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Training Data · 3 min · Mar 11, 2025
Legal rules limit access, but some states are testing changes
Winston Weinberg
Winston Weinberg says the average lawyer’s hourly price puts legal help out of reach for many people.
In this episode
Full analysis- 5:26Harvey builds specialized workflows, then unifies them3 min
- 9:09Legal AI needs process data and expert evaluationPro pick 4 min
- 25:25Prestige and tailored demos help firms trust new AI3 min
- 16:01Harvey is moving from seat sales to selling legal work6 min
- 29:51Law firm review layers change AI’s minimum quality bar2 min
- 32:13Routine legal work may shift to fixed fees as advice gains value3 min
- 35:09Legal rules limit access, but some states are testing changes3 min
- 41:27Harvey tests multiple models instead of relying on one3 min
“The average price of a lawyer in the United States is $352 an hour.”
Winston Weinbergat 35:14 · Training Data
Takeaways
- He says even extensive pro bono work would not close the access gap.
- Unauthorized-practice and ownership rules constrain new legal-service models.
- Utah and Arizona are testing rule changes or regulatory sandboxes.
About this segment
Winston Weinberg says the average lawyer’s hourly price puts legal help out of reach for many people. He points to state experiments with rules on legal advice and law-firm ownership as possible openings.
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.
Sonya Huang, Host · Partner, Sequoia Capital
Works with OpenAI and Anthropic; co-wrote Sequoia's essay on generative AI.
Pat Grady, Host · Co-steward, Sequoia Capital
Joined Sequoia in 2007; backed Snowflake, Zoom, ServiceNow and OpenAI.
From “How AI Breakout Harvey is Transforming Legal Services, with CEO Winston Weinberg”, Mar 11, 2025. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 35:11
line for how Harvey helps us get there. So a little bit of background info on this. The average price of a lawyer in the United States is $352 an hour. So almost no one can afford a lawyer, right? And I think there's a bunch of arguments about, you know, how much latent demand is there for lawyers, et cetera. The reality is there is a massive population of folks that do not have access to our justice system, right? Like either way you slice it, that is the case. And even if you had every single lawyer work 20 hours a week on access to justice, still wouldn't close that gap, still, literally, without anything else being fixed, right? And so I do think that we are going to have a large transition to lawyers using AI to actually help and increase access to justice. There are a bunch of things on kind of like the regulatory side that prevent a lot of
- 36:08
this, but I think a lot of those will change. So the best example of this is there are kind of two conflicting rules here. It is unauthorized practice of law, right? So businesses cannot give legal advice, someone who is not past the bar actually cannot give legal advice, etc. And the second one is you cannot make an equity investment into a law firm unless you are a lawyer, right? And so that is basically cut out any sort of traditional financing in the legal sphere, right? Utah, Arizona, and now some other states are also thinking about getting rid of these rules or creating sandboxes to kind of experiment with that. And it's been going really well. I do think that there is going to be a lot of change in this in the next couple of years.
- 36:52
And I think it will be amazing. Like there really is. I think that if you can figure out the way to make sure that people are getting the same quality of legal advice with AI and maybe a lawyer in the loop, depending on kind of how that pans out, this will be incredible for folks. And my last piece on this is one of the things that i think people don't think about a lot is most people don't know when their rights have been violated they do not know right and so like i think like we take for granted that we have all been like you know in this kind of like bubble have been super well educated we know exactly what when something happens we know whether we have legal recourse or not, to some degree, a lot of folks don't, right? And so they don't know if a person in authority is doing something that is illegal or not, right? This is
- 37:41
a huge problem in housing, huge problem in kind of like collecting unpaid fees for things that shouldn't even be a fee, et cetera, right? So I think that's an area where you can do a lot of not just providing the services, but a lot of education at scale that you couldn't do before. Can we zoom out to the AI market more broadly? Yeah. OpenAI was lucky enough to partner with you in the early days. What do you make of the recent developments that are happening in the AI ecosystem?