PwC engages Harvey AI chatbot with potential to ‘inform legal advice’

PwC will introduce an AI tool to help its Australian lawyers conduct research and analysis, manage claims and eventually offer legal advice.

PwC global legal boss Tony O’Malley says the tool would initially assist the Australian team with research and analysis, but he did not rule out the potential for it to offer legal advice in the future. Picture: Hollie Adams

PwC will introduce an artificial intelligence tool to help its Australian lawyers conduct research and analysis, manage claims and potentially offer legal advice, promising the new technology will not force redundancies but instead invite employment ­opportunities.

The big four consulting firm has partnered with Silicon Valley AI agency Harvey, which has developed a chatbot to answer questions from lawyers about various aspects of legal work.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, PwC global legal boss Tony O’Malley said the tool would initially assist the Australian team with research and analysis, but he did not rule out the potential for it to offer legal advice in the future.

“What it will become over time is it will be trusted more,” he said. “It will continue to improve, and so the extent to which inputs to that legal advice will definitely ­increase.”

Mr O’Malley said Harvey would not become “a substitute for human-led expertise and sign-off” and the firm was “a way away” from letting the tool solely decipher “a complex set of factual circumstances around a client scenario” but he said it would be employed to generate research used as a “base level of knowledge” on a topic that could inform legal advice given by a legal practitioner.

As an example, “We regularly advise multinationals as they go into new territories on what the data protection laws are and whether their particular products and services are likely to raise any specific concerns,” he said.

“That could be over 20-30 territories. Our ability to establish a base level of knowledge around that analysis quickly, and then to create the assurance and validation … around that analysis will be greatly enhanced in this new environment.”

About 4000 lawyers across PwC’s global business will get access to the tool, following the lead of London-based Allen & Overy, the first major legal business to publicly partner with Harvey.

More than 3500 of Allen & Overy’s lawyers have used the service to automate some legal document drafting and research, asking the tool about 40,000 questions over a few months.

Harvey, described as a “co-pilot for lawyers”, was founded by roommates Winston Weinberg, a former securities and antitrust litigator, and Gabriel Pereyra, previously a research scientist at DeepMind, Google Brain and Meta AI.

The company has been backed with $7.4m in funding from research and deployment company Open-AI, the founders of ChatGPT.

Harvey’s inception came after Mr Pereyra showed Mr Weinberg Open AI’s GPT-3 text-generating system, and the latter realised it could be used to improve legal workflows.

Mr O’Malley was adamant introduction of the new technology at PwC would not eliminate jobs, but instead make way for new opportunities. “I suspect that it’ll be a little bit like the banking industry where if you go and look at the jobs 30-40 years ago, compared to the jobs today, some have dis­appeared but there’s a whole stack of new jobs,” he said.

PwC Australia legal leader Nick Brown said Harvey’s integration would “give our people time and resources, allowing them to focus on innovation and other value-accretive tasks.”

He said it was an opportunity for PwC to be at the “leading edge on risk and governance” when it comes to AI. “That takes a bit of time, we understand that. We’re keen to be up the curve and ahead of the market on that one.

“There is just an unbelievable appetite to engage with technology. People on our platform want to be part of a broader organisation that thinks differently … you can imagine that talent is just so excited about accessing this tool.”