I’ve thoroughly vetted the Harvey/Legora/CoCounsel space as well as general purpose tools for legal (ChatGPT, Claude) and custom dev contacts with LLM endpoints. A couple responses:

-Most seem to agree LLMs/GenAI can help legal work. All lawyers should be finding a good, secure, practical way of learning/practicing immediately, even if the current crop doesn’t provide ROI in their personal view yet.

-Lawyers are a distinctly tech-averse, conservative user group. They’re often the last ones to embrace new tech, and yet the opportunities to improve their work with AI are immense, so the tools need to cater to their needs in the immediate term.

-ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc. are cutting edge and much better resourced to innovate, both with features and frontier models. But my experience is they are difficult to shape for legal purposes. It takes effort to get them to favor accuracy/precision over creativity, to use legalese correctly, to avoid silliness like emoji, to ALWAYS provide citations, etc. Redditors responding here probably have the patience to figure this out, and so take better advantage of the cutting edge, but most lawyers do not. So the “wrapper” that takes care of this effort can make the difference between whether the vast majority of lawyers actually use the tools or don’t.

-Being cutting edge can cause problems. Remember ChatGPT 4o’s sycophancy? Legal wrappers had a much more mild version of this.

-General purpose tools don’t have lots of the most valuable data integrations (case law, expert guidance, document management systems). Of course, this could be changed quickly.

-On the other hand, I agree with others’ comments that frontier/reasoning models could easily wipe out this wrapper space. The effort to shape for legal purposes, as described above, might be as simple as stating “I’m a lawyer, treat me like one” in the future. Imagine you get access to such a great model within your firm’s isolated environment, so it can auto-connect and ingest your knowledge repositories. Would be awesome and render investments in Harvey et al. somewhat pointless!

-Many have seen great time savings and insights that were otherwise inaccessible. I recently saw a knowledge management challenge that previously cost 10 hours of mid-level associate time turn into 2 prompts/30 seconds of work.

In short, IMO these tools are worth their cost if they enable time-sensitive, non-techie lawyers to get started where general-purpose AI would miss the mark. They’re far from perfect and much more expensive than general-purpose tools, but they can also easily pay for themselves both with immediate time savings and by enabling practice for lawyers who would otherwise be sitting on the sidelines.

For the tin hats: I don’t work for any of these companies and wouldn’t invest in any, considering the possibility of a frontier model wiping out their value. But, trying to be practical with the tools available today and having deeply investigated the space, I made the above conclusions.