Extract from Marianna Wharry’s article “‘It’s Going to Happen’: Harvey CEO Details Why AI Is Here to Stay in the Legal Industry”
Try everything, think about what you do, and listen to young people is the advice Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told attendees Friday afternoon while discussing the role of artificial intelligence in the legal industry at the New York University Law Review’s “Charting the Future of Litigation Finance” event.
Weinberg joined Maria Glover, a professor at Georgetown Law, and Tobey Scharding, a professor at Rutgers Business School, for a keynote conversation at the law school in lower Manhattan to discuss how and why the generative AI system has taken the legal industry by storm. The 31-year-old founder and former associate at O’Melveny & Meyers described how the startup, now valued at over $11 billion, has become a pioneer and why legal tech like it is here to stay.
“When you have a legal issue, [people] want it to be resolved, and they want help resolving it,” Weinberg told the crowd. “That second piece is really a human element, at the end of the day the problem here is there are not enough human lawyers to meet the demand of consumer legal needs. It doesn’t exist, … and what you could do is you could give those human lawyers the tools to basically better, better address all this stuff that they’re doing.”
The main goal is for Harvey to ultimately shift eliminate lower risk issues so attorneys can spend additional time with clients or prepare for more detailed cases, Weinberg said. The product is now being marketed and sold to individual lawyers as a productivity tool as the company begins to step outside the world of Big Law.
