Harvey, Mike, but no Donna!?
Yeah this reeks of never talking to the customers of these legaltech companies - on top of what you mentioned, it's also external integrations and downstream configurability for how those integrations behave.
If you view Harvey as Claude in a box for legal documents, then the Harvey/Legora competitor that will never have the "killer features" that larger firms receive from running Harvey/Legora.
These biglaw firms also have software engineering teams themselves. If Harvey was easy to remake as doing legal document RAG, why haven't they done it themselves?
Well the firms with engineering teams are most definitely exploring doing it all in-house. There is no point in having the engineering team otherwise. I'm at a midsize firm that doesn't have that kind of staff and we're definitely going to be using something in the Harvey/Legora space, primarily because its not practical for us to roll our own.
I built for a friend's law office a RAG proof of concept. It sucked. But it was there, so I could have claimed I vibe coded an entire open source legal solution right? But it still sucked, so no (and made me believe RAG is not a useful way at all for knowledge search).
> the ability to represent to other parties that you are using a trusted provider.
so ppl trust ai if its coming from provider X ?
This isn't that uncommon for many technologies, people and especially organizations who are procuring software look for signals that can offload perceived risk. These signals can be things as small as the formation of a company at all, or other ongoing partnerships which shows more social trust. Whether or not the company or provider is actually safe is a different conversation though.
No they're trusting the lawyers turned solution architects that you get when you buy Harvey.
No, they are trusting Harvy because the founders have legal/Law background and know what the customer wants. Plus the B2B contracts I'm sure they sign.
Yes.
Would you rather trust sensitive legal documents with me running a self hosted app that shares data with whichever provider openrouter chooses, or Harvey?
They trust the companies that already use Harvey or Legora for their legal work and nobody got fired for buying services from both of them.
But someone will risk getting fired for vibe-coding their own without the support, sales, infrastructure and engineering to recreate them.
Exactly. The old saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" applies here, except it's Harvey and not IBM.
yes, esp if you're a company
it's more like you _don't_ trust ai if it comes from provider Y, or was vibe-coded by some random dev that you've never heard of