Happy belated Q4 to those who celebrate. Pre-Christmas work rush is picking up, but I still found pockets of time to summarize a couple of best practices from How Harvey Uses Harvey, a registration to a free online legal tech lecture series, and a Legal AI podcast with yours truly.
Enjoy and as always: let me know in the comments or on my LinkedIn any tips, tricks, and opinions!
#1 How Harvey Uses Harvey
The GC of Harvey, the generative AI tool that broke the legal internet, John LaBarre gives a sneak peek into how the hyped tool is used by lawyers who have the ultimate access to it: their in-house legal department.
A couple of really good practices stood out to me in their quest to reclaim time on certain kinds of necessary but not necessarily fun tasks:
- Know what you are doing and measure the improvements – Harvey team seems to have a decent visibility on frequency and volume of their tasks and estimates of impact of the tech on these. Read here why the before-and-after view is key to any innovation efforts.
- Experimenting with use cases – specifically, the Harvey team reports saving and sharing prompts and spending at least 30 minutes weekly trying new things (although this is not a KPI, but a soft rule of thumb)
- Think like a lawyer before drafting with GenAI – backing up that higher order legal reasoning is not going anywhere, the Harvey team thinks first, drafts second: “After conceptually aligning internally on a way we could get comfortable with the issue, we used Harvey to generate a draft of the revised language.“
- The tools are better when fed with data – the insight highlights the use of vault as a topical repository of data to be mined. Makes me wonder if this realisation will finally lead to the establishment of thorough data governance standards in the legal sphere in general.
- Plain language – the prompt “Draft me [type of document] using easy-to-understand language that doesn’t contain a lot of legalese” should be the system-default for all legal work. For more inspiration, here are my plain language checklists.
- Harvey still uses a clause library – Generative AI is used to enhance and implement the playbooks, not to replace them (I want this as a poster for everybody who says that GenAI killed knowledge management)
Read here: How Harvey Uses Harvey
#2 Legal Tech Essentials
My favorite online and free lecture series is back! As a Bucerius Law School Summer Programme alumna (you can read my review of the experience here), I am excited about the return of the series that was a formative resource and a shining beam of light especially during the pandemic for me.
There will be sessions on AI in the legal industry (here are 10 things that every lawyer should know about AI), legal operations, and more.
The fun starts tonight (Nov 13), you can register to receive emails about the series here.
#3 Talking Legal AI in Crespect Talks
I sat down with Karolina Šilingienė and Pekka Puolakka for a chat about the future of the legal industry.
We talked about traditional law firms, why is service design important, about key skills for lawyers in the age of AIa if it is (still) worth the hustle of learning how to code.
You can watch the entire episode here.
Závěrečná ustanovení
Here are some actionable points:
- Get inspired by some of the Harvey’s Legal function best practices (the 30 minute a week unstructured exploration time slot is a good start)
- Soak up legal tech and ops wisdom in the Legal Tech Esssentials series,
- and enjoy three different perspectives on Generative AI adoption
What caught your eye lately? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for your time and until next time!
Baru
