Legora and Harvey Launch Nearly Identical Products Within a Day
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Great minds apparently think alike, or at least equally fast: The legal A.I. start-ups Legora and Harvey have unveiled a nearly identical product within a single day, under exactly the same name. Both are called “Intake,” both target in-house legal departments, and both are pitched as a “front door” for legal requests. Stockholm-based Legora went first on Tuesday, and San Francisco-based Harvey followed a day later.
What the Two Intake Products Do
The idea is the same for both: Employees from every department send their legal questions, contract reviews or approvals to a central point, and an A.I. agent does the groundwork. The software handles routine cases on its own and prepares everything else for the lawyers.
Legora’s Intake is already available in Slack, where employees can mention Legora directly in a message. An agent chases missing information, turns each request into a tracked task and uses the legal team’s playbooks to produce a first draft, which a lawyer reviews before anything is sent back. Rival tools only triage and route requests, Legora says.
Harvey’s Intake captures requests in the tools employees already use and routes them to the right agent, solution or lawyer. Contracts flow automatically into Harvey’s contract analysis tool, where even employees without a paid Harvey seat can track their status. Harvey developed the product together with the in-house legal teams at Carvana, GE Aerospace and Dentsu. “Intake gives the business one front door to legal support,” John LaBarre, Harvey’s chief legal officer, said, according to the trade publication Artificial Lawyer. Access is initially available through an early-access program.
Mockery and Trademark Law
Artificial Lawyer was the first to notice the overlap, remarking dryly that great minds think alike. Readers of the British site Legal Cheek were less forgiving. The top-rated comment suggested that both companies had let their A.I. pick the product name. Another pointed out that the LinkedIn posts announcing the launches were also worded almost identically. According to the trade publication The Lawyer, a third legal tech provider that already offers a similarly named product reacted with amusement.
A legal fight over the name seems unlikely. “Intake” simply describes what the product does, and such terms are hard to protect as trademarks, the site LawFuel writes. Customers also usually buy the entire platform, with all its modules.
The Battle for In-House Legal Teams
Behind the coincidence lies fierce competition. Both companies want to expand beyond big law firms into corporate legal departments, a market that is still largely up for grabs. Harvey says it already works with more than 1,600 in-house legal teams, including five of the Fortune 10. At Legora, corporate clients make up about half of its customers in Britain, and use by in-house teams is growing more than three times as fast as use by law firms, according to the company.
The two are also racing each other financially. Harvey raised $550 million (about €491 million) in September at a valuation of $15.6 billion (about €13.9 billion). Legora was valued at $5.55 billion (about €4.95 billion) in a $550 million funding round in the spring, and according to the Financial Times, the start-up is now negotiating a valuation of at least $10 billion (about €8.9 billion).
They are not alone in the market. OpenAI also works directly with legal departments, such as that of the U.S. telecom giant AT&T. Then there are providers of contract management software that are building in A.I. agents of their own, and in Germany, start-ups such as Noxtua, which recently sold a majority stake to legal publishers.
