Harvey has launched Intake, its new legal front door for the inhouse world, which not only helps to funnel contracts to the right lawyers, but also helps perform an initial first-pass review via its agents of any incoming work. Early access will begin this month.
Now, for those with great memories, you’ll probably have noted that Legora also launched an inhouse legal front door… yesterday, also branded as Intake. Great minds think alike, as they say.
Right, back to Harvey’s Intake, for which there is a short video below that explores the key ideas behind its development.
Intake has been designed hand-in-hand with several major inhouse groups, including those of Carvana, GE Aerospace and Dentsu. And, they noted that today they already work with ‘1,600 inhouse legal teams, including 5 of the Fortune 10’ – which underlines how important the corporate counsel world is to them.
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So, how does Intake work?
Fundamentally, what it does is extend the company’s already well-developed Contract Intelligence capability to handle intake and triage, along with providing some automated initial review outputs, so that lawyers have something already in motion when they look into their work pipeline.
It goes like this:
- Intake captures requests from the tools people already use,
- It routes each request to the right agent, solution, or lawyer, and returns the answer to the requester under the legal team’s rules.
- And Harvey resolves routine requests and also takes a first pass on the rest, so lawyers can focus on judgment, not triaging.
Or, as Seena Ghebleh, Senior Corporate Counsel at Carvana, explained: ‘When work comes in after hours or while I’m tied up in meetings, [Intake] can apply our playbook [to a contract] and have an initial review ready for my sign-off. As a design partner, we’re helping ensure the product reflects how in-house commercial legal teams actually work.’
John LaBarre, Chief Legal Officer, Harvey, also commented: ‘When requests arrive from every part of the business, too much of a legal team’s time goes into gathering context and deciding where work should go. Intake gives the business one front door to legal support. It routes requests to the right agents and lawyers, with contract work flowing into Contract Intelligence.
‘That gives us more capacity to meet growing demand while keeping our judgment at the centre of the work. The impact reaches across the company: faster answers, earlier guidance on risk, and more time spent helping the business move forward.’
And here’s a short video that explores Intake and the ideas around it, featuring Nabil Virji, who joined Harvey after working inhouse, and Matt Zerweck from Harvey’s product team.
Is this a big deal?
When both Harvey and Legora launch a significant capability for the inhouse world in the same week, then you know something of note is happening.
So, what is happening? Two things. First, both companies – along with many others across the legal AI field – understandably see large inhouse legal teams as a major market that has still not settled down and one could say belongs to no-one in particular. One key way into this market is to create new value with AI and agents, e.g. offering to provide an automated first-pass review on top of more regular triaging and routing systems.
Meanwhile, AI giants such as OpenAI are going after this segment too, e.g. their work with AT&T’s legal team which AL covered last week. The CLM companies have been here for some years, but are evolving rapidly to compete versus newer legal AI rivals and they also see new opportunities. Plus, companies that started in the law firm world are now very much focusing on the inhouse field as well. Why? Because there are 1,000s of large legal teams globally, and very few have totally committed to just one legal platform.
The second part is that Harvey is not just handling triage, it’s offering an automatic first-pass of an incoming contract based on pre-existing playbooks developed by a legal team. AL really likes that approach as it significantly reduces the review burden on inhouse teams – at least for the more standard contracts that flow into such departments each day.
And, as to the future, clearly the direction of travel is to advance the agentic part and guide those tools to handle more and more complexity in the automated review stage. One could see the Intake launches of October 2026 as simply the opening salvo in the battle to agentically handle as much contract work as possible for corporates.
More about Harvey Intake here.
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