Harvey, an $8 billion legal software startup, is becoming Big Law’s default vendor. Now, rival startups are following suit. The AI model provider is moving closer to legal workflows, and Harvey is bringing in new executives to protect its leads.
The company told Business Insider it has hired Anik Drumwright as its first chief product officer. In this role, she decides what Harvey builds next and how quickly it can be shipped. Drumright has held positions at Uber, TripActions, Loom, and most recently an HR software startup. At Rippling, she led the company’s IT management software efforts.
“Her learning curve is very high,” said Winston Weinberg, Harvey’s chief executive officer. He explained that he sent Drumwright a lengthy Google Doc about the current state of law firm technology and how law practice works on a day-to-day basis. She came back soon with “really good product ideas,” he said.
The executive hire comes at a critical time for Harvey and for legal tech more broadly. Law firms are pouring money into new software aimed at making lawyers work faster and lowering costs. Much of that spending is driven by clients. After seeing chatbots and virtual assistants transform their own operations, they now expect similar efficiencies from outside lawyers.
These tools aren’t cheap, Recent moves by the model providers themselves complicate matters. Anthropic’s release of a contract review tool last week sent ripples through the industry, leading to a sharp decline in legal research stocks. It posed a pointed question. Even if the underlying model can review contracts in addition to handling tasks across other parts of the organization, how much will companies still pay for specialized legal software?
Harvey is currently at the top. The startup has emerged as one of the best-known and best-funded companies in legal tech, with licenses at more than half of the nation’s 100 largest law firms. The company announced late last year that its annual recurring revenue exceeded $190 million. And job postings reviewed by Business Insider suggest the company is expanding into smaller and midsize companies, a long tail of potential growth beyond Big Law.
Earlier this week, Forbes reported that Harvey is raising new funding that values the company at $11 billion, citing unnamed people familiar with the deal. A spokeswoman for Harvey declined to comment on the report.
With Harvey’s dominance comes pressure. The company still needs to show lawyers that its product can not only save time but also increase revenue. At the same time, competition is increasing from legitimate software startups like Legora, as well as OpenAI and Anthropic, the same companies that provide technology for Harvey’s platform.
Weinberg said Anthropic’s latest release doesn’t change the direction of Harvey’s products, but it does highlight the company’s need to be more nimble when it comes to shipping. “Part of hiring Anik is to accelerate that,” he said.
If the next battle is adoption, Drumwright has put in a rep. She has spent years developing products that ask people to change their habits.
At Uber, she worked in product and marketing as the ride-hailing giant scaled to billions of trips a year. Later, at Loom, he helped grow a product that took office workers away from meetings and long emails and replaced them with screen-recorded video messages.
Drumwright faces similar challenges at Harvey. So the company must convince reluctant lawyers in a notoriously difficult profession to replace familiar practices with new tools. It takes time to use them effectively.
“When something is new, even if it’s powerful, it’s more difficult than what we’ve always done,” she says. Her job, she said, is to make these new features feel intuitive.
Drumwright is the daughter of two lawyers and has seen firsthand how low-tech the practice of law can be. She remembers her mother sitting on the couch, speaking into a tape recorder, preparing for the deposition.
Drumlight begins on Tuesday. Your first few weeks at Harvey will be spent on a listening tour, meeting with the lawyers who will use the product and meeting with the legal team who will decide whether to purchase it. “Legal law is a very specialized field,” she said, but the work starts with understanding how lawyers actually work today and designing products that don’t slow them down.
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