and precedent. | Approximately 45% faster access to relevant precedent and advice informed by broader market data. |
Impact
Today, over three-quarters of Foley Hoag lawyers and staff use Harvey weekly, signaling that the platform has become embedded infrastructure rather than an occasional tool.
Using Harvey, the firm converts efficiency gains into strategic flexibility. Harvey-enabled diligence allows teams to review more documents within budget and pursue matters previously priced out, in each case while maintaining quality. Lawyers also push complex work to junior associates earlier, strengthening training outcomes while supporting fixed-fee models.
Harvey strengthens — not replaces — what differentiates Foley Hoag. As generative AI reshapes legal practice, the firm sees Harvey as central to navigating the next phase of legal work.
"We’re not just using Harvey to be faster,” said Pemberton. “We’re using it to rethink how legal services can be delivered more consistently and efficiently without losing the judgment our clients rely on.”