How Shumaker Deployed Legal AI Firmwide Without Adding Risk, Tickets, or IT Headcount

About Shumaker

For more than 100 years, Shumaker has helped clients move forward with confidence. With more than 300 attorneys and advisors across 13 offices nationwide, the firm delivers outcome-focused legal counsel across litigation, corporate and transactional law, real estate, labor and employment, intellectual property, and more.

As competition intensifies and client expectations rise, Shumaker continues to invest in secure, forward-looking technology that strengthens how its lawyers work — without disrupting how the firm operates.

Opportunity

As Chief Information Officer, Tony Draksic owns every technology decision that touches the firm — from security and stability to adoption and long-term support.

AI was no exception.

“AI is the biggest moment legal may ever see,” Draksic says. “Sitting on the sidelines wasn’t an option.”

But neither was rolling out a tool that would create risk, overwhelm IT, or frustrate lawyers.

“At the end of the day, the product has to work — day in and day out,” he says. “If it doesn’t, IT owns that.”

For an AmLaw 200 firm without a dedicated innovation function, the bar was clear: any legal AI platform had to deploy cleanly, integrate into existing systems, and actually get used — without creating a new support burden.

Solution

Shumaker evaluated several AI solutions. Harvey stood out immediately.

“What really separated Harvey was the way it’s built — it’s legal-specific, intuitive, and easy for lawyers to follow,” Draksic says. “The results speak for themselves.”

“Any time you have a software project, there’s usually a lot of IT lift,” Draksic explains. “This has been different.”

Shumaker’s IT team implemented Harvey quickly and cleanly. “Setting up SSO was ‘set it and forget it,’” Draksic says. “Once it was turned on, it just worked.”

The rollout delivered outcomes CIOs rarely see:

• No instability
• No performance issues
• No security concerns
• No help desk tickets

“It hasn’t put any strain on our team,” Draksic says. “It just goes.”

For an IT organization managing hundreds of applications with limited bandwidth, that reliability mattered more than anything else.

Ecosystem First: Adoption Happens Where Lawyers Work

Early feedback from lawyers was blunt.

“During the POC, the only negative comment was, ‘Why isn’t this tied to iManage or Word?’” Draksic says. That changed quickly, once Harvey released native integrations for both.

Once Harvey for Word, Outlook, and iManage integrations were installed, adoption accelerated almost overnight. Today, more than 75% of Shumaker’s lawyers use Harvey daily.

“The add-ins made a big difference,” Draksic says. “Harvey lives where our lawyers already work.”

Training That Scaled Adoption — Without Burdening IT

Shumaker doesn’t have a dedicated KM or AI enablement team. Harvey filled that gap.

“One of Harvey’s biggest perks has been the training and workshops,” Draksic says. “We were concerned that we wouldn’t have the bandwidth to make this work, but they immediately prioritized us and made sure we were set up for success.”

Harvey’s team delivered firmwide training, practice-specific workshops, and ongoing office hours — accelerating adoption without adding work for IT or professional staff.

Why Lawyers Embraced What IT Rolled Out

That operational reliability gave senior lawyers the confidence to push Harvey deeper into their daily work.

For Zachary Madden, Partner and Management Committee Member, Harvey quickly became essential — not because it replaced judgment, but because it amplified it.

“One of the biggest changes is how we use Harvey as a training tool,” Madden says. “It’s raised the bar for how we develop associates.”

“I’ll have an associate review a lengthy loan agreement, then run the same document through Harvey. We compare what the associate caught versus what Harvey caught, and it turns into a really powerful learning experience.”

Harvey also changed what clients were willing to ask of outside counsel.

“One client asked us to do a quick, high-level review of an agreement where only $50,000 was at issue,” Madden says. “Before, that might not have made sense. With Harvey, we turned it around in less than ten minutes.”

On larger matters, the impact was even more pronounced.

“We recently took on a document review project that would have required five associates spending ten hours each,” Madden says. “With Harvey, we handled it efficiently and delivered for the client — something we simply couldn’t have done before.”

Across his practice, Madden estimates Harvey saves lawyers seven to ten hours per week — time that goes directly back into higher-value work.

“Instead of being buried in routine tasks, I can spend more time with clients, develop new business, and dig into the complex projects that really move the needle,” he says.

Impact

For Shumaker, Harvey delivered IT success that translated directly into business impact.

• Stable, secure deployment with no support burden
• Seamless integration into the firm’s core systems
• Training that drove confidence and adoption
• Daily usage across most of the firm
• Lawyers doing more — without burnout or bloated teams

“In my experience, this just doesn’t happen,” Draksic says. “Folks love Harvey.”

Shumaker continues to expand how it uses Harvey as new features and integrations become available.

“The more our lawyers use it and understand it, the better positioned we are to stay ahead of competitors on the AI frontier,” Draksic says.

For Shumaker, Harvey isn’t an experiment. At this point, Harvey isn’t a pilot or an add-on — it’s how the firm operates.

“Harvey hasn’t replaced judgment — it’s made us better lawyers,” Madden adds. “It’s changed how we train, how we work, and how we build trust with our clients.”

Today, Harvey is part of Shumaker’s operating system — a win for IT, for lawyers, and for the business.