The useful part
Works | SaaStrAI Harvey Puts a Former Practicing Lawyer in Every Deployment. Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai Everybody in B2B AI is rediscovering forward deployed engineers right now. Palantir ran the model for two decades, OpenAI built a team, and everyone has figured out agents don't deploy themselves effectively.
How it works
- Harvey's forward deployed pods are mixed teams: a product manager, one or two actual lawyers, and software engineers, working bespoke for the customers that need it.
- Harvey has roughly 180 of them working with law firms and in-house teams, and they're former practicing attorneys.
- Harvey is now certifying legal engineers who don't work at Harvey, which is the part almost nobody has noticed.
- The legal engineer asks the questions a practicing lawyer would ask, which surfaces the workflows a software person wouldn't know to ask about, and the adoption barriers a customer wouldn't volunteer to a...
- Onboarding, enablement, adoption, utilization, and support for renewal and expansion, working with CSMs and AEs.
What to take from it
The forward deployed pod is the mixed team: a product manager, one or two actual lawyers, and software engineers, working bespoke on that customer's problems. Legal engineers are in every deployment, always, because Harvey's position is that a subject matter expert is what lets a customer get the full value of the platform. Harvey runs two versions of FDEs, and the interesting one isn't the classic technical FDE pod.
Example or evidence
- "Our FDEs at @harvey include 180+ lawyers" with CPO Anique Drumright "180 legal engineers, ex-lawyers, help our customers build their agents.
- The post-sales version goes deep enough that Harvey describes it as sitting down with a full practice group to build agents on the firm's real matters, not on training exercises.
- A hundred and eighty former practicing attorneys sitting inside real matters at the best firms in the world is the highest-quality product research operation in legal, and it bills.
- Compare that to how most B2B companies get product input: a CSM relays a feature request, a PM interprets it, and three layers of translation later you build something adjacent to what the customer meant.
Details worth keeping
Harvey Puts a Former Practicing Lawyer in Every Deployment. Anique's number on stage was 8 to 10 years of practice for most of the team. For a company selling into more than 60% of the Am Law 100, with 1,400+ customers in 60 countries and over 100,000 lawyers on the platform, that's a deliberate and expensive structural choice.
Related coverage
- Legaltechmonitor: The new Harvey platform will support user preferences, matter history and context with the help of Memory, a tool the startup unveiled back in January.
- Law360: As legal artificial intelligence companies debate whether customers should pay for AI by the seat or by usage, Harvey is sticking with traditional software-style pricing following a major product overhaul...