The Role They Didn't Need to Fill: How ICL Group Scales Legal Across Five Regions with :Harvey:

Key Highlights

• +1 FTE of capacity gained across a four-to-five-person core team
• 20% reduction in reliance on outside counsel
• £90,000 to £165,000 saved on a single cross-border restructuring

About ICL Group

ICL Group is a global specialty minerals company creating essential solutions for humanity, operating across four business segments: Growing Solutions, Industrial Products, Phosphate Solutions, and Potash. Its Legal Department runs as a single global function spanning five regions, including the US, Brazil, the EU, Israel, and China, serving every business segment, with Compliance embedded in the team. Operating in a highly regulated industry, across a diversified global business and a matrix organization, the department carries the kind of complexity that makes speed, quality, and cost impossible to optimize all at once — at least without help.

Opportunity

Before Harvey, ICL's legal team lived with competing pressures: quality, and speed. Often, that meant reaching for outside counsel for leverage.

“Outside counsel was engaged for two reasons: a lack of time or a lack of expertise,” says Mehmet Ocak, Senior Legal Counsel at ICL Group. Both came at a cost, and both created delay. When the team evaluated generative AI tools, Harvey stood out for its legal-specific design and its ability to hold up under the demands of a regulated, multi-jurisdictional business. The harder challenge was internal: introducing AI to an organization with no established playbook for it. “It was uncharted territory,” Ocak says. “There were no structures, no processes, no clear responsibilities.” Ocak led the rollout across Data Privacy, IT, IT Security, Legal, and Procurement over several months to lay a durable foundation.

Solution

Bringing complex matters back in-house

The clearest proof of Harvey’s impact came on a cross-border restructuring involving multiple entity transfers, dividend distributions, and pension trust assessments, that ICL completed internally in five weeks. Working through articles of association for eight-plus subsidiaries, drafting share purchase agreements and board resolutions across jurisdictions, and reviewing 700 to 800-plus pages of pension documentation, the team kept in-house what it would once have outsourced entirely.

External counsel was engaged only for the most complex pension trust questions, and even there, Harvey enabled the ICL team to identify gaps in external counsel's high-level assessment and push back on their conclusions. On this matter alone, Harvey enabled ICL to save an estimated £90,000 to £165,000.

Turning a data room into a report in a day

During an M&A process, Ocak uploaded the entire contents of a data room into Harvey Vault and produced a comprehensive, buyer-side due diligence report in a single day. “This type of analysis would traditionally have taken days or weeks, and often external counsel,” he says. “With Harvey, the work was completed internally, in a single day, at a fraction of the cost.”

Working across languages and decades

ICL is currently defending against claims from a former joint-venture partner in China, drawing on documents in English, German, and Chinese that reach back to 1990. Harvey's ability to read and analyze material across three languages has been central to building the defense, work that would have been slow and costly to coordinate manually.

Cleaning the foundation

When ICL found its legacy contract database riddled with gaps, the team ran more than 1,000 contracts through Harvey to extract the missing metadata and repopulate the system with accurate data, a task Ocak calls “virtually impossible to accomplish manually within any reasonable timeframe.”

Scaling Compliance

Compliance, embedded within the Legal Department, has become the team's automation pioneer: risk assessments that once took days now run through a Harvey Agent at consistent, repeatable quality. It's the proving ground for what comes next as they deploy additional agents to Data Privacy, Sales, and Procurement to push legal judgment closer to the business.

Impact

The efficiency gains are material: ICL estimates that Harvey makes each lawyer roughly 30 to 40% more efficient, the equivalent of adding a full person to a four-to-five-member team. The most tangible sign is a role the department has chosen not to fill. “We currently have one FTE position open that we haven't needed to fill,” Ocak says. “The efficiency gains from Harvey let us manage the workload without additional headcount.”

That leverage has reset ICL's relationship with the market. Reliance on outside counsel is down 20% and the team has rewritten its billing guidelines to state its AI ambitions plainly, pre-approving Harvey and expecting firms to pass on the savings. “We now question whether a firm that isn't using AI can stay competitive on price or speed for routine work,” Ocak says a standard that increasingly shapes which firms ICL hires.

The ambition now is less about doing the same work faster and more about changing what the team is able to advise on. Ocak has begun reshaping his own role toward legal engineering and teaching, building the department's capability rather than simply clearing its queue. “The most critical investment is not in technology, but in people,” he says. “We're not just using Harvey as a productivity tool — we're using it as a platform for organizational transformation.”