Amid embrace of AI, firms look for mix to best suit their needs

As artificial intelligence continues to develop at a rapid pace, law firms across the United States and here in Indiana are implementing different models into their legal practice.

Last month, Faegre Drinker made a major leap into the world of AI when the firm announced its formal adoption of two AI platforms into its practice firmwide. Harvey AI and Microsoft Copilot are helping Faegre Drinker and its attorneys meet client needs accurately and efficiently.

“We realized that we wanted to be an AI-led organization, and that we wanted to put AI in the hands of everyone in the firm,” said Scott Angelo, chief technology and innovation officer for Faegre Drinker.

As Harvey positions itself as a leading force in AI technology catered toward the legal profession, law firms continue to test its features, and those of other platforms, to find the right fit for their own legal practice.

Ice Miller is testing the platform among some of its attorneys, while Barnes & Thornburg has implemented it firmwide.

Harvey’s benefits

Back in May, Harvey AI led a panel discussion at Faegre Drinker’s 13th annual Indianapolis M&A Conference. The panel came together separate from Faegre demoing the technology, and it proved beneficial to those in attendance, Angelo said.

It’s an operating system for legal and professional services, the industries it was specifically designed to serve.

Harvey was founded in 2022 by business partners Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereyra. To date, the technology is used by more than 142,000 professionals and 1,500 law firms across 60 countries, according to the company.

More than 25,000 custom agents operate on Harvey, executing work across M&A, due diligence, contract drafting and document review.

Through its relationship with OpenAI, the platform analyzes complex issues and stores scores of legal documents in one place. The technology pulls from sources like LexisNexis and EDGAR, offering legal professionals the ability to research issues within the platform.

Unique in its functioning compared with more mainstream AI models, Harvey integrates several large language models (LLMs) to seek responses to a user’s inquiry. When a user inputs a request to the platform, Harvey divides the request into several subtasks, selecting the best LLM to give the user the best output, according to Harvey’s website. Harvey uses a number of LLMs across its platform, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini.

Harvey representatives told The Indiana Lawyer they would respond to written questions but had not as of this publication’s deadline.

Harvey is now valued at $11 billion after it announced in March $200 million in new funding co-led by returning investors GIC and Sequoia.

That growth has not come without drama. In September, an anonymous Reddit user — purportedly a former Harvey employee — wrote in a now-deleted post that adoption was low for firms using the platform and criticized the cost. The post also said that Harvey leadership prioritized sales and partnerships over product development and retention. The post went viral in the LegalTech community.

Harvey does not publish a standard rate for its solutions on its website.

Faegre did not share with The Indiana Lawyer what it’s paying.

CEO Weinberg pushed back on the claims and shared publicly the company’s metrics. He and co-founder Pereyra then participated in an Ask Me Anything session in the Reddit LegalTech community.

For Faegre leaders, adding Harvey was a natural step in further helping attorneys handle client needs.

“We felt that they were ready, they had higher expectations, and they were excited about doing things differently with respect to their clients,” Angelo said.

Before pursuing specific AI platforms, innovation leaders at law firms must assess how these models could help, not hinder, case progress.

For legal professionals like James Boyer, chief innovation officer with Ice Miller LLP, whether to implement artificial intelligence comes down to what clients need to move their cases along. It’s those client needs, like responsiveness and efficiency, that require leaders to take a step back and evaluate how attorneys can better serve them.

“Even if it allows us to do one or two more tasks a day, that’s a tremendous amount of value. So we can respond quicker to our clients or [be] more available to our clients because we’re able to do that,” Boyer said.

Implementing AI

Faegre Drinker’s decision to use Harvey and Microsoft Copilot enterprise-wide came after several months of testing different AI models, including the deployment of its own AI platform called Atlas AI.

While Atlas offered a strong starting point for Faegre Drinker attorneys to build an understanding of how AI can be used in their practices, firm leaders knew it ultimately wouldn’t be enough. Atlas AI did little more for attorneys than platforms like ChatGPT, Angelo said.

“This was an opportunity to provide them with a sandbox,” he said. “It was safe, and it served its purpose, just getting people comfortable.”]

Now Harvey and Microsoft Copilot are available to both attorneys and nonlegal professionals at Faegre Drinker.

The implementation of two AI platforms is intentional, Angelo said, since both offer different resources for users. Copilot, for example, is a better tool for nonlegal attorneys, while attorneys can accomplish more legal-specific tasks using Harvey. Harvey also serves non-legal-specific positions, Angelo said.

Angelo said ethics has been top of mind through the deployment. Before Faegre Drinker employees can have access to the technology, the firm requires them to complete three checkpoints to ensure a thorough understanding of AI and their own ethical requirements at the firm.

Each employee must complete basic AI training, professional responsibility (otherwise known as ethics) training and be tested on a Faegre-specific AI security policy.

“It was an opportunity to level-set, raise that level, and then level-set,” he said. “Everyone’s going to understand how to use it, they’re going to understand what we mean by professional responsibility and everyone’s going to understand the new security policies around this.”

While Faegre Drinker is committed to Harvey and Copilot, some firms, like Ice Miller, continue to test different AI platforms to determine which best support its needs.

Recently the firm tested Legora, another AI platform designed to support legal work. Now, some attorneys are testing Harvey.

“Until things kind of settle out in the next four or five or six years, we’re going to be constantly looking for the next best tool, to best serve our clients, because it really comes down to them,” Boyer said. “We are trying to do best by our clients and make sure the tools that we’re using are meeting their needs.”

And this week, Barnes and Thornburg announced that the firm now has 38 attorneys across its 26 markets serving as “AI practice champions” who are working withing their practices to advance how AI is used in in the delivery of legal services to clients.

“AI is not taking work away from lawyers. It is changing which parts of the work clients are willing to pay for, and the firms that understand that distinction will lead,” Brian McGinnis, co-chair of the firm’s AI practice, said in a news release. McGinnis is based in Indianapolis.

Barnes & Thornburg’s approach to AI is deliberately straightforward: buy best-in-class tools, put them in the hands of lawyers, keep adoption high, and learn through real client matters, the firm said in the release.

Rather than requiring attorneys to use AI or treating it as a separate workstream, the firm has focused on moving AI from the edge of legal work to its core — putting tools in the hands of those who are eager to use them and letting adoption grow naturally from demonstrated results, the press release said.

Nearly 90% of the firm’s attorneys are actively using AI, and more than 1,000 users have already logged into Harvey since its firmwide deployment, the press release states. In the past 30 days alone, attorneys submitted more than 150,000 prompts across the firm’s AI platforms. Harvey licenses have been deployed to all attorneys and legal personnel, alongside CoCounsel, ChatBT — the firm’s general AI portal — and practice-specific solutions.

Angelo of Faegre and Boyer of Ice Miller both emphasized that the use of this technology is ultimately in service of their respective firms’ clients. As law firms continue to use advancing AI in their practices, clients are beginning to ask more in-depth questions about how the technology will help their cases, which is another reason why proper attorney training is so crucial to the rollout.

Looking ahead, Angelo said Faegre Drinker is looking for opportunities to integrate AI technology into focused practice areas and specific client needs. He wants the firm to continue being a leading force in AI adoption in the legal community, showing clients what they can do to support their matters.

“We want this to be a differentiator for us,” he said. “This isn’t just a ‘nice to have.’ This isn’t, ‘We’re only doing this because a client or two or competitors are doing it.’ We believe in it, and we want to embrace that so that we can stay ahead.”•