# Harvey builds specialized workflows, then unifies them

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/harvey-builds-specialized-workflows-then-unifies-them/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Winston Weinberg](https://realalpha.app/builders/winston-weinberg/) · Winston Weinberg is cofounder and CEO of Harvey. · Co-founded and leads Harvey, after working as an associate in securities and antitrust litigation at O'Melveny.
- Host: [Sonya Huang](https://realalpha.app/people/sonya-huang/) · Partner, Sequoia Capital · Works with OpenAI and Anthropic; co-wrote Sequoia's essay on generative AI.
- Host: [Pat Grady](https://realalpha.app/people/pat-grady/) · Co-steward, Sequoia Capital · Joined Sequoia in 2007; backed Snowflake, Zoom, ServiceNow and OpenAI.
- Show: Training Data
- Episode: [How AI Breakout Harvey is Transforming Legal Services, with CEO Winston Weinberg](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/), Mar 11, 2025
- Moment: 5:26 to 8:51 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/harvey-builds-specialized-workflows-then-unifies-them/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=326

## Quote

> “if all of these models work perfectly and humans were perfect at communicating with each other **the best interface is literally email**”
> — [Winston Weinberg](https://realalpha.app/builders/winston-weinberg/) at [5:51](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=351) · Training Data

## Takeaways

1. Chat alone does not fit every legal use case.
2. Build end-to-end systems for specific tasks first.
3. Combine those workflows behind a unified interface.

## About this segment

Winston Weinberg describes expanding into focused workflows and then collapsing them into a shared product surface. The approach handles complex legal tasks without forcing users to orchestrate every step themselves.

From “How AI Breakout Harvey is Transforming Legal Services, with CEO Winston Weinberg”, Mar 11, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[5:28](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=328) Yeah, so the best way to kind of describe how we've been building the product, and this is, I think, one of the things that we've gotten the most right, and it has also been the hardest to manage. which is and from an org perspective and from a kind of like which pieces do you focus on etc and the piece here is at all times you have to basically expand the product and then collapse it back right and so what i mean by this is actually if all of these models work perfectly and humans were perfect at communicating with each other the best interface is literally email like that's it like there is no interface it's literally just email and it's perfect it has all of your contacts that can read your mind etc i mean it could just be a neural link yeah sure that's perfect yeah that's even better right um but that's not how it works right and i don't

[6:13](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=373) think that we're just going to rant randomly one shot, be able to do that, right? And even if we could do that on the model side, we can't do it on the human workflow side. In other words, like the example I give a lot is, even if the models could do, you know, somehow chain all the steps together to do a large merger, like the Activision and Microsoft merger, the user can't send that to the model and say, merge, please. And then it just like does all those steps, right? There's all of these communication sides on the UI side as well. But okay, so holding that still going back to the, constantly expand and collapse the product. When you're expanding, what I mean by this is the chat UI doesn't work for every use case, right? And it doesn't work for every use case right now. I don't think it will for the future, right? And so an example of this is if you were

[7:00](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=420) trying to build something that does really good case law research, right? There's multiple steps to that. You want to build a system that is very good at doing retrieval over all the cases. You want to build a system that is really good at comparing and contrasting all the cases. You want to build a system that is really good at synthesizing the facts in your case to all of the case law, et cetera, right? And if you're doing that, the best way to do it is you expand your product by building specific vertical, you could call it agentic systems, whatever you want, that do that thing from start to finish, right? And then you collapse them all together. So what does this end up looking like we will take a bunch of use cases that are very high value we'll build out a specific workflow to do that use case and then we will chain them together so that you can

[7:47](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=467) complete a task from start to finish right and so the difficult piece of that is if you're trying to sell something that is seats you have to sell something that is applicable to as many users as possible and so you have to balance are you building something that is really good for a securities attorney or are you building something that's really good for all of the attorneys right and so that's kind of the collapse part where you want to build these specific workflows agentic workflows whatever you want to call it whatever terminology it works and then you want to combine them into the same surface level on the product right and so what this looks like eventually is you upload a share purchase agreement onto harvey right and we have the user may not see this but there's tons of different workflows that are like extract the reps and warranties from that or

[8:37](https://realalpha.app/v/eXK-_yyQDMM/?t=517) summarize it or whatever it is, right? And we've built them all separately. And you can use those UIs and actually do that workflow separately. Or when you just upload an SPA, Harvey says, would you like to run any of those workflows? And that's the collapse version, right? So you're