All In on Harvey: How King & Wood Mallesons Is Accelerating Insight, Impact, and Innovation

About King & Wood Mallesons

King & Wood Mallesons (KWM) is one of the world’s leading law firms, known for tackling complex, cross-border matters in financial services, M&A, real estate, litigation, and regulatory reform. With a decade-long commitment to designing better ways of working, KWM set out to find legal AI that could match the firm’s ambition — and scale across every practice.

Opportunity

KWM’s lawyers face an escalating volume of information: more documents, lengthy technical reports, and more pressure to deliver precise, actionable advice at speed. As Michelle Mahoney, Chief Innovation Officer, noted, many tools “allowed us to ask a question…but didn’t support the sophisticated workflows our lawyers needed.”

KWM needed a platform that would reduce time spent on manual review, guide lawyers through structured workflows, and support client collaboration — all while feeling intuitive for Australian and Singaporean practitioners.

Solution

In discussing KWM’s evaluation of Harvey, Mahoney stated, “I’ve evaluated a lot of LegalTech over my career. I was impressed by the pace of development, the alignment of future functionality with the KWM GenAI strategy and roadmap, [and] the engaging UI.” She also noted that the team was aiming for high adoption and impact across all practices — and Harvey delivered.

To validate impact, KWM ran a rigorous 6 week experiment with in excess of 200 lawyers, testing Harvey against ten criteria tied to efficiency, effectiveness, ease of use, ensuring it fit naturally into key workflows. The results were clear:

• 284 real use cases identified across litigation, banking & finance, M&A, Real Estate & Projects and Tax practices
• Rapid proof of value in weeks, not months
• Broad excitement and clear demand for firmwide rollout

Adoption followed quickly. KWM rolled out Harvey firmwide, and within the first six weeks of launch, over 86% of the firm’s lawyers completed training — one of the most successful enablement campaigns we have run. As Mahoney explained, “If you can combine substance with curiosity and add some joy, that’s the secret recipe.”

How Harvey Supports KWM’s Lawyers

• Litigation at Scale with Harvey Vault: The team uploaded 140 sets of steering committee minutes into Vault to generate affidavits, witness attendance tables, chronologies, and timelines — eliminating hours of manual review.
• Faster Research and Regulatory Analysis: KWM lawyers use Vault to triage many 300-page scientific and AI reports, surfacing key issues instantly and guiding priorities.
• Workflow-Driven Consistency: Lawyers create and rely on customized workflows using Harvey’s Workflow Builder, improving efficiency and consistency of work product.
• Firmwide Knowledge Sharing: A growing library of shared prompts, examples, and how-tos and customized KWM workflows lifts collective capability, enabling lawyer training and upskilling.

Impact

Harvey is woven into KWM’s daily practice. Usage exceeds internal benchmarks, and lawyers at all seniority levels incorporate Harvey into how they work, draft, and analyze across complex matters. As Mahoney shared, “You’ll often hear people say, ‘What does Harvey say?’ We think of Harvey as a digital colleague working alongside our lawyers.”

The results are tangible:

• Greater Efficiency: Lawyers spend less time compiling information or sifting through large document sets — and more time finding insights, applying judgment and solving client problems.
• Improved Quality and Clarity: Workflows and Vault streamline fact-finding, chronology building, affidavit preparation, and complex research, enabling faster and clearer guidance for clients.
• Cognitive Sparing Partner: It is great at creativity, so we encourage our lawyers to use it as a cognitive sparring partner. Helping our lawyers to train their cognitive muscles by exchanging arguments, questioning assumptions, identifying blind spots and stress-testing ideas. Assessing the impact of every output and bringing in new perspectives to their position which results in better decision making and stronger client solutions.
• A Cultural Shift Toward Innovation: Prompts, workflows, and examples are shared across the firm, unlocking new use cases from live matters and reinforcing a culture of experimentation and excellence.

Momentum continues to build. As Mahoney noted, “Our people are going much further than Harvey Assistant — they’re using all the functionality.” KWM is not just adopting legal AI; it is defining the modern practice of law.