Inside $5bn Harvey: Chief business officer John Haddock on scaling a legal AI powerhouse

Before John Haddock joined Harvey earlier this year after a decade at tech rocketship Stripe, he wanted proof that the legal AI startup’s hype matched reality. "I asked Winston [co-founder] to put me in touch with a whole bunch of different customers," he tells us in a conversation for The Non-Billable Podcast.

"Some had only positive things to say, and others - like Paul Weiss's chief knowledge and innovation officer - showed up with a long list of problems Harvey had yet to solve. That’s the product person’s dream - when customers are pulling ideas out of you because the software has become mission-critical."

Harvey as a first port of call

Now as chief business officer, Haddock heads up customer success, go-to-market and strategy, including a 50-person team of former Big Law lawyers who help clients integrate Harvey into daily workflows. "We like to think of lawyers using Harvey as a first port of call," he says. "They have an incoming call from a client to solve a problem that’s going to require real counsel. How do we make sure that first port of call is a way that you can reference all the things they need to do to get their job done?"

That focus on context, he says, is what defines Harvey. "So much of the lawyer’s job today is just piecing together context," Haddock explains. "It lives in emails and documents and document repositories and case law. One of the big challenges that Harvey’s trying to solve is how do you pull together all the different pieces of context that a lawyer needs to do their job in one place."

Behind the scenes, Harvey fine-tunes its models through a research group called Advanced Legal Researchers (ALR) - a team of former Big Law lawyers who test every new model release. "They’ve built what we call BigLaw Bench," Haddock says. "It’s a set of very complicated prompts across a whole bunch of different disciplines that they can continually test to see whether our performance is better than it was without a model change."

Europe expansion and Reddit threads

Despite its US roots, Harvey’s recent funding from European private equity giant EQT hints at its ambitions on this side of the Atlantic. "It comes as a surprise to many, but our first customers were in the UK and Europe - Ashurst, A&O Shearman, Cuatrecasas, Macfarlanes - taking early, early bets on Harvey. EQT brings amazing insight about where the industry is going and how we can make sure we meet the moment."

And when Harvey faced scrutiny in a viral (anonymous) Reddit thread recently, Haddock took it as validation. "I think of it as a sign of our success in bridging legal AI into the mainstream," he says. "The data speaks for itself. We were celebrating this week crossing 50% of the Am Law 100 - and we’re just getting started."

Listen to the full conversation with John Haddock on the latest episode of The Non-Billable Podcast.