The legal AI frontrunners: a beginner’s guide to Harvey and Legora

AI-powered tech has been taking the legal industry by storm in recent years, with the big two players, Harvey and Legora, seemingly announcing a new partnership with major law firms every other week.

Both companies have raised millions of dollars in funding and have developed their own highly sophisticated AI-powered platforms to supercharge lawyers’ output.

But what is it that they offer – and which firms have signed up to use their services? For armchair observers who have not yet had first-hand exposure to the companies leading the tech revolution, here, LB presents a beginner’s guide.

Legora

Founded in Sweden in 2023, Legora is an AI-powered legal workspace built on Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure and large language model (LLM) services.  Formerly known as Leya, it rebranded in February this year before going on to launch in the UK and US in March.

The platform includes features such as tabular review, which transforms folders full of contracts, agreements, or case files into an organised, interactive grid. With each document appearing on a separate row, users are able to extract key data points and spot inconsistencies at a glance. The company has also recently launched a new ‘Workflows’ feature, which helps lawyers build, run, and evolve complex legal processes, automating multi-step tasks like due diligence, document analysis and legal research.

Early deals with law firms saw Legora partner with Goodwin in the US in March, before announcing a partnership with Cleary Gottlieb in May. Early adopters in the UK include Bird & Bird.

Legora have also just announced a new strategic partnership with Deloitte Legal UK to develop pre-built solutions and custom workflows.

In May, Legora secured $80m in a Series B fundraising round, reaching a $675m valuation less than two years after founding.

‘Legora’s long-term vision is to be in the hands of every elite corporate and commercial lawyer,’ said CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand. ‘Legora is built to pair human judgement with AI velocity – enabling junior lawyers to take on higher-value work sooner, supporting senior partners in delivering exceptional client outcomes, and helping in-house teams work more efficiently and consistently.’

Harvey

Launched in 2022, Harvey is a generative AI platform, built on OpenAI’s GPT LLM, which was built specifically for law firms and in-house legal teams. Founded by former O’Melveny & Myers associate Winston Weinberg, Harvey uses customised large language models to handle tasks such as legal research, contract review, drafting, and due diligence.

The platform can query and analyse large document sets, generate citation-backed answers from case law, and is fully integrated with legal tools such as LexisNexis and iManage.

With two $300m fundraising rounds during the first half of 2025, Harvey is now valued at around $5bn, and has recently announced new partnerships with Latham & Watkins and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

‘We want to be the trusted AI platform for the world’s leading law firms and we are honored that, after extensive evaluation, Latham has chosen to deploy Harvey at scale across the business,’ said CEO Winston Weinberg in the company’s press release announcing the partnership.

What difference can these platforms make?

Efficiency and a focus on giving lawyers more time to work on more interesting and high-value matters are generally touted as the main benefits of both AI platforms. As Junestrand says: ‘the most immediate impact when lawyers start using Legora tends to be in high-volume, document-heavy workflows such as contract review, due diligence, and regulatory checks.’

As clients continue to seek greater transparency and better value for money from their legal advisers, better use of technology is one way to bridge the gap.  ‘We know legal workloads are only increasing – more documents, tighter regulation and sharper client demands mean lawyers will never run out of work,’ says Junestrand. ‘Our mission is to keep them ahead of the curve, with a platform that expands and evolves to meet their current and future needs.’

At Harvey, the company emphasises the integration levels and fact it was built specifically for the legal market as key differentiators. ‘Harvey was designed with a legal brain, legal data, and legal reasoning by lawyers, for lawyers, to do everything from drafting and comparing contracts to wholescale review and analysis across tens of thousands of documents,’ says Jackie Karmel, Harvey’s head of EMEA. ‘Using generative AI, lawyers can now produce work outputs and products with a couple of clicks, even taking away the burden of lawyers having to know how to prompt AI.’

Who’s partnered with who? Key law firm clients of Harvey and Legora

*accurate at the time of publication