Freedom to Operate: How SUSE’s Legal Team Scales With :Harvey:

Key Highlights

• In-Housing Complex Work: Projected 50% projected reduction in outside counsel spend this year, driven by bringing complex, high-value work back in-house.
• Cost Savings: Up to £80,000 saved in external fees on a recent acquisition on due diligence, and an additional £80,000 in recurring annual savings (£50,000 for horizon scanning and £30,000 adverse media monitoring).
• Exceptional Speed: 60% faster contract reviews and 32% faster delivery of legal advice to the wider business.
• Exponential Adoption: Registered a 207% year-over-year increase in usage, from 2.8 to 8.7 hours per user per month, averaging 50.7 queries per user each month
• Cultural & Wellness Boost: 100% of users report improved wellbeing as a result of using the platform, driving Legal’s workload eNPS to 17 points above the company average.
• Internal AI Pioneer: Named by SUSE’s CIO as the company’s internal AI pioneer

About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open-source software. By transforming community innovation into secure, sovereign, and AI-ready solutions, it empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny, with the flexibility to innovate everywhere: from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge, across Linux, Kubernetes, edge, and AI infrastructure. As SUSE expands, including its recent acquisition of Losant, its lean legal team across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC must keep pace without adding headcount.

Opportunity

At SUSE, Legal's journey began when the team recognised that the nature of their work made them suited to the adoption of generative AI.

For a team that lives in commercial negotiations where every contract gates revenue, the question was never whether to adopt AI, but how to cut through the industry noise and transform its potential into measurable operational value.

A natural starting point was using AI to scale the team’s capacity and expertise, while simultaneously optimising legal spend.

“We wanted to bring our high-value work back in-house, which includes, M&A diligence, regulatory matters, and disputes,” says Anne Wong, Head of Legal Operations at SUSE.

Rather than impose a top-down decision, Legal evaluated competing AI platforms head-to-head and let the team trial and choose. Harvey won for its legal-specific design: enterprise-grade security, answers that cite exact source quotations, and built-in access to a legal knowledge base spanning multiple jurisdictions.

Solution

Andy McDonald, SUSE’s Chief Legal Officer, sponsored the business case, framing AI as a corporate enabler rather than discretionary spend. From there, the rollout was intentionally human-centric. Legal Operations spearheaded governance, strategy, change management, technical integrations and ROI reporting.

As the Legal team is geographically dispersed across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC, and operating across multiple jurisdictions with varying regulatory regimes, localised change management was critical.

The team deployed an internal champion network with four hand-picked, regional Power Users, ensuring each sub-team had local peer-to-peer support.

When a quarterly review of prompt logs revealed inconsistent prompting and output quality, the regional champions partnered closely with Legal Operations to roll out standardised templates and agent workflows.

Faster contract review, deeper analysis

The team’s highest-volume use case is reviewing customer, partner, and vendor agreements against SUSE’s standard positions. With Harvey, the review runs 60% faster, and the team delivers advice to the business 32% faster overall.

However, speed is only half of the equation:

• 94% of users report that Harvey allows them to go deeper into complex issues.
• 65% of users report a reduction in errors.

“Harvey frequently adds significant depth to my initial analysis,” notes one senior commercial lawyer. “It’s a core part of my issue-spotting now.”

A full acquisition diligence, handled in-house

During a recent acquisition, the team ran the entire due diligence process in-house in one month, using Harvey. Utilizing Harvey's Vault, they analysed a target data room of agreements, identifying 12 high-priority contracts that required deep-dive analysis regarding termination rights, liability, indemnity, and limitations on open-sourcing.

Harvey performed the first pass review and flagged potential risks, which the legal team then verified against the cited sources. This approach resulted in a 73% reduction in manual review time, and up to £80,000 saved in external fees, on a single deal.

One individual with the output of a team

Harvey has fundamentally changed what a single individual can deliver. As Liz Hogan, SUSE’s global trade compliance director, explains:

"I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands of my current role without Harvey. Normally someone in my position would have a team of people. Harvey allows me to continue acting as a sole contributor.”

One of her highest-impact workflows involves using Harvey to review existing policies and internal documentation against current legal regulations - allowing her to identify new risks in minutes.

Embedded where the team works

To ensure frictionless adoption, Harvey runs within the team’s existing tools, including Microsoft Word and Google Drive. Vault serves as the team’s internal legal knowledge base, reclaiming hours that were once lost searching for information across scattered platforms.

This accessibility extends beyond the desk: Chief Legal Officer Andy McDonald was the earliest adopter of the Harvey mobile app, using it as a live thought partner during high-stakes business and legal decisions.

Impact

The data reflects a deeply integrated habit rather than sporadic usage. Usage has more than tripled year-on-year, becoming a daily working tool.

With Harvey, the SUSE Legal team has collectively saved nearly 1,500 hours in four months, putting them on pace to far exceed their 3,500-hour annual target. This efficiency has dramatically elevated the team's culture and employee sentiment:

• 100% of users report improved wellbeing.
• Legal’s internal engagement score for "having the right tools" is 30 points higher than SUSE’s company-wide benchmark.
• Legal's Pulse Workload eNPS stands at 48, which is 17 points above the company average and a 13-point increase since deploying Harvey.

By keeping high-value matters in-house, the team projects less dependence on external counsel this year, and 70% of users say the reclaimed time funds strategic work for which they once lacked capacity.

By proving that a historically traditional function can lead the charge in enterprise technology, SUSE’s CIO has named Legal the company’s internal pioneer for AI, a function historically seen across the industry as traditional is now setting the pace for the entire enterprise.

“As AI absorbs the routine, we reinvest that capacity into judgment and nuance, the work only our lawyers can do,” Anne Wong says. “It goes beyond productivity gain. It’s a different operating model.”