
Legal genAI pioneer Harvey has struck a deal with leading Japanese law firm Mori Hamada & Matsumoto (MHM), believed to be its first in the world’s fourth largest economy. MHM will also make use of the new Vault feature for large-scale document review, such as M&A due diligence.
The news comes a week after Harvey announced it had raised an additional $100 million in an investment round led by Alphabet Inc-backed venture capital firm GV. The Series C funding round, which included investors OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil and SV Angel, values the company at $1.5 billion.
While MHM is one of the largest firms in Japan with 1,600 employees and 16 offices throughout Japan and the Asia-Pacific region, it’s an especially significant move because legal tech companies have made little impact in the legal market here, with one notable exception being home-grown LegalOn, a legal AI company focused on inhouse teams and which interestingly also works with MHM, (see more below).
MHM will work with Harvey to enhance its services to clients including through ‘further harnessing genAI for document review, due diligence, drafting and research, across geographies, practices and languages’.
Artificial Lawyer has taken part in several events in Japan over the years and despite a burgeoning interest in innovation among some firms, generally speaking legal tech has made little impact in the still very traditional local legal culture of the bengoshi.
However, things are clearly changing. And this is not just good for Harvey, but good for many other legal tech companies that may want to grow globally.
Commenting on the Harvey deal, Koichiro Iida, managing partner of MHM, said: ‘We intend to further integrate cutting-edge technology into our practice by entering into a strategic partnership with Harvey, the leading generative AI platform for the legal industry. Our commitment to implement AI across our offices enhances our legal services and adds value for our clients and our people, and we look forward to collaborating with Harvey to explore the opportunities for AI.’
While Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, added: ‘Partnering with MHM is an important step for us as we expand into the Japanese and Asia-Pacific markets. This partnership is built on our shared values of excellence, innovation, and client-focused service. We’re grateful for MHM’s trust and look forward to working together to offer outstanding AI-enabled legal solutions in the region.’
All well and good, but back to the bigger picture. As mentioned, LegalOn signed a deal with MHM in April this year to work with its LegalOn Cloud whereby legal content such as templates and guidance on M&A and international transactions will be provided to corporate clients.
LegalOn Cloud customers maintain various systems such as matter management system, contract management system, contract review system, CLM, and a system for legal document formats prepared by law firms.
Meanwhile, back in 2020 another top Japanese law firm, Nishimura & Asahi, invested in legal tech ‘app store’ Reynen Court, although the company in 2022 experienced a crisis and saw most of its staff depart.
(P.S. if you followed Reynen Court’s growth and then decline, you may be intrigued to hear that its founder, Andrew Klein, started a new business last year – Brighter Seas, which is the North Sea’s first large scale oyster restoration project. Yep, from legal tech to oysters. Klein is truly an irrepressible entrepreneur.)
But, aside from LegalOn, some engagement by the legal giants such as LexisNexis, and Nishimura’s punt on Reynen Court, legal tech has not been big in Japan.
So, as noted, while this new step is good for Harvey, the interest in a legal AI company focused on law firms may well trigger more buy-in for other companies that want to make the trip out to Tokyo. This site hopes they all do because then one day we can have a Legal Innovators conference in Japan, which would be amazing and this site’s founder would have a good reason to keep going back!
But, more importantly, the legal tech world needs more large law firms to sell to. The UK and US have a limited number of ‘BigLaw’ scale firms. If you want to build a very high revenue legal tech business, that caters for high volumes of equally high value work, then you’re going to have to go global – and the addition of Japan’s leading firms will certainly help in this regard.
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[ Photo: by RT – Meiji Jingu, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. ]