Design a Harvey experience that helps in-house legal teams handle NDA and vendor contract requests from business teams.

Introduction

Harvey started by selling AI to large law firms, but in-house legal teams at corporations are now one of its fastest-growing customer groups. These teams are small relative to the companies they serve. A legal team of 15 at a 10,000-person company may receive hundreds of requests a month from sales, procurement, HR and marketing: "Can you review this NDA?", "Can we use this vendor's terms?", "Is this marketing claim okay?" Most requests are routine, but each one waits in a queue, and the business sees legal as a bottleneck.

The prompt asks us to design a Harvey experience that helps in-house legal teams handle contract requests from business teams. Harvey already offers Assistant (a chat interface for legal work), Vault (secure document storage and bulk analysis), Workflows (pre-built and custom multi-step processes) and agents that execute tasks. The question is how to combine them into an intake-to-answer experience. I'll clarify the problem, explain why it matters, segment users, prioritise pain points, and design and measure a solution.

Step 1

Clarify Questions (3 minutes)

• Are we designing for the legal team, the business requester, or both?

• Why it matters: Business users want fast answers; lawyers want fewer, better-prepared requests.
• Hypothetical answer: Both, but the paying customer and primary user is the legal team.
• Impact: Business users get a simple intake; lawyers get the main workspace.

• Which request types should we focus on?

• Why it matters: NDAs, vendor contracts and sales contracts differ in risk and volume.
• Hypothetical answer: Start with NDAs and low-value vendor agreements, which are about 60% of volume.
• Impact: We can rely on the company's playbook positions for standard clauses.

• Does the team have a negotiation playbook?

• Why it matters: Automation needs clear rules for acceptable and unacceptable terms.
• Hypothetical answer: Yes, a 12-page document plus a clause library, partly out of date.
• Impact: The design must turn the playbook into something Harvey can apply.

• What does success mean to the general counsel?

• Why it matters: Defines the North Star.
• Hypothetical answer: Faster turnaround for the business and more lawyer time for high-risk work, with no increase in risk.
• Impact: Measure turnaround, lawyer time and escalation accuracy.

Propose the Goal

Help in-house legal teams turn routine contract requests around in hours instead of days, by letting Harvey triage, review against the team's own playbook, and draft redlines for lawyer approval.

Define the Scope

In scope: intake from business users, triage, playbook-based review, draft redlines and responses, and lawyer approval. Out of scope: e-signature, full contract lifecycle management and litigation matters.