Legal GenAI vendor Harvey today (8 January) announced the launch of Memory, a context retention product that it is looking to co-build with input from the legal industry. Harvey says that when Memory is turned on it will be able to reference past threads within a firm’s defined retention window to inform new questions. This capability can be scoped at a granular level, for example, to a specific user, client, or matter.
While announcing a product that doesn’t exist yet is likely to be greeted with cynicism among competitors, Harvey says it is taking a deliberate ‘build in public’ approach given the complexities of what it is building when it comes to the likes of data privacy and governance challenges.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Harvey’s co-founder and president Gabe Pereyra, said that at its simplest, users want AI to remember other work they have done for a client.
Even longer term, fee-earners might want Harvey to remember the work they have done across client matters. “The benefit,” he says, “is if every law firm buys Harvey, how do you differentiate yourself, and Memory is one good answer. What will always differentiate you is the quality of your lawyers and one way to do that is to leverage the expertise and knowledge locked in the heads of your partners or scattered in documents that are not well organised. With Memory, a new associate can get all of the best expertise from the best partners.”
So far, Harvey customers have been using its Vault product to store legal documents as a precedent base.
One significance of the new product is its relevance to Harvey’s platform play – Harvey already integrates with the major document management providers and many of the major research platforms and Pereyra says: “Law firms are excited about how to do an entire client matter in Harvey.” A feature of Memory may be the ability to retain information from other systems that you have found relevant and important for future reference. While this may be the direction of travel, the challenge will be in respecting ethical walls, among other issues.
“Individual users already have some memory and we provide a retention setting that let’s you say that, for example, after one month you want to delete it, Pereyra says. “That becomes more complex if you’re sharing across multiple client matters and with all of these AI problems the key challenge is permissioning and ethical walls. We need to make sure that only the right people have access to the right data.”
In addition to Vault, Harvey last year launched collaboration space Shared Spaces and Pereyra says: “The nice thing is that we have already built quite a bit of the infrastructure.”
Adoption of Memory will be optional, and users retain autonomy over whether the feature is turned on or off.
There seems no doubt that there is an element of publicity play here but Pereyra says: “When it’s public, people take it more seriously and you tend to get more feedback. This happens a lot in Silicon Valley.” Customers interested in participating are encouraged to contact their Harvey account team.
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