Legal tech consultancy Harbor has launched ‘Deploy’ for legal AI needs, which will see them ‘embed specialist teams, including forward-deployed engineers (FDE), inside clients’. They noted it will compete versus the general LLM makers which have recently launched their own FDE teams as part of a linked consultancy service. In short, this is a battle of specialist consultants vs generalists.
Harbor mentioned that ‘OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have each launched dedicated businesses built to embed engineers inside client organizations’, but they then added: ‘Harbor Deploy is built for one [industry]: legal.’
That suggests they may be getting a bit nervous that they could miss out on the piles of lovely consulting cash if customers start to look to the FDE teams of the mega-LLM makers and their now closely allied consulting companies.
Rudy DeFelice, Global Head of AI Strategy at Harbor, continued with the theme that you need a specialised legal tech consultancy to help with legal AI, with the following comment: ‘Each of [the general LLM companies and their FDE teams] is building horizontally, across every industry at once, and in most cases tied to their own model.
‘Legal doesn’t work like the rest of the economy. The workflows, the confidentiality obligations, the governance, and the way each is run and governed inside a law firm or a legal department are specific enough that a general-purpose deployment arm, however well-funded, can’t get inside them the way a legal-native team can. That’s the gap Harbor Deploy exists to close.’
Is this a big deal?
What stands out is that they’re taking aim at the LLM giants and treating their consulting efforts as competition.
This tells us something important: that OpenAI and Anthropic’s efforts are having an impact, otherwise Harbor and others would not need to make such pitches. This is especially relevant as both are also – at varying stages – rolling out legal specific capabilities. In short, Harbor could get outflanked here if it’s not careful. Hence the arrival of a newly branded Deploy and the new spiky marketing message.
And as they noted, they have ‘a global team of over 900 professionals and work with more than 80% of Global 200 law firms and close to 600 corporate law departments,’ so if the LLM FDE teams start to eat away at the legal sector, then such a large super-focused business could struggle to feed so many consultants.
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Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators!
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day.
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