Six months ago, Harvey was a tool law firms were testing. Now over half call it foundational, the infrastructure their legal work is built on. RSGI's second large-scale independent study of Harvey use, drawing on 82 organisations and 54 interviews, charts a market that has moved past the pilot phase and started depending on it.
Six months ago, RSGI's first report on Harvey's customers found high usage, fast impact, and an early cohort of power users pulling ahead. The picture has already moved on. In a second, larger study – combining a survey of 82 organisations with 54 long-form interviews – the question is no longer whether Harvey delivers value, but how deeply it has been built into the way legal work happens.
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“The speed and depth of change we are documenting, in just six months, is extraordinary. Harvey is becoming the infrastructure on which legal work is built. Firms and legal teams are showing real signs of AI enablement.”
Reena SenGupta, Executive Director, RSGI
The clearest sign of maturity is what users now count. Six months ago, value was a proxy game: logins, query volumes, workplace satisfaction. Today, most law firms (77%) justify their licence spend by pointing to better legal and commercial outcomes, and 68% of in-house teams measure value by their freedom to focus on higher-value work. As one Reed Smith interviewee put it, partners no longer want to hear that lots of people are using it, they want to know what those people are doing and why it matters.
That shift is showing up in economics, not just sentiment. Among law firms able to track the changes, 59% saw lawyer utilisation rise, 44% saw revenue increase, and 53% saw profitability improve. The operational gain is the visible part – 89% of firms say Harvey lets them take on more work – but it is increasingly translating into the numbers that reach the bottom line.
“The findings show an industry evolving at remarkable speed. Legal professionals are rapidly moving from using AI as a productivity tool to relying on it as a foundational part of how legal work gets done. The organizations seeing the greatest impact are those investing in adoption, integration and capability-building, demonstrating that AI enablement is becoming a core competitive advantage across the legal sector.”
K-Ming Lee, Head of Customer Engagement, Harvey
Agentic AI is often discussed as imminent; in this research it is already operational. A striking 68% of both law firms and in-house teams have deployed Harvey-based agents, and over a fifth of law firms (21%) are running more than 50 in production. Integration is what makes this stick: firms point to document management systems, Microsoft 365 and MCP/API as the features that turn Harvey from a useful assistant into core delivery infrastructure.
The research surfaces a widening gap between what law firms believe they are telling clients and what clients say they hear. 61% of firms report proactively discussing Harvey-driven efficiencies with clients; only 1 in 25 in-house respondents say a firm has approached them about it. With almost half of in-house teams (48%) now mandating that their firms use AI, the pressure is moving to the client side – and the firms that close this gap first will be the ones that keep the relationship.
For a full copy of the report: [Click here]
Key findings
Key findings
At a glance
