Truyens Advocaten: One Standard, Every Area of Law

Key Highlights

• 30 lawyers across three Belgian offices, advising on virtually every area of law
• Harvey selected as the most mature platform after an evaluation of several AI solutions
• Harvey serves as a common starting point across every practice area, helping to improve both efficiency and consistency
• Three to six hours returned to every regular user each week
• A multistep debt recovery Workflow co-developed with Harvey’s Engineering Team, currently in beta

About Truyens Advocaten

Truyens Advocaten is a full-service Belgian law firm with offices in Sint-Niklaas, Ghent, and Lokeren. Its team of 30 lawyers advises businesses, public authorities, and private clients across virtually every area of law. Continuous investment in specialist expertise, innovation, and technology enables the firm to deliver practical, high-quality advice while keeping a personal approach to clients.

Opportunity

Full-service breadth carries an obligation. For Truyens Advocaten, that means every matter has to meet the same standard. The firm found that repetitive work was consuming the hours where specialist judgment belonged.

“We were looking for ways to reduce the time spent on repetitive legal research, drafting, and document review — without compromising quality,” says Stefan Walgraeve, Managing Partner at Truyens Advocaten.

Preserving quality was equally important. The firm tested several generative AI (GenAI) platforms on the dimensions that decide whether lawyers adopt a tool at all: quality of legal reasoning, consistency of outputs, and speed of response. Enterprise security and responsible AI were also nonnegotiable.

“It quickly became clear that Harvey was the most mature and advanced solution among the platforms we tested,” says Walgraeve.

Solution

One Starting Point, Every Practice Area

Harvey is increasingly used as an effective starting point in a range of workflows and practice areas. Lawyers use it to identify relevant legislation, case law, and arguments, as well as to draft memoranda, procedural documents, and client communications. Others turn to Harvey to summarize lengthy documents and pinpoint the issues that matter.

This new baseline changes what the firm can promise on any given matter.

“Harvey helps our junior lawyers develop their legal analysis by providing well-structured starting points that they can critically assess and improve,” says Arthur Roosen, Senior Associate at Truyens Advocaten. “But Harvey pushes senior lawyers too, supporting their experienced reasoning with fresh perspectives and insights that sharpen their expertise.”

While all output remains subject to professional legal review, Harvey has substantially reduced the time Truyens Advocaten’s lawyers spend on routine tasks.

Context From the Conversation, Not the Notepad

Where appropriate and with the necessary consent, recordings of client and adviser meetings can be transcribed using Harvey’s proprietary transcription tool, helping lawyers capture relevant context and action points while focusing on the conversation.

“Our lawyers keep their focus on the client instead of notetaking,” says Roosen. “Harvey pulls the context and the actionables from the meeting and works against the case files in Vault, helping ensure that important information is captured.”

Building the Firm’s Own Automation

Roosen led the internal task force that piloted Harvey across practice areas before a broader rollout within the firm. “Adoption happened naturally because lawyers quickly experienced practical value in their daily work,” he says.

Today, the task force focuses on building automated workflows in Harvey. In cooperation with Harvey’s Engineering Team, the firm has developed a multistep Workflow automating debt recovery for clients. While it is currently in beta, it presents considerable potential to drive efficiency and value for both the firm and its clients.

Impact

Results

• An estimated three to six hours returned to many regular users per week
• Consistency improvements and efficiency gains across legal research, drafting, and summarization processes
• Significant time reallocated to strategic legal analysis, client communication, negotiation, and case strategy

Harvey helps Truyens Advocaten’s lawyers reach a high-quality first draft faster and supports greater consistency across recurring research, drafting, and document review tasks. Based on user feedback, many regular users estimate that Harvey saves them between three and six hours per week, depending on their practice area and workload. The firm attributes the time savings to efficiencies gained across the aforementioned core tasks.

More crucially, Truyens Advocaten’s lawyers can now dedicate their newfound bandwidth to enhanced client service.

“Rather than reducing working hours, Harvey allows our lawyers to spend more time on strategic legal analysis, client communication, negotiation, and case strategy,” says Walgraeve. “The technology removes repetitive work while leaving more room for the aspects of legal practice where human judgment and interaction create the greatest value.”

As corporate clients and public authorities increasingly expect their advisers to adopt innovation responsibly, Walgraeve believes GenAI will become a standard tool for the profession, comparable to how online legal databases transformed research years ago. In his view, lawyers will primarily focus on legal judgment, strategy, and client relationships, while AI handles the repetitive tasks that previously stood in the way of higher-value work.

“Our ability to demonstrate responsible usage of leading AI technology strengthens our innovative profile and reassures clients that we are continuously improving efficiency and service quality,” says Walgraeve.

“We expect Harvey to remain an important strategic partner, particularly as integrations, workflow automation, and legal-specific capabilities continue to expand,” he says.