The AI That Lawyers Didn’t Ask For—But Now Can’t Ignore

Three years ago, Winston Weinberg was a rookie lawyer who barely lasted twelve months at a top firm before quitting. Today, the product he built with a former OpenAI researcher sits inside nearly half of the world’s elite law firms. If most AI startups are racing to replace interns, Harvey took the opposite bet: solve the work even senior partners hate, and trust will follow. The result isn’t a chatbot—it’s the closest thing lawyers have ever had to a second nervous system.

Betting on the Hardest Problem

Winston Weinberg did something few lawyers have the stomach for: he quit after just one year. Fresh out of Harvard Law, he tasted life at a top litigation firm in 2022, and instead of billing clients, he started sketching out how AI could change the job. He teamed up with Gabriel Pereyra, a former OpenAI researcher, to launch Harvey—before GenAI was the center of every VC meeting.

Weinberg’s insight wasn’t about speed. It was about durability. Every AI founder in 2022 was chasing “lawyer-in-a-box” tools: contract generators, clause checkers, legal chatbots. His bet? Build something the next GPT upgrade can’t casually destroy.