Legal genAI pioneer Harvey has released a revamped version of its core Assistant capability. The new version brings three major enhancements, they said: (1) specialized modes tailored to different use-cases, (2) iterative functionality for refining and expanding on initial responses, and (3) faster processing, higher-quality outputs, and enhanced document processing capabilities.
In a blog post today the company explained that the enhancements work in the following ways:
1. ‘Mode Choice – Assistant is now divided into multiple modes, starting with Assist and Draft.
– Assist Mode is optimized for summaries, analyses, and searches. Example: Identify inconsistencies across these depositions. Provide in a table format.
– Draft Mode is purpose-built for generating and revising detailed long-form content like briefs, contracts, contractual provisions and more with a legal/professional style. Example: Based on these precedents, draft an NDA for my client who is a private equity firm based in Delaware, for a potential acquisition of a target company.
– Assistant Toggle – Our research indicates that using different algorithms and underlying models for specific tasks results in stronger outputs.
2. Iteration on answers – The most common request from Harvey users has been to incorporate iterative functionality to expand on Harvey’s first answer. We’re excited to launch two ways to do this – users can engage in follow-up questions in Assist Mode or revisions in Draft Mode. In each instance, Harvey will produce tailored content based on the document and previous answers.
3. Performance Improvements – The new version of Assistant includes many overarching performance improvements to our document understanding, sourcing, and reasoning systems. The most visible to users are:
– Accuracy: Based on our internal evaluations, we’ve reduced hallucinations by 60%
– Sourcing: Based on our internal evaluations, we’ve improved the accuracy of cited sources by 23%
– Speed: Based on our internal tests, we’ve improved time to first word by 80%
– Excel Support: Better parsing and citations for xlsx/xls spreadsheets with multiple sheets, tables, and numbers.
– Language Support: higher fluency across a broader set of languages
– Prompt Understanding: Improved handling of prompts containing multiple requests.’
These updates will be rolling out over the next few weeks, the company said and stressed that they ‘remain committed to improving transparency and helping clients better understand our product’.
All in all, a broad set of updates that will help the fast-growing legal tech company to compete with a range of rivals, from small to massive, that are also rapidly improving and widening the range of genAI ‘skills’ they offer.
One only has to see the avalanche of new feature releases from a host of legal tech companies over the last few weeks to get a sense of the pressure now to keep pushing forward ‘the state of the art’ and to keep clients happy.
P.S. Nice to see Harvey openly talking about accuracy and giving some numbers there too. It’s a helpful step, although they will likely have to give more detail here to really explain what those improvement numbers mean in the context of different use cases.