How Munck Wilson Mandala Turns Technical Depth Into Legal Leverage

About Munck Wilson Mandala

Munck Wilson Mandala is a nearly hundred lawyer, technology focused mid-market firm where roughly half the attorneys hold STEM degrees. The firm represents technology companies across corporate, IP, complex commercial litigation, and labor and employment, lawyers who think like engineers. That DNA defines how the firm operates.

Opportunity

Many firms discovered generative AI in 2023. Munck Wilson Mandala has been patenting it for clients since the early 1990s. Managing Partner Bill Munck coded neural networks before law school, and the firm assembled a multidisciplinary evaluation group long before the current wave hit. They initially licensed a different provider, but it couldn't keep pace with the team. When that contract expired, they moved to Harvey after rigorous evaluation. "It was so much better than the other products," Munck says. "It felt indispensable."

Solution

Lawyers at the firm deploy Harvey across the firm's most document-intensive work. The firm treats GenAI adoption as a service to clients, showing in-house teams firsthand what the technology can do. The firm’s AI use policy mandates that MWM attorneys keep open communication with clients, ensuring AI use only happens with client knowledge and permission.

M&A Due Diligence: Collapsing Weeks into a Day

A long-standing client's general counsel was wary of AI. He agreed to let the firm try Harvey on a single matter. The team uploaded associated contracts, refined prompts over half a day, and generated an Excel spreadsheet answering every due diligence question – plus the questions they knew the client would have asked if he trusted the tool. Accuracy came in above 90%.

"What we did with those contracts would have been three associates working a week and a half," says Munck. "We did it in a day." The once-skeptical client is now adopting AI for their own internal use.

Banking Litigation: From Notebooks to Seconds

Jenny Martinez, Managing Partner of the firm’s Dallas office, handles document-intensive banking disputes. In one matter, an investor's audit revealed a borrower had misrepresented her employment status, triggering a repurchase demand worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The evidence sat inside a 2,000-page loan file: applications, appraisals, title policies, and legal opinions, unordered and full of duplicates.

"Instead of printing all of that out, highlighting it, building a timeline by hand, days of work, I put it into Harvey," Martinez says. Harvey surfaced the relevant documents and assembled the timeline in seconds. Harvey's sentence-level source citations let her jump straight to the underlying page to verify the output.

"Harvey allows me to take on more work and deliver faster results to our clients," she says. “What used to take me days now takes me a couple of hours.” Martinez juggles at least 10 cases daily, switching between matters in Harvey the way she once shuffled physical notebooks.

IP Discovery: Bridging Technical Knowledge Gaps

Neil Ferrari, an IP attorney with an electrical engineering background, gets pulled into the firm's most technically demanding work. In one trade secrets dispute, he had 24 hours to work through dense technical discovery built on platforms unfamiliar even to him, with critical timelines buried in file metadata.

"I didn't rely on it to tell me the answer, it guided me to the answer I was trying to find," Ferrari says. That let him produce a concise, accurate report that advanced the case. Without Harvey, he would have had to pick a few angles and hope.

Ferrari also uses Vault for M&A diligence, mapping IP licensing rights and flagging ownership gaps. "Sometimes what we think we're buying isn't what we're buying," he says. "That can kill a deal or adjust the purchase price."

Impact

Munck Wilson Mandala isn't just faster, the firm is built differently. Summer classes that once ran 11 associates have settled at two or three, because experienced attorneys with Harvey accomplish work that once required fleets of juniors. Associates use Harvey as a training tool, validating their own work and asking what they missed before a partner ever sees it.

Munck compares the shift to the nail gun arriving on a construction site: a roof that once took a week goes up in a day and a half. "That's Harvey," he says. "What you're looking for now is somebody with the experience to use these tools."

"If you don't adopt it, you're just going to fall behind," says Martinez. "Clients are going to demand these efficiencies."