How Gray Reed Turns Tight Deadlines Into an Advantage With :Harvey:

About Gray Reed

Gray Reed is a full-service Texas law firm with more than 150 lawyers in offices in Dallas, Houston, and Waco. For decades it has handled deals and tried cases against national firms with larger benches, in one of the country’s toughest markets, all while maintaining its culture and regional focus. But it was never easy, and Gray Reed set out to change that.

Opportunity

For Gray Reed, the challenge was never talent — it was leverage. Larger firms can staff a matter with more people and hours. “We’ve always prided ourselves on going toe-to-toe with firms two or three times our size,” says bankruptcy partner Lydia Webb. “But doing that well meant a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of ingesting and understanding complicated documents with a smaller team.” After a year and a half of evaluating options, a firm committee chose Harvey to help close that gap. Then it made a less obvious bet: instead of buying software and hoping for uptake, it put a partner in charge of the change.

Solution

Skyler Stuckey, a litigation partner who now also serves as the firm’s Chief Innovation Officer, quickly saw Harvey’s potential to unlock value and scale capability for the firm. He now runs AI training for every practice group, builds agents alongside practice leaders, and helps determine the firm’s strategy regarding legal innovation. He also runs the firm’s AI transformation as one of its most demanding users, using Harvey daily inside his own high-stakes litigation practice.

Stuckey builds a Vault for every case, loading every available document, so it is deeply embedded in the matter from start to finish. In a recent case — which involved 50,000 to 60,000 documents — the payoff came mid-deposition. On the road defending a client’s CEO in a federal lawsuit, he recognized a document opposing counsel was referencing before it appeared. Rather than dig through a folder on the floor or frantically message an associate back at the office, he asked Harvey a plain question: “find the document written in September or December of 2022,” and kept his attention on the client. Moments later, Harvey had provided him with the correct document and connected ideas. The point wasn’t the search; it was that he never left the room — still engaging opposing counsel, constantly thinking ahead. “It gets my clients better results. Period.,” he says. “It takes out the guesswork and cuts down on the most tedious parts of litigation. It gives me more space to focus on strategy and key issues, which are the things the client wants to begin with. It lets me do more of my best work.”

The Harvey agents he’s built are now being deployed firmwide. Transactional attorney Tanner McClellan, who handles M&A and securities work, saves about three hours a day. On one last-minute deal, the parties shifted from the deal structure to involve multiple additional entities — cascading subject-verb changes across hundreds of pages that no find-and-replace could fix adequately. “Harvey is incredible at that. It did in minutes what would have taken me hours, and it did it accurately.” The process of comparing a 200-page credit agreement against a new one of equal length, isolating everything and providing reasoning for each change, dropped from hours to minutes. “That’s game changing for my team,” he says.

For bankruptcy partner Lydia Webb, a critical moment came on a holiday weekend, when she had fewer than 24 hours to file a response to a bankruptcy filing, with most of the team unavailable. She loaded the relevant documents into Harvey, had it build a spreadsheet analysis, then — once the case filed at 3:00 a.m. with a 1:00 p.m. hearing — uploaded the filings, had Harvey identify the requested relief that affected her client, and drafted an objection that was filed an hour before the hearing. She then had Harvey build a cross-examination of the debtor’s CFO based on that same filing and look for ways opposing counsel might challenge her client’s standing. “I did more in about six hours than I could have done in days before,” she says. “It was like an adrenaline high. I called my partner afterward and said, ‘I can’t believe we just did that.’ This is going to make us so much better at what we do.”

Impact

What began as a committee experiment is now how Gray Reed practices, with firm-wide adoption from founding partners to first-years. The bigger shift is strategic. “Once you understand what Harvey can actually do, you can have real conversations about how many associates to put on a file, how to handle a large review, and what that costs,” Stuckey says. “It lets us fine-tune everything we do to fit the client and the case.” The work now bends towards what matters most: McClellan spends more time on strategy and clients; Webb expects to give clients “my best work, consistently.” Stuckey’s advice to peers still hesitating is blunt: “The best time to start using Harvey was yesterday. You have to get in the game.”