Agents, Lawyers, and LLMs

**Aatish Nayak** (0:00)
Globalization, the Internet, AI has increased legal work exponentially over the last few decades. And so you have basically infinite demand for legal work because companies are wanting to do different transactions, legations, etc. So you have infinite demand. And then what that means is that the supply is very constrained. And the unfortunate human cost of supply constraints is very long hours, often doing very mundane, boring tasks. We talk to lawyers who we've hired, our customers, they haven't become lawyers to write the fifth draft of the same document the fifth time, or ask the same legal research question, right? They became lawyers to apply the law in creative ways, publish opinions, shape the fabric of society.

**Kimberly Tan** (0:41)
Thanks for listening to the a16z AI podcast. If you're into applied AI and specifically building products for specialized and possibly regulated vertical markets, you should take a lot from this discussion between a16z partner Kimberly Tan and Aatish Nayak, who's head of product at Harvey, which, if you're not familiar, is a fast growing startup targeting the legal industry with LLMs. Aatish talks to the various areas of legal work that Harvey is targeting, but more importantly, he gets into the very critical aspects of any successful vertical application such as working closely with customers, integrating with their existing tools and workflows and having industry expertise in-house. Looking more broadly, he also touches on how Harvey thinks about expanding into other fields of knowledge work and its strategy for adopting and innovating on top of today's best foundation models. It's an exciting discussion that you'll hear after these disclosures. As a reminder, please note that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Aatish Nayak** (1:57)
I'm Aatish, I lead product at Harvey. I've been at Harvey for a year and a half now, when we were around 30 people, and since we've scaled to 250 people, so it's been quite a journey going through that growth. And generally, my background and where I spend most of my career is actually in hypergrowth AI startups. And so before this, I was at scale for four and a half years as a product leader, and before that I was at Shield AI, also a 16z portfolio company. And really, it's a privilege to be part of Harvey for a third time through hypergrowth, because it's such a pivotal moment in human history, and I think a lot of things are going to change, and I'm excited to be at the forefront.

**Kimberly Tan** (2:32)
Maybe for people who aren't familiar in the audience or people who are listening online, what exactly does Harvey do? I think a lot of people know that Harvey exists, but we might not know in extreme detail what the product offering is.

**Aatish Nayak** (2:43)
So Harvey is domain specific AI for legal and professional services. Our product basically helps users and lawyers automate drafts, synthesis, strategic advice, memos, and more.

**Kimberly Tan** (2:53)
Got it. And before we get a little bit deeper into the practice of building Applied AI, are there specific use cases that Harvey tackles the most, knowing that there are a lot of different workflows one could theoretically do for legal or professional services?

**Aatish Nayak** (3:05)
Broadly for legal, there's maybe two or three types of legal work. So there's transactional work, which is essentially for mergers, acquisitions, venture funding, large transactions that involve tremendous amounts of money. And then there's litigations, which is if someone sues someone, if there's a case in court, also often involving a lot of money. And then probably the third is really focused on in-house, so enterprise councils and enterprise in-house teams. So these three are the larger buckets. We serve all these in various ways. And so if you think about what you need in a merger or acquisition, you need to do due diligence in that. You need to understand all the liabilities, you understand the financials, you understand where the gotchas are of the target and the acquire. So each due diligence can be broken up into almost 10 to 12 different workflows, and we help in different ways in those workflows. And then same thing in litigation. So there's that high level and really focused on different steps in that journey.

**Kimberly Tan** (4:03)
For a long time in Silicon Valley circles, people believed that selling to law firms or selling to professional services just wasn't the most fruitful area given they weren't known for adopting technology quickly. A lot of people thought the billing model wasn't aligned to increasing efficiency or using technology. I'm curious, what has Harvey seen in that regard?