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The life of a junior associate at a prestigious law firm involves hours of research and analyzing contracts. Three years ago, Winston Weinberg found himself buried in these kinds of tasks as a first-year antitrust and litigation associate at OMelveny & Myers in Los Angeles. And there Weinberg might have remained, diligently climbing the BigLaw ranks from associate to partner, logging thousands of hours of drudgery along the way. Instead, hes cofounder and CEO of Harvey, the high-flying legal AI platform thats raised more than $800 million by promising to handle much of this work. A lot of the tasks junior [associates] do are going to get automated, Weinberg says. That doesn’t mean their job’s going to get automated. It’s just going to be a different job. Built atop language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Harveys platform streamlines legal workflows by helping lawyers with drafting, contract analysis, legal research, due diligence, regulatory compliance, and case law review. In addition, the technology cuts down on reading time by summarizing complex legal documents and combining databases to research and summarize legal issues. Harvey, which is used by some 250 law firmsincluding 42% of The American Lawyers list of biggest 100 firms in the U.S.announced in June that it raised a $300 million series D led by Sequoia, bringing its total haul to more than $800 million and driving its valuation to $5 billion. Its now the highest valued startup in a growing field of AI companies that are all focused on overhauling how the legal profession works. The companys annualized revenue run rate hit $100 million in August, up from $50 million earlier this year, propelled by an aggressive sales strategy targeting big law firms. Harvey now has 460 employees, 20% of whom are lawyers. The company is also hiring dozens of engineers, sales leads, and account executives as it seeks to increase the moat between itself and its competitors. Whether Harvey ultimately upends the legal procession or winds up burning a lot of cash, time, and effort could reveal that fates of industries as far afield as finance, music, and film. All these sectorsand moreare on a similar curve: exploring whether AI tools can be truly transformative and seeing just how many jobs they’ll reimagineor disappear altogether. Despite its sizable moat, Harvey’s success is far from assured. Investors are pouring money into firms working on rival legal AI agents: Canada-based Clio raised $900 million last summer; Swedens Legora raised an $80 million Series B led by ICONIQ Venture & Growth and General Catalyst in September; London-based Luminance took in $75 million in January. Meanwhile, a growing chorus of criticssounding off on Reddit and elsewherequestion how original Harveys offerings are. “ChatGPT wrapper” is the most common dig thrown by these disaffected apparent users, who note the similarities between the information retrieval capabilities of Harvey and ChatGPT (made by Harveys early investor, OpenAI). Even Harveys cofounders have called OpenAI an indirect competitor. But critics also say the company could be steamrolled by OpenAI, pointing out that the LLM could simply build its own legal-focused model. Im hearing from more and more attorneys that OpenAIs Deep Research is the single best research product on the market, and its what most attorneys use (even when its not a firm approved tool), former lawyer and legaltech investor Zack Abramowitz wrote on his popular substack Legally Disrupted in June. OpenAI itself has begun testing the waters of legal technology. In September, the company published a blog post about creating an internal database to review its own contractsthe feature is not available to consumers. One Redditor, who claimed to be a former employee, recently went even further, drawing a direct comparison to Silicon Valleys most notorious startup: think of theranos and overinflated claims of what a product can do, the person posted in a thread that reached more than 300 of comments within a day. The post generated enough attention to prompt an indirect reply from Weinberg himself: On LinkedIn, he stated that the companys Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is at 98% and its Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is at 167signs that Harvey is both retaining and growing revenue from its customers. The Redditor has since deleted their post, though comments agreeing with it remain on the page. (When Fast Company reached out to verify the persons employment at Harvey, a spokesperson said: There was nothing in the post to suggest that the author was a recent employee at the company.) Harveys customers, in the meantime, seem satisfied. [Harvey is] totally embedded in the workday of our lawyers. It’s really become embedded throughout their daily workflows, says Gina Lynch, chief knowledge and innovation officer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the white-shoe law firm with more than a thousand lawyers. From D&D to r/legaladvice Weinbergs sliding doors moment from junior law associate to AI entrepreneur came via his roommate after law school: Gabe Pereyra, who was a machine learning engineer at Meta and a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that. (Pereyra is now president of Harvey.) In the spring of 2022, while Weinberg was working as a lawyer, Pereyra was focused on finding real-world, assistant-like applications for large language models. It didnt take long before he and Weinberg started testing out Weinbergs legal workflows on language models, most notably OpenAIs GPT-3, which was publicly available. (The pair had initially started running GPT-3 to augment their Dungeons and Dragons games, but quickly realized the potential of its chain of thought prompting abilities.) They began using GPT-3 to solve problems on the r/legaladvice subreddit. We found a hundred landlord-tenant questions and we were able to answer [them], Weinberg says. To further test the models accuracy, they fed it legal materials about California regulations and local statutes, then got it to answer questions. We showed [the answers] to three California-based lawyers working on landlord-tenant issues. We just said, Would you send this to a client? For 86 out of 200 questions, at least two attorneys answered thumbs up, Weinberg says. Their timing was auspicious. It was still months before the launch of ChatGPT would make GPT-3s capabilities clear to everyone. In July 2022 Weinberg and Pereyra cold-emailed OpenAIs general counsel at the ime, Jason Kwon, and shared their ideas for how AI could change legal work (Kwon is now OpenAIs chief strategy officer). In November of that year, the company raised $5 million from the LLMs startup fund, along with venture capitalists Elad Gil and Sarah Guo (all three also participated in the companys most recent round). Within five months, blue chip venture capital firms, including Sequoia, also invested. Signing on Big Law Almost as soon as it launched, Harvey aggressively began pursuing enterprise contracts with big law firms. In December 2022, A&O Shearman, which has nearly 4,000 lawyers across 48 offices, started testing Harveys technology in its Markets Innovation Group. Paul Weiss followed in January 2023 and began testing the technology throughout its practice. Both firms have since signed longer contracts. Using those clients reputations, Harvey has signed big contracts with other prominent U.S. firms, including Vinson & Elkins and Macfarlanes. The company now has 700 customers in 58 countries. Other clients include general counsel offices at private equity firms and hedge funds like KKR and Bridgewater and accounting giant PwC. For bigger clients, Harvey embeds staff members within the company to personalize its services and features for their workflows. It also offers an off-the-shelf general application product for smaller companies. Harveys close association with OpenAI has, in some ways, been a blessing and a curse. The AI giant gave Harvey a first-mover advantage, but has heightened the comparisons between ChatGPT and Harvey. After all, according to a March survey from Law360, ChatGPT is the tool most lawyers use for workeven if its not approved by their firm. But although Harvey could still introduce hallucinations into its work (an issue that has bedeviled lawyers who rely too heavily on ChatGPT), its less likely to do so, says Weinberg, because its trained on legal data and purpose-built for corporate law firms. The company says that its 2024 version of Assistant, Harveys most popular product, reduces hallucinations by 60% and improves the accuracy of cited sources by 23% compared to other chatbots. Harvey has also deepened its product by incorporating models from Anthropic and Google alongside OpenAIs GPT. It also recently signed a key deal with LexisNexis that enables users to ask complex legal questions and get citation-backed answers. Harvey, however, could find itself in a similar situation to Bloombergs ill-fated BloombergGPT as technology evolves. In 2023, the financial information giant Bloomberg spent more than $10 million training an LLM on its own financial data before finding out that an off-the-shelf GPT-4 provided more accurate answers to users. As Ethan Mollick, a professor and codirector of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, wrote on Linkedin, There was a moment that we thought proprietary data would let organizations train specialized AIs that could compete with frontier models. It turns out that probably isn’t going to happen. The largest frontier models are just much better at most complex tasks than smaller models. Another concern is how long Harvey can maintain its lead, given the cost of its product. Harveys bespoke services cost $1,200 per seat, per month, with contracts stipulating that large companies need to purchase the service for at least 100 employees and for at least a year. The company justifies its prices by touting the productivity gains it passes onto employees. You can arm lawyers with tools that make them enormously productive, says Harveys chief business officer John Haddock, who has a law degree from Stanford. And $100,000 a month is still less expensive than the salaries of an army of paralegals and junior associates. Even so, Harvey will have to convince its customers to sign back up, even as more affordable productsaimed especially at smaller or midsized firmsenter the market. And it has to keep delivering for them amid an AI hype cycle where disappointment in enterprise AI products is growing. After the recent flare-up on Reddit involving the apparent former employee, Maarten Truyens, founder and CEO of ClauseBase, a Belgium startup also working on an AI platform for legal drafting, took to LinkedIn to weigh in. He said the main problem is the hype and expectations around these AI platforms. GenAI is too good to ignore, yet simply not good enough for many legal use cases, he wrote. What’s really needed is vendors to be transparent about the limitations, and the legal community to learn what’s possible with GenAI, and where other technologies are a better fit. Both sides need to become much more realistic. AI associates Though Harveys work needs to be checkedwhich can be a time-consuming process for paralegals and junior lawyersthe company aims to cut down their workload. A widely cited 2023 Thomson Reuters report estimated that AI technology could save lawyers on average 200 hours a year. That number has likely increased as AI becomes more sophisticated. Left unsaid: It could also cut down the number of lawyers and paralegals firms and companies need to hire. Investors and Harvey employees argue that legal tech is unlikely to take jobs away because the demand for legal services is likely to increase. There’s a huge undelivered need for legal services. The right way to think about it is that if you can arm lawyers with tools that make them enormously productive, that will just expand the access to the types of services they can provide, Haddock says. Venture capitalist Sarah Guo, whose firm Conviction invested in Harvey in 2022, makes a similar argument: People will not want less practice of the law. They will want more if it is more affordable, and the quality will go up. Employment for law school graduates hit a record high in 2024, according to the American Bar Association. But the incentive structure for law firms is complicated. Most big firms bill hourly, and when a task that typically took a law associate hours of research can be condensed into three or four minutes, they face the prospect of losing money. One way to save: hiring fewer associates. Weinberg acknowledges that Harvey could change hiring. Are there some firms that will change their business model and structure? Yes. I do think there are some firms that might explore [charging] fixed fees [rather than hourly billing] or having a leaner team, he says. Corporate legal teams could see the most impact from Harvey. Allison Zoellner, general counsel at advertising giant Dentsu, which started working with Harvey last year, says that while the companys AI tools havent led to a workforce reduction, she hasnt had to hire as much. We’re being asked to do more with fewer resources. What Harvey does is allow us to keep our heads above water while not adding people. Weinberg, Haddock, and Guo all say that b eliminating rote tasks, tools like Harvey will free up time for junior lawyers to attend meetings, shadow senior leaders, and start doing more strategic work. So much of what an associate does today is the types of things that [are] not what they went to law school for. If we are able to give associates faster, thicker, deeper, higher-order thinking problems, that is great for everybody. It’s great for partners who can get more from their teams. It’s great for junior lawyers because it makes practice of law more intellectually satisfying sooner, Haddock says. While that may be true, without billable hours to subsidize training opportunities like shadowing, firms may have trouble justifying the cost of so many associates. The legal industry has weathered technological shifts before. When I started as a lawyer in the ’90s, it was the time of transition from manual review of documents in litigation to computer-assisted review of documents. [That created] a bump in productivity, NYU Law School professor Christopher Sprigman says. How many more people would’ve been hired at those firms absent the introduction of that technology? There’s always an unknowable counterfactual, but I get the strong idea that its fewer than [if the technology hadnt been adopted]. These days, Sprigman says lawyers are having similar conversations. A friend of mine who runs a law firm said to me that at this point, maybe 10 to 20% of what junior associates do can be automated through AI. But in 18 months it could be 30%, he says. The winners will be people who know how to use AI in their practice and also people who have deep expertise that allows them to exercise judgment. It is too early to say how the technology will impact roles at the Paul, Weiss. Lynch expects that while it will not reduce positions at the company, it will bring change to certain roles. She has already seen wider acceptance by senior leadership than anticipated. Partners very much gravitated towards AI because they were comfortable that they knew whether the output was good or bad. More junior employees with less experience may not be able to make those distinctions early on in their careers. Already, Paul Weiss is using its AI savvy as a sales pitch to prospective clients. We want [clients] to know were using it and we are really earnest about the efficiency gains, Lynch says. Lynch and Sprigman see a new role emerging within law schools and firms that specializes in AI adoption. Youre going to see more of a legal technologist role, Lynch says, adding that, like many firms, Paul Weiss has invested heavily in training to get lawyers to use AI tools, and in building their own closed LLM to work alongside Harvey. Sprigman says that senior lawyers may start to look for AI savvy in their juniors, and that means law schools may also have to change. Law schools obviously want their students to be prepared. [That could be] teaching people how to prompt engineer. Maybe that’s something you hire an adjunct for. I’m sure school schools will be looking for expertise from the outside, he says. To gain an edge and get students used to its platform, Harvey has started partnering with law schools including the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania to offer students, professors, and administrators access to its tools. A sizable moat The moat of capital Harvey has raised, its aggressive and successful pursuit of leading law firms, and its relationship with OpenAI have made it a dominant player in the legal AI race. But the companys valuation may limit its exit possibilities. We’re voting that the company has the opportunity to be a tens of billions of dollars public company, Guo says. The companys success may ultimately hinge on how many big law firms decide to renew their contracts with Harvey once the mandatory year or two minimum expires, and whether the company can stay ahead of competitors from rivals like Legora to off-the-shelf LLMs. Weinberg and Pereyra settled on the name Harvey because it sounds a little bit like Harvard and because of its associations with Suits superlawyer Harvey Specter. Ultimately though, Harvey acts more like the shows other main character, Mike Ross, a college dropout with a photographic memory. Though he is unlicensed, Ross proves to be more useful to Specter than any other paralegal or associate at the fictional big law firm.
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Some seven million Americans are now on GLP-1 weight loss drugs, a figure expected to rise to 24 million by 2035. These medications curb users’ appetites for fatty, ultra-processed foods, and grocery stores are noticing: total sold units of doughnuts, cakes, and cookies are down by 10%, 19%, and 13%, respectively, compared to five years ago. With this drop in revenue from junk food, grocery stores need to think about how to make more money from other categories. For Whole Foods, there’s one aisle that brims with potential: supplements. Today, Whole Foods is introducing a new line of Japanese-inspired supplements called Apothékary onto its aisles. The brand is known for its distinct form factor factor: While many supplements are sold as gummies, capsules, or powders, Apothékary sells tinctures, which can be dropped under the tongue, or incorporated into drinks. Apothékary is part of the booming supplements industry, currently valued at $192 billion, and projected to grow to $415 by 2033. The brand has been growing rapidly thanks to its recent expansion into all 350 of Ulta Beauty stores and 400 Sprouts grocery stores. But the move into Whole Foods is its biggest one yet, and offers insight into how consumers are spending their grocery dollars as their food spending goes down. [Photo: Carl Ostberg/Apothékary] Modernizing tradition Shizu Okusa launched Apothékary in 2020. She had previously founded a cold-pressed juice brand called Jrink, which had 14 retail locations and was sold at Whole Foods. In 2019, Okusa sold Jrink to Puree Juice Bar, and began plotting out her next business. This time, she wanted to launch a company that was more deeply connected to her own roots. Okusa’s father grew up in Japan. After dropping out of high school, he decided to take a boat to Canada, where he got a job as a laborer on a dairy farm. Eventually, he decided to start his own farm, one where he could use traditional Japanese techniques, such as space-saving vertical farming. As Okusa grew up in this farming community, she learned about the Japanese approach to health and medicine, which is intimately connected with the land, herbs, and plants. “In Japanese culture, we often talk about nature as medicine,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with a lot of pills. Instead, my family relied on plant-based remedies.” In Japan, there is a herbal medicine tradition called Kampo. It goes back to the Sixth century, when the Empress of Japan sent a group of doctors to China to learn about the medical practices that had evolved there. These doctors brought back the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine to their homeland, then localized them to the ingredients that are abundant in Japan, like seaweed. Today, Kampo continues to be practiced in Japan. Doctors and researchers are now modernizing Kampo practices and performing clinical studies on formulations. There are also hospitals in Japan, such as Tohoku University Hospital and Okayama University Hospital, which integrate both traditional and Western medicine into their treatments. (This is similar to what is happening in China, with traditional Chinese medicine.) Okusa believed that there was an opportunity to bring traditional Kampo formulations to the Western market, particularly as many Americans are embracing other Japanese wellness practices. And she relies on ingredients that are backed by peer-reviewed studies. “There is growing awareness about meditation and even the matcha tea ceremony, which are both Japanese,” she points out. [Photo: Apothékary] The Evolving Supplement Landscape Okusa launched Apothékary with a collection of herbal formulas designed to improve sleep, digestion, and energy. Apothékary’s original formulas came in powders, but Okusa realized that to stand out in the market, she needed to innovate. She had the idea of changing their form factor to tinctures, so she began to make liquid supplements that could be taken under the tongue or in beverages. “The tincture form has been around for a long time, particularly in Eastern medicine traditions, but it wasn’t very common in the U.S.,” she says. “It added novelty and also convenience, because you can just put it directly into your mouth.” This new format was key to driving the brand’s growth. During the pandemic, many people realized they were drinking too much and wanted to curb their alcohol consumption. Apothékary launched a collection of alcohol alternatives, like Wine Down, Take The Edge Off, and Rose-Tinted Glasses, which were tinctures that could be consumed in a mocktail. As little jars of liquid, they looked much more like spirits and they were designed to provide many of the benefits people are looking for in an alcoholic cocktail, like relaxation and better sleep. Apothékary’s unusual approach to delivering the supplement was partly what made Whole Foods bring the brand into its stores. “Whether you take [the tincture] directly or mixed into mocktails, it provides an engaging format,” says Abbey Appel, a Whole Foods merchant who specializes in functional foods and supplements. [Photo: Apothékary] As the pandemic was waning, the next big trend was the rise in GLP-1 drugs, which the FDA approved for weight loss. As adoption of these drugs spiked, people began consuming less junk food and alcohol. Okusa saw a spike in Apothékary’s sales, as people seemed to turn to these tinctures, which are tasty despite being calorie- and sugar-free. “We could not have predicted how GLP-1s would change people’s consumption patterns, but our brand has benefited from this new reality,” she says. “We’re creating an alternative for people who have stopped buying as many chips and cookies, and are more focused on their health.” As GLP-1s increase in popularity and Americans continue to seek out products that promote wellness, grocery stores are introducing new brands into their mix. Whole Foods has been actively seeking out interesting new supplements to bring into their aisles. Appel says that the brand’s non-Western approach to wellness was intriguing. “The founder’s genuine connection to Japanese heritage resonates with our customers,” says Appel. While demand for wellness products continues to grow, the market is also getting more crowded, as new brands pop up. Okusa believes that the key to the brand’s success so far has been it’s ability to be agile and innovative. “Consumer behavior is constantly evolving,” she says. “It’s important to keep evolving too.”
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My first time plopping down on my therapists couch, I tried to breeze through the basics. Yes, upbringing, romance, family, social lifeall important. But I entered that softly lit space to vent about the place that eats up a third of my waking life. I was there to talk about the office. The physical location wasnt the issue; the office snacks were elite. The problem was the people: the supervisor with no respect for work-life balance, the snooty coworker firing off slick emails, the boys club that would always look out for its own. Being the only Black employee there wore me out in ways I couldnt always name. And talking it out with a licensed professional who looked like meincense smoke in the airhelped me locate my peace from 9 to 5. Im thankful those healing sessions a few years ago kept me from crashing out on Brayden in sales. But I never anticipated theyd also make me a better manager once I had a team of my own to lead. My most recent job had its share of team drama when I arrived. Morale was in the gutter, but workplace woes seemed to weigh heaviest on Gina, one of my direct reports. She was checked out like bell hooks books at the library. The go-getter energy she had when she started had devolved into bare-minimum effortand a creative interpretation of the companys unlimited vacation policy. The 1.0 version of me mightve addressed the situation by mirroring the coldness I experienced early in my career, parroting those icy conversations, questioning whether I had what it takes to be successful in a place like this. Corporate America can be cutthroat, especially when deliverables are regularly behind schedule and quotas are missed. But I felt an obligation to help my team shine, which meant pulling from the lessons I internalized back on my therapists cozy black upholstery. I sat with Gina in a 1:1 meeting to remind her that the companys PTO policy is at managements discretion. But then I got curious about her apathy. Turns out, she said shed been slept on more than Tempur-Pedic during promotion considerations. Even worse, before my arrival, she had been pushed into a role that was vastly different from the one she initially signed up for. I let her know I understood her frustration, like, for real. After all, Id previously been in her New Balances as I tried to climb the corporate ladder. I cut her a deal: If she stepped up on the nonnegotiables, Id give her a chance to prove herself as the point person on more challenging projects. The results didnt show themselves overnight. Shed been burned before, so it took some time and patience for her to fully buy in. But she took our handshake agreement and ran with it. Within a few weeks, she was hitting deadlines, contributing valuable ideas during brainstorming meetings, and even turning on her camera during Zoom calls. I gave her verbal flowers in her next performance review and got props from my boss, who was impressed at how I became an even better motivator than Jeezy. The thing people dont discuss enough is the way therapy teaches you the art of real talkthat is, effective, empathetic communication. You learn to listen actively, validate peoples feelings, and respond constructively. At first, it took conscious effort, but eventually it became second nature. That doesnt mean I turned into some kumbaya caricature of a manager. Accountability still mattered. I developed a knack for delivering (and receiving) tough feedback. I understood how to make people feel seen. The value of talking through interpersonal challengeseven the unsolvable ones. And because my team rocked with me, they wanted to kill it to make us all look good, I think. (Although in my self-conscious moments, I can only imagine what theyre telling their therapists about me. None of my business. Boundaries!) I can trace so many of my management wins back to my therapists office, a safe space where I was challenged to pause before reacting, to see the bigger picture, to regulate before responding. So, no, I dont recommend therapy just to survive toxic workplaces. I recommend it because it helps you build healthier ones. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with Levelman.com.
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