Legal services look set to be one of the first industries to be radically transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Startup that hired ChatGPT as a lawyer secured bold investment as more law firms use AI tools.
More than 16,000 law firms are on a waiting list to use the services of Harvey, which develops legal-specific language models. The term “language model”, popularized by the chat engine ChatGPT, refers to algorithms that are trained with material from the Internet or other sources to answer user queries or compose any kind of text.
Harvey has raised $21 million in the new round of funding, adding to the $5 million previously invested in the company by OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. One of Harvey’s thousands of potential customers is the law firm Allen & Overy, which plans to roll out the system to its 3,500 employees to automate legal writing and research.
4,000 lawyers of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers will also gain access to the platform. In recent months, several large law firms have signed agreements to use AI products, a remarkably rapid development.
DLA Piper uses the company’s Casetext system, which is based on ChatGPT and automates tasks such as research, contract analysis and document review. Known as CoCounsel, Casetext’s tool is also used by other large law firms, including Fisher Phillips with more than 500 lawyers and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliff with 1,150 lawyers.
