Co-founder Gabe Pereyra says their new Toronto office will have both tech expertise and customer support
One of Silicon Valley's hottest legal technology companies is coming to Canada. “We want to better serve Canadian law firms,” says Gabe Pereyra, president and co-founder of Harvey. The AI company's plan to open an office in Toronto isn’t just about expanding territory – it’s a strategic push to tap into top technical talent and capture a market known for legal innovation.
Harvey is already valued at over $5 billion, backed by some of the world’s most prominent tech investors. Pereyra rejects the idea that Harvey’s valuation is hype. “When we started the company, the thing that I believe very strongly is these models are going to keep getting better,” he says. Early investment from OpenAI gave Harvey access to GPT-4 before its competitors, letting the company build tools far beyond chatbots. “We partnered with Lexis, with iManage, with NetDocs, a lot of these providers to build out this suite of tools so that our AI systems can help attorneys with all the tasks they’re doing,” he says.
The Toronto office is positioned as a centre for both technical development and customer support, not just sales. The company is building out its local presence by hiring a mix of technical talent and support staff, with plans to grow teams focused on product development and client service.
Product localization goes beyond translation. Pereyra, who previously worked on translation systems at Google, says, “Translation in general has been something that we built workflows around.” However, the real challenge is integrating legal data. “How do you get case law and all the other data sources for every region that Canada or any other country we operate in needs? There we’ve been doing a mix of partnerships building [and] some of our own. Our top priority is obviously we want to partner with all the best providers of these data sources and work with them to provide this experience to users,” he says.
Pereyra says Harvey’s edge comes from its team and ability to integrate complex systems. “We have AI researchers from Brain, DeepMind, Meta. We have engineers that have worked at hyperscalers and the best startups. And then we also have lawyers [who] have worked at the top law firms,” he says. That mix, he argues, lets Harvey build products for the most demanding law firms. “As we scale, it is the ability to integrate all of these tools. So I think the partnerships we’ve been able to get with Lexis, iManage, how do we build this cohesive experience where you can operate your firm on this platform?” he says.
Harvey’s platform quickly expanded beyond law firms. As clients began using the product internally, new demands emerged. “We started a year and a half ago selling the law firm product to these in-house teams,” Pereyra says. In-house teams pushed for features like contracting modules and project collaboration, a model Pereyra says mirrors how companies work with investment banks or audit firms. “The really interesting piece was, can we work on projects together, and so how do we make our outside counsel more efficient? I think that’s not unique to legal. That’s the same way you would work with an investment bank or an audit firm or a tax firm,” he says.
Pereyra says Harvey is not meant to threaten law firms: “We don’t see it so much as disruption. Law firms actually already do this, and so most law firms build software solutions for their clients already. So we see it as ‘how do we help you build infrastructure that supercharges this?’” The goal, he says, is to make the technology a win-win – improving client outcomes and boosting law firm profitability. “There are situations where we can make the work better for a client and more profitable for a law firm. And I think that’s really the end game,” he says.
For lawyers, Harvey is more than a chatbot. Pereyra says it’s a suite of tools built to let legal professionals manage every aspect of their client matters in one place. “The experience you want is ‘I log into Harvey and I say okay today I’m going to work on litigation XYZ’ and I should be able to query all of the context of that litigation or interact with all of the tools,” he says. The aim is to bring together emails, documents, and discovery data – using generative AI to unify everything.
Pereyra sees AI transforming the legal profession. As these models improve, lawyers will work alongside them like colleagues, shifting away from repetitive tasks and focusing on strategic projects. “We see a lot of the work moving towards … what senior associates and partners are doing,” he says.
Skepticism over Harvey’s $5 billion valuation doesn’t faze Pereyra. He argues that legal tech’s complexity has slowed progress, but better models are changing that. “Historically, the challenge with legal tech was [that] the work was so complex that it was very hard to build systems beyond search and document management, just given how unstructured, text-heavy, [and] complex the reasoning is. I think as these models are getting better, they’re starting to be able to do more … of this work,” he says. The real value, he insists, will come from law firms’ unique training data and their ability to distill expertise into AI systems.
Pereyra likens law to programming – both are complex, human-made languages that demand deep expertise. As technology advances, he says, specialization in law will only increase. “Legal feels very similar, where there’s all these different practice areas, all of them are so specialized that you have a partner that does fund formation and they have a completely different skill set than a partner that does antitrust litigation,” he says. The future, he argues, isn’t fewer lawyers, but more – armed with better tools and facing even greater complexity.
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