AI assistant for PwC’s 4,000 legal staffers

A growing number of legal consulting firms and technology companies appear to rush to integrate generative AI into their system to enhance product capabilities.

PwC has just announced its plan to give 4,000 of its legal professionals' access to an artificial intelligence (AI) platform through a contract with AI startup Harvey. 

In this process, it has become the latest firm to introduce generative AI technology for legal work. PwC said under the initial 12-month contract, the accounting firm will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services.

The firm further said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology. According to the firm, access to Harvey’s technology is exclusive among the Big Four professional services firms.

Harvey is built on technology from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, which released an upgraded version of its AI sensation ChatGPT. Harvey received a US$5 million investment last year in a funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.

PwC made it clear that AI will not provide legal advice to its clients and “will not replace lawyers”. According to a PwC spokesperson, the company will use its own internal data and over time may use anonymised data from clients that want PwC to use their information for certain uses. 

The company will also work to make its own AI models with Harvey’s platform to create custom products and services, it said.

Other companies, law firms and professional services firms have also started to experiment with generative AI technology.

Last month, Global law firm Allen & Overy became the first major legal business to publicly partner with Harvey. The large London-founded firm said more than 3,500 of its lawyers will use the service to automate some legal document drafting and research.

Other legal technology companies are rushing to incorporate generative AI capabilities into products. Robin AI, a London-founded company that focuses on contracts, last month said it integrated technology into its platform from OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

Casetext, a legal research company, has recently-released AI legal assistant product that is also built on OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4.