Introducing the Motion to Dismiss Workflow, Co-Developed With LexisNexisⓇ
Draft a fully researched, citation-backed motion to dismiss in Harvey, grounded in the LexisNexis collection of U.S. case law, statutes, and Shepard's® Citations Service.
In June 2025, we announced our strategic alliance with LexisNexis® to integrate LexisNexis AI technology, primary law content, and Shepard's® Citations within the Harvey platform, and to jointly develop advanced legal workflows. Since that announcement, we introduced Ask LexisNexis to bring citation-backed answers grounded in LexisNexis primary law content directly into Harvey. Today, we're introducing the first of our co-developed workflows: a drafting agent for an entire Motion to Dismiss (MTD).
From Weeks of Associate Time to a Single Review-and-Approve Loop
Drafting a motion to dismiss is one of the most time-intensive tasks in early-stage litigation. Typically, an associate has to read the complaint, spot viable grounds for dismissal, research each ground in the right jurisdiction, check for adverse authority, and draft 20–30 pages of intensely researched arguments. This multi-step process commonly takes 40 to 50+ hours of work. The new MTD workflow streamlines this entire process — just upload the complaint, approve the strategy, review the research brief, and watch Harvey prepare your first draft.
How it Works
The MTD workflow is agentic: a series of specialized agents plan, research, and draft in a review-and-approve loop, with human checkpoints at the moments where a lawyer's judgment matters most. This loop breaks down into four stages:
- Harvey reviews the complaint and proposes a set of ranked arguments for dismissal
- The lawyer approves or adjusts the plan
- Multiple agents conduct in-depth research on each approved argument
- A final agent drafts the motion
A planning agent reads the complaint and proposes a strategy. Harvey starts by identifying the forum and the governing law, then runs an initial research pass with LexisNexis US primary law to surface up to eight candidate grounds for dismissal. Harvey checks each ground against the specific elements of the claims pleaded — a missing element of a cause of action, a jurisdictional defect, a timeliness issue — while weighing the authority honestly and factoring in choice-of-law issues.
Harvey rates each ground by strength, so the lawyer can see at a glance where the complaint is vulnerable and where the motion may be strongest. It then produces a proposed strategy: a ranked set of arguments the lawyer can build the motion around.
The lawyer reviews and approves the plan. Each proposed argument is presented with its strength rating and a short explanation of the basis for each rating. From here, the lawyer can approve the plan as-is or give feedback to add or drop arguments before deep research and drafting begin. This is the point in the process where the attorney's judgment has the most influence over the final motion.›
Parallel research agents run LexisNexis searches for each approved ground. Agents use jurisdiction-filtered, boolean queries tuned to find cases at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Where state authority is thin, they supplement with federal decisions applying that state's law.
This research comes back as a memo for each argument, containing the applicable legal standard and the three to five of the strongest cases. Each case includes a full Bluebook citation, a direct link to the opinion on Lexis+® with Protégé™, its key holding, and how it applies to the specific allegations at issue. The memo also analyzes how the case law supports the theory, including the weaknesses the plaintiff is likely to raise, plus key adverse authority and how to distinguish it. Cases are validated through Shepard's® Citations, with the Shepard’s Signal™ reported alongside them.
A drafting agent assembles the motion. The agent drafts argument sections that weave the complaint's allegations together with the authority that the research agents retrieved, in both federal and state court. For a state-court complaint, it detects the caption and confirms the correct procedural vehicle for that forum — a demurrer in California, a CPLR 3211 motion in New York, preliminary objections in Pennsylvania, and so on. For a federal complaint, it drafts to the Rule 12(b)(6) standard — accepting the well-pleaded allegations as true and testing whether they state a plausible claim under Twombly and Iqbal — and addressing any other threshold 12(b) grounds available on the face of the pleading.
Throughout the draft, every factual assertion is cited back to the complaint, and every legal proposition is cited to case law, so each statement is checkable against the record and the authority behind it. The result is a motion drafted end-to-end, complete with a Table of Contents and Table of Authorities, the forum-specific pleading standard, and motion-appropriate formatting.
How to Get Started
Instead of an associate spending days on research and a first draft, Harvey produces both in a matter of hours, with the lawyer's review built into the process at each stage. The time saved can go toward refining strategy, addressing edge cases, or simply moving the case forward faster.
The Motion to Dismiss workflow is available to all Harvey customers who have access to Ask LexisNexis, and Harvey customers who are also Lexis+® with Protégé™ customers, whether or not they use the Ask LexisNexis integration.
What's Next
This is the first of two co-developed workflows we are building with LexisNexis, and a Motion for Summary Judgment workflow is next.
Ready to see the MTD workflow in action? Fill out the demo form below to learn more.
