Harvey's co-founders did an 'Ask Me Anything': Here's what you might have missed

Fresh off its recent fundraise bringing Harvey’s valuation to $8 billion, co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra hosted an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") on Reddit’s r/legaltech this week where they answered live questions from the Reddit audience covering everything from their origin story meeting through mutual friends on the West Coast how they think about market competition and hallucinations.

It also gave them a chance to set the record straight after a purported, anonymous Harvey employee posted on the same subreddit a few months ago claiming Harvey had low usage and average tech.

The takeaways:

‍The big valuation

Asked about Harvey’s valuation, co-founder Winston said "we need to earn that valuation every day" and said investors look at a mix of "math and momentum". He said there are around 10 million global legal professionals and that Harvey currently serves only a single digit percentage of them.

Room at the table

Winston said there is "very clearly room" for other legal AI startups and he does not believe any one company will "capture all of the pretty enormous amount of value" that will be created in the next ten years, but that they hopefully capture some of that upside.

If people actually use Harvey

Winston pointed to an 81% increase in the share of monthly users who also use Harvey on a daily basis. In other words, a much bigger portion of people who log in during a month are now coming back every day. He added that users who work across several parts of the product tend to use it almost as regularly as tools like Slack or email.

Lawyers won’t lose their day jobs

Winston framed AI as task automation, rather than job automation. He said many legal tasks will be consumed by technology, but the job of lawyers will evolve.

On hallucinations

Pereyra said "one common misconception in legal is that an AI system needs to be perfect and have zero hallucinations to be useful". He said that fine-tuning is one of the tools Harvey uses to reduce hallucinations and that the rate will continue to decrease. Harvey’s chief business officer John Haddock explained the company’s approach to fine tuning in our recent podcast episode. You can listen here at the 17:54 mark.

Can AI improve legal outcomes

Pereyra said that this is a major investment area for the company and they are working with firms on benchmarking and retrospective analyses to "compare litigation outcomes, write-off rates, drafting accuracy, deal-cycle times with and without AI".

European adoption and expansion

Winston said the UK was initially faster to adopt than the US, but now says they are "completely even". Harvey has 75 employees in London, some hires in Spain and Germany and are bringing new countries online next year to support customers in EMEA.

Redditors react

The AMA attracted a steady stream of questions and comments, and many users had their specific questions answered directly by the co-founders.

One redditor celac242 said the AMA was "sanitised" with "all softball questions" in a comment that was upvoted 22 times. The moderator alexdenne replied: "No questions were pulled on my side, for what it’s worth. What did you want to ask?"