Harvey launches Legal Work Orchestration to tie agents to matter workflows

What Legal Work Orchestration does

Harvey describes Legal Work Orchestration as a new way to organize and manage legal matters inside its platform. It brings the phases, tasks and reviews of a matter or project into the same place as the documents and the agents that work on them.

The company's reasoning is that much legal work follows a repeatable process. An M&A transaction, for example, moves through familiar phases, tasks and review points, yet the process often has to be rebuilt for each new matter from a checklist, a previous deal or the knowledge of experienced colleagues. Harvey says AI agents can already complete many individual steps, but often lack the structure around the task: where it fits in the matter, which documents and instructions apply, who should review the output and what comes next. Lawyers have so far had to supply that context and move work between people and systems themselves.

The same structure can support any matter a team runs more than once, according to Harvey, from an M&A transaction to a quarterly compliance review.

Templates, task context and review gates

The feature rests on three elements, as Harvey presents them.

• Reusable templates. Templates capture how an organization runs a recurring type of work. When an associate opens a new buy-side acquisition, the Space can already contain the relevant phases, tasks, playbooks, agents, collaborators and review gates. Innovation and knowledge teams can define that structure once.
• Context for every task. Each task includes its scope, inputs and reviewer. In Harvey's example, an agent assigned a change-of-control review can analyze the relevant contracts and produce a consent matrix without the lawyer assembling a new prompt and briefing. Tasks can also be assigned to another lawyer or shared with the client while keeping the matter context.
• Reviews and next steps. When the agent finishes, Harvey notifies the designated partner that the consent matrix is ready. Once the partner approves it, the task is completed and the next step can begin.

Updates can also be made from email. A lawyer can ask Harvey in a reply to close a task or begin the next one, while the Space keeps a current view of the matter's progress. Partners can see where work stands without asking an associate to reconstruct the status from email and separate checklists.

Harvey's expectations for agent workload

Harvey notes that before the release of Harvey II in August, every step delegated to the platform required a lawyer to gather the documents, write the instructions and move the output onward. It says Legal Work Orchestration reduces that overhead by providing each task's inputs, instructions and reviewer in advance.

The company says lawyers still actively prompt the majority of steps in a legal workflow, and expects that to change rapidly. Over the next six months, Harvey expects agents to take on an additional 20% of workflow steps, and within a year it expects that share to triple. These are the company's own projections.

Harvey says lawyers will remain in control through defined review gates, and that the work performed by agents will remain transparent and auditable. As agents take on more execution, lawyers should be able to focus more on directing the matter, reviewing consequential outputs and exercising judgment, according to the company.

Availability

Legal Work Orchestration, which includes tasks, commenting on tasks and notifications, is rolling out across Harvey workspaces now. Templates are not yet generally available: customers interested in the early access program for templates are asked to contact their Harvey team. Organizations that are not yet customers can request a demo.

For law firms and legal departments using Harvey, the change points to matter management and agent work happening in one environment, with named reviewers and approval steps built into the process rather than handled through separate checklists and email threads.