Drafting routine legal documents · Contested (since 2023)

On 15 February 2023, Allen and Overy announced that it had put Harvey, a system built on GPT-4, in the hands of more than 3,500 of its lawyers across 43 offices, after a trial in which the firm sent about 40,000 queries on live client work.

The first draft of a memorandum, a standard clause, a board resolution or a client letter now often starts from a machine in large firms, and the hours saved are real. The second half of the work has not moved. A partner still decides whether the clause fits the transaction, whether the authority cited exists, and whether the document does what the client actually needs. Firms that skipped that check have been sanctioned by courts for filing citations to cases that were never decided. Every document that leaves a firm carries a name, and the name is the part no system supplies.