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Training Data · 3 min · Mar 11, 2025

Prestige and tailored demos help firms trust new AI

Winston Weinberg · CEO, Harvey

Winston Weinberg explains why Harvey pursued prestigious firms and earned trust with personalized demos using partners' real work.

The episode’s best minutes

Full analysis
  1. 5:26Harvey builds specialized workflows, then unifies them3 min
  2. 9:09Legal AI needs process data and expert evaluationPro pick 4 min
  3. 25:25Prestige and tailored demos help firms trust new AI3 min
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode
Up next · LightconeA simpler search system worked as language models improvedPro pick 3:11
“whenever I would demo to a partner, I would try to use something that they recently worked on.”
Winston Weinbergat 27:16 · Training Data
27:16

Takeaways

  1. Trust from leading firms can spread downstream.
  2. Tailor demos to work a partner recently handled.
  3. Let lawyers challenge the model's arguments.

About this segment

Winston Weinberg explains why Harvey pursued prestigious firms and earned trust with personalized demos using partners' real work. Inviting lawyers to challenge the model made them engage closely with the product.

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.

  • 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

Transcript

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

  1. 25:28

    This is a very, very scary new world, and you managed to earn their trust. So how did you do that? Yeah, so I think, okay, so the reason for doing it, there was a GTM reason for it and a product reason. From the product side, the bet was that the models were going to get better and that you want to build systems that the next generation model cannot do, right? And so you want to go after the incredibly complex international merger-type work, right?

  2. 25:55

    You want to do the very complex work and build systems for that because it is the most defensible by far, right? So that was kind of the product side of it. From the GTM side of it, I think that something that's really important in professional services is prestige and trust, right? The reason prestige is so important is because trust is the most important thing in professional services, right? Right. And so the reason we went after the larger firms is if you earn the trust of a few of those firms, the rest of them will trust you and the rest of the firms downstream will definitely trust you.

  3. 26:29

    Right. And their clients will trust you. Right. So I think that's something, you know, something that we thought about doing in the beginning was, well, just go straight to enterprise. Right. And there are a bunch of problems with that. But one of the main reasons is there's just no reason for them to trust you. Right. That you can actually build these systems. Right. How did we do it? We did a bunch of things that do not scale at all, in all honesty.

  4. 26:53

    I think that one of the things that we did really well is I don't think there is any excuse for someone who is building an AI product and trying to sell to not do hyper-personalized demos. Like, there is no excuse. I think it used to be really important to do that. Now it's paramount, and it is so easy to do this, right? And so one of the things that we did in the beginning was whenever I would demo to a partner, I would try to use something that they recently worked on.

  5. 27:24

    And then the other thing, too, is lawyers are argumentative, like very argumentative. And I mean that in the best way. So just let them fight with the model? Yeah, I'm serious. And I mean that in the best way. So I would sometimes say, you know, was this a good argument and how would you improve it? And if they were really bored on the demo and then you say that, they are reading every single word that comes out of Harvey, like every single word.

  6. 27:50

    And, you know, it wasn't always the perfect response, but I think it engaged them in a way that they've just never been engaged with software before at all. Right. And we found I mean, one thing that's that's interesting is, you know, a lot of the older partners at firms, sometimes we. Might be their first AI product that they've used, right? And so it's really important to actually like show them, you know, kind of the basics as