Law firm CMS has said it aims to ‘stay ahead of the curve’ by rolling out legal tool Harvey AI after lawyers reported already seeing “meaningful time savings”.
The law firm is set to extend the use of the AI tool, named after the fictional character in Suits, across all 21 CMS member organisations in more than 50 countries.
Before this expansion, Harvey was already widely used across CMS, with more than 1,100 daily active users and nearly 3,000 monthly users. The core areas of use included contract review, due diligence, and regulatory analysis.
Internal analysis indicated that 93 per cent of users reported productivity gains of up to 117.9 hours per lawyer per year.
CMS said the gains from using this AI tool “allow the firm to reduce write-offs, reduce the load on lawyers, offer the most competitive prices to clients, and maintain profitability”.
With this extended deal with Harvey, CMS has made the most significant investment in user access licenses for Harvey among law firms in EMEA.
Stephen Millar, managing partner at CMS UK, said: “Expanding Harvey across our global organisation is about scaling the best of CMS – our judgement, sector insight and cross-border capability – with the power of AI.”
Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, added: “We are proud to have CMS as a long-standing customer of Harvey, and to see their decision to extend access to all of their lawyers and team members.”
The $8bn AI startup
Harvey is one of the most well-known legal AI tools in a crowded market. It was founded in 2022 by Winston Weinberg, a former securities and antitrust lawyer, and Gabriel Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind.
Last week Harvey revealed it had raised $160m in new funds, and that its startup had an $8bn valuation. Among its other legal clients are A&O Shearman and Latham & Watkins.
However, with the surge in law firms investing in AI, the question remains: what does this mean for jobs? Earlier this year, CMS was reported to have launched a round of redundancies in its real estate practice.
This comes as the CEO of legal tech firm Legora, Max Junestrand, told City AM that the future of hiring in the legal market will be different due to AI.