The Platform Shift: Rethinking Collaboration in Legal Work

By Matt Zerweck, Head of Enterprise Product, Harvey.

Anyone working in legal today is already living the shift. Demand is rising. Matters are more complex. AI is accelerating early-stage work. And collaboration between firms, clients, and internal teams is continuous rather than limited to handoffs.

Legal services are shifting from delivering finished answers to collaboratively developing understanding, and the systems that support legal work need to be designed for that reality.

Generative AI allows teams to reach initial answers more quickly, uncover more issues earlier, and refine their thinking continuously as new information emerges. When this process is collaborative, it leads to better decisions, faster progress, and a more engaged client experience. When it isn’t, the result is fragmentation, duplicated effort, and lost context.

To date, collaboration challenges in legal have largely been addressed in an ad hoc way: by adding portals, shared folders, task trackers, or access layers onto existing tools. These solutions digitized workflows but have fallen short of true transformational change. They move information, but they don’t preserve reasoning, and in some cases, have caused more isolation than when collaboration was done physically in rooms together.

Recent research — both independent market studies and our own customer-level analysis — helps explain why this gap is widening, why a platform approach to legal collaboration is emerging as the next logical step, and how this forces a reimagination of how legal services are delivered overall.

What the Research is Telling Us

Independent research shows that AI has moved decisively into everyday legal work. Findings from Wharton’s Human-AI initiative and the GBK Collective identify Legal as the fastest-growing function in GenAI expertise year over year, with AI now embedded in routine drafting, analysis, and knowledge work rather than confined to pilots.

As AI becomes routine, the nature of legal work shifts. Crucially, AI makes context easier to capture, preserve, and extend across collaborators, enabling legal teams to operate less as a sequence of isolated tasks and more as a coordinated system working toward an optimal outcome.

Our own customer-focused research mirrors this trend. RSGI’s Defining the Impact of Legal AI  study, based on interviews with 40 Harvey customers, found rapid time-to-value, unusually high usage, and stronger client relationships when AI was deeply embedded into workflows. The differentiator was not access to AI alone, but how tightly tools, workflows, and collaboration were integrated.

A similar conclusion emerges from Pathways: A Roadmap for Law Firms, published by The LegalTech Fund (TLTF) in collaboration with Harvey, which frames the industry’s shift toward interoperable data, hybrid human-machine workflows, and evidence-based trust — changes that point to value increasingly accruing at the platform level.

The implication is clear: as AI accelerates legal work, the limiting factor is no longer access to information, but the ability to share, sustain, and act on context together.

What Collaboration Needs to Look Like Going Forward

Legal collaboration has changed in kind, not just in scale. Work no longer moves through clean handoffs; it unfolds in parallel across firms, clients, and internal teams, often across locations and devices. AI accelerates early-stage reasoning and drafting, and clients expect visibility into progress as work develops, not just at delivery.

When collaboration is limited to discrete handoffs, the work itself becomes more transactional in nature. Deliverables arrive, but the context behind them — how drafts evolved, which risks were flagged, what assumptions changed — is not always visible to everyone involved.

Looking ahead, effective collaboration needs to be embedded where legal work actually happens. Instead of centering collaboration on static deliverables, teams need shared environments where work evolves in context — where insights surface early, analysis is refined collaboratively, and decisions are shaped over time. In this model, clients don’t need to read everything to stay informed; AI enables them to grasp essentials through summaries, ask targeted questions, and drill down into specifics when needed.

This is the standard legal collaboration now needs to meet — and it requires systems designed around shared understanding, not disconnected handoffs, to support this new way of delivering services.

Some of the clearest signals for what that looks like in practice come from teams already working this way.

From Early Adoption to Evolving Collaboration

Gleiss Lutz and Deutsche Telekom operate in environments defined by scale, regulatory complexity, and high-stakes decision-making, where legal work is inherently spread across in-house teams, external counsel, and specialists whether on a national basis or cross-border. In that context, the value of AI has not been about replacing judgment, but about structuring complexity so teams can collaborate together more effectively.

Both organizations describe similar patterns emerging in their work: AI helps turn large volumes of material into shared understanding. Lawyers use Harvey to draft clauses, review due diligence reports, spot issues, compare contract standards, and translate documents across jurisdictions. With expert review reserved for synthesis and strategic judgment, they’re finding efficiency gains that allow them to focus legal expertise where it matters most. The collaborative potential is clear. One leader noted that having all legal teams access the same vault with Harvey’s translation capabilities would be ‘a game-changer’ for cross-border work.

These experiences and the collaboration patterns other clients are developing are directly informing the development of Harvey Shared Spaces: a dedicated environment where context, sources, and decisions can remain connected as work evolves, responding to needs for integrated chat, co-editing, and seamless coordination as work becomes increasingly collaborative.

Looking Ahead

AI is accelerating legal work, but speed alone is not the goal. The real opportunity lies in delivering legal services that are more collaborative, more transparent, and more aligned with how clients make decisions. That shift is already underway—and the firms and legal teams that embrace it will set the standard for what comes next.

Learn more about Harvey Shared Spaces.

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[ This is a sponsored thought leadership article by Harvey for Artificial Lawyer. ]