Any insiders to big law firms globally that are considering not renewing Harvey/Legora due to Claude release?

Top comments · 5

• 27↑u/tulumtimes2425
  Mid-law (I guess). Running three, no word on cancelling one yet. Ran pilots for Harvey, Legora, enterprise Claude, Irys. Signed with Legora due to more law firm centric features, didn’t receive support. Piloted Irys not long after, received better support and features. Running Irys, Legora, Claude. Claude good for ops and BD teams for decks etc, would like this functionality in Irys or Legora. Legora good for tabular and some workflows. Irys highest adoption, good as daily driver, organization of work, AI’s work product. Both Harvey and Legora have discounts. I did a post 2-3 months ago on pricing, see that for details. Owe a follow up on decision, been busy.
• 15↑u/firstLOL
  Most of the Harvey etc contracts are fixed term - a couple of years. Also it takes most law firms *forever* to review, approve and roll out any new tech that has AI involved. Even the best and most well funded ones take a long time: infosec, DPIAs, etc etc etc. Even today Harvey are announcing partnerships with big firms, many of whom will have been in some form of pilot for a year or two since AI became a “thing” among big law. So even if (big if) Claude is seen as a replacement for the other tools and not a complement, I’d guess it’ll take a while before we see Harvey subs being cancelled / not renewed. Big law firms have never been about minimising costs: a Harvey seat pays for itself within the first week of January for many of its users.
• 5↑u/Hinged31
  It makes sense that H/L would cater to big law first, if only because big law is “enterprise”-like. Deep pockets, users who probably don’t care much (who won’t complain about cost compared to capability), procurement processes, and so forth. I cringe a bit when I see how eager they are to announce conquest of the big law market. Because most lawyering occurs outside big law. And unless and until H/L makes inroads with mere mortals, the rapidly improving Claudes of the world will become the daily drivers for scores of attorneys. Convincing them to swap from that to H/L will be a tough sell. To those who use H/L: does it have a lot of guardrails like: click here to analyze a brief, click here to ask a research question, etc? That approach is going to become very tiresome when you can just treat Claude or Codex as a paralegal or legal clerk, interacting and delegating all kinds of tasks in plain language. Just this week I had Codex download my jurisdictions’ caselaw from CourtListener and create an MCP for querying it. It’s kind of eerie how well it’s working (and for free, other than the llm subscription price). EX: find every citable case in my jurisdiction where D was convicted of second degree reckless homicide. Limit to gun crimes. Note the circumstances of the shooting for each, then synthesize. The ability to do legal research like this in Cowork and Codex, using all of their other agentic capabilities, is amazing. Can’t imagine what we’ll be able to do in a year.
• 2↑u/hamut
  I can’t see AmLaw 100 letting AI get near client data currently. Curious to hear of exceptions but I bet a lot of those deals are multi year try outs.
• 2↑u/sheppyrun
  the question isn't whether firms renew harvey or switch to claude. the real shift is that legal AI is commoditizing fast. the value was never in the tool itself - it was in the workflow integration and the proprietary training. once general models catch up on reasoning, the premium for legal-specific wrappers collapses. firms won't abandon the category, they'll just stop paying a premium for it.