> dent

nice...

If you view Harvey as Claude in a box for legal documents, then the Harvey/Legora competitor that will never have the "killer features" that larger firms receive from running Harvey/Legora.

These biglaw firms also have software engineering teams themselves. If Harvey was easy to remake as doing legal document RAG, why haven't they done it themselves?

so ppl trust ai if its coming from provider X ?

It seems to me that many people believe that the primary benefit that attorneys can receive from AI is searching through droves of statutes and/or court decisions. This is certainly part of the job, especially in common law countries. But regardless of the legal system, much more substantial gains can be had elsewhere in practical day to day work. It is not often an experienced attorney needs AI to explain law to them, especially if you're working in a field you specialize in. But in almost all cases, at least in dispute resolution, an attorney would benefit a lot from an AI agent going over the matter documents to highlight stuff like this:

- possible contradictions between the opposing party's arguments now and their arguments let's say 4 years ago when they filed their statement of claim (in long running cases often parties' positions will drift over time)

- possible misalignment between the opposing party's own evidence and their arguments that depend on said evidence

- potential problems with representation, for example an important notice being signed by a person that now is a management board member, but back then did not formally have the right to represent the company

Many disputes in court are at the end of the day decided by small or not-so-small issues like these. Before AI what attorneys did was to just sit down and try to read the matter materials are thoroughly as possible. This was of course an imperfect solution. Now with AI much of this can be handed off to a machine. AI is especially good at these types of needle-in-a-haystack tasks. So in other words, in my opinion lawyers do not benefit so much from AI having an inch deep view of the whole world, but rather benefits from a mile deep view of the specific matter at hand.

Due to this I believe that law firms do not need custom LLMs, the frontier ones today are good enough for such tasks. And I also believe law firms do not need custom harnesses. Again, the ones from frontier labs fit very well already. What law firms need in practice, in my opionion, is this:

1. strict context management - for each agent session the attorney should be able to not just limit the agent to a project, but to specific files or folders inside that project, often the unit "project" is not granular engouh (think a project containing emails from the client to the attorney where they describe what "really happened" - this text should never be accessible to AI unless the attorney specifically wants it to)

2. strict agent isolation - by default a law firm should start AI agent sessions in VMs that have no internet access (other than to the AI provider and whitelisted sites) and no file system access to the machine it runs on

If these 2 requirement are effectively met, I do not see a reason why law firms would need anything legal-specific in their AI setup. Harvey and Legora provide a one-stop solution. But they also provide vendor lock-in. In a couple of years I think the natural next step for most larger law firms is self-hosted AI once prices come down to a more reasonable level. So I would encourage firms to already today try to make decisions that will likely make this transition easier in the near future.

Take all of the above with a grain of salt. I am the founder of liitmik.com (isolated AI agents for law firms), so I have a skin in the game.