Matthew Guillod (00:00):
There are times where I literally would look at a motion or a filing that I made a month ago or two months ago and just say, "Man, what was that mean?" It takes a little bit, right? You work and you're professional and you work diligently for a client, but you just do so much that to go right back into that and remember the context, remember what you were asking, remember how long you worked on it too, that duration is huge.

Will Ayers (00:23):
Behind every great law firm are bold leaders and powerful solutions that help them run a better business. Welcome to Studio A, the home of legal tech innovation. Welcome to Studio A, powered by Aderant, your podcast for the latest conversations shaping legal tech. I'm your host, Will Ayers. On Studio A, we love talking to innovators and builders who are really driving innovation across the legal industry. And we've entered the golden era of legal tech. For the back office, you have Aderant driving innovation to help law firms run a better business. And on the front office, you have Harvey who's also driving innovation to help law firms run a better business. But now both of those entities have joined forces and they are collabing to roll out a brand new integration that's going to make life easier for legal professionals around the world. So on today's episode, we have Senior Product Manager at Harvey, Mr.

(01:26):
Matt Guillod on the show today. How are you doing, Matt?

Matthew Guillod (01:29):
Good. Thank you, Will.

Will Ayers (01:31):
I'm super excited about this conversation. Every time I look in the news, I see Harvey doing something special to drive innovation. We've always wanted to have someone from Harvey on, so now we're going to get into the weeds and talk all things tech. Are you ready to go?

Matthew Guillod (01:45):
I'm ready. Yeah, you're amping me up. This is great. I love it.

Will Ayers (01:48):
Now, before we get started, a little birdie told me that you were actually in the field and that you were actually a lawyer before you switched it up a little bit and joined the world of legal tech. So first question, let's talk about the era before the Harvey and Aderant iTimeKeep integration. Take me back to when you were still practicing, it's very late, everybody else has gone home and you have a whole day that you still have to account for. What was actually going through your mind during those moments?

Matthew Guillod (02:23):
Background, I was a practicing lawyer for a few years at a large law firm. Entering time was always something that it's kind of a gauntlet that you go through and some lawyers have better practices, some lawyers it's a little bit harder. My firm actually tried to incentivize us pretty strongly to get our time in. It was longer than that. I mean, it could be a week of time, bad months, a couple weeks of time, and that is just a lot of work and mental exhaustion to go through.

Will Ayers (02:48):
Now let's talk about the big news, the Aderant and Harvey collaboration to join the back and the front of the office. Tell us a little bit more about that integration and why it's beneficial to law firms.

Matthew Guillod (03:00):
Billing time is difficult. There's a lot of psychological elements to it. You have to remember what you did. You got to do it at the time of entry. When you bill, it's best to do it as close to the work product as possible. And unfortunately, law firms, you work a lot and you can work late nights and it's just tough to keep up with that. And so with the integration, we're focused on at the moment of work. When you're working in Harvey, you can submit right there and actually use the Harvey agent to summarize what you've already done. And because all that work and a lot of that main work product's already being done within the platform, you can just use Harvey to already categorize, summarize, work on certain client matters and summarize it according to those client matters. So we're really excited about the integration and want to keep building.

Will Ayers (03:45):
Now I've seen you guys collaborate and partner with other companies as well. Of everywhere that Harvey could have plugged into on the business side of the firm, why was time entry the one that you went after?


Matthew Guillod (03:58):
You ask any lawyer about this and they'll say, oh, that makes total sense. You show us lawyers and they just say, oh, please, I need something like this, please. Because it is the nature of legal practice that you have to track at six-minute increments everything that you do. And it is exhausting and tiring. And when there's an opportunity to expedite that process and automate it in an accurate manner, lawyers are so excited for it because it's not the substantive work that you went to law school for. You didn't go to law school and work hard in law school and get your JD to then summarize what you did two days ago. That's difficult to do. And when you have a process that could just automate it and an integration that could just do that for you, again, in an intelligent and accurate manner, it's so, so delightful and a lot of lawyers, it just really resonates.

Will Ayers (04:46):
Now set the stage or set the scene, I would say, for someone that they don't know what this is. Walk me through it like I'm a lawyer who has never seen this. I finished something in Harvey, three things travel across the matter context, the duration and the narrative. What happens next?

Matthew Guillod (05:04):
So if you're in Harvey, you can work on a whole variety of different matters and different content throughout the platform. And in each of those main platforms, when you're working on something, you have a Submit Time indication and a Submit Time button. And so if you click that button, it actually will summarize as accurate as we can what you've done in Harvey up to that time. And if you've been working on a thread, you've been working in a vault, you can actually submit right away all that content and it will look at here's the matter that you worked on, here's the content, here's any kind of uploaded documents and summarize that in one sentence. So we don't want to support block billing. We don't want to support any practices that would be rejected. We want to align with how lawyers actually bill. And then in the future it would be more automated.

(05:46):
You don't need to select a button, but right now it's a button that you would use at the end of your work product in Harvey.

Will Ayers (05:52):
So what does Harvey know about a piece of work in the moment it gets finished that a lawyer trying to remember at 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM at night may have already forgotten a loss?

Matthew Guillod (06:02):
Oh, everything. You do so many different things as a lawyer and you could work on five to seven matters in one day, respond to emails, working on drafts, writing motions, reading diligence reports, all sorts of stuff. There are times where I literally would look at a motion or a filing that I made a month ago or two months ago and just say, "Man, what was that mean?" It takes a little bit, right? Y work and you're professional and you work diligently for a client, but you just do so much that to go right back into that and remember the context, remember what you were asking, remember how long you worked on it too, that duration is huge. You might remember that you worked on a motion or wrote a summary judgment brief or a review for a certain element, but you don't remember how long you did it for.

(06:44):
You just know it was between one, two hours. And if you were diligent, you wrote it down and you had a timer, but sometimes that was hard to do and you just have to try your best to actually remember that and you want to bill as accurately and as honestly as you possibly can. So this is just a way to really expedite that and ensure that this is as least painful as possible.

Will Ayers (07:01):
Now Harvey writes the draft and then it stops and never posts anything. You could have gone further. I'm pretty sure that you could have, but you decided not to. Tell me about that decision and why did you all take that approach?

Matthew Guillod (07:14):
Yeah, so at Harvey, a lot of our work will say trust but verify. That's the same thing with doing research, primary law research or drafting anything within Harvey. So the platform is extremely powerful and same with all of our products. But at the end of the day, you are professional and you have an obligation to your client to ensure that what you're doing is accurate and truthful. And so with these drafts, we don't want to just submit the drafts. We want the lawyer to still approve and review that content just to ensure that they have their approval and they can send it off once they've seen the drafted narrative itself.

Will Ayers (07:46):
Now, I know for a fact that you know this, in our industry, security is always a big topic. Put me in the room with a firm's security team. What's the first thing they want to know and what do you say back to them?

Matthew Guillod (08:02):
Yeah, first thing they want to know is what's the transportation of data between the two systems? How do I authenticate? We made that as simple as possible. If a firm has Aderant identity, you would just authenticate with that process within Harvey, establish a link basically between your accounts, and then Aderant will send the client matter associated with that work when you try to submit. And then Harvey will simply send that client matter that you select and then the narrative itself. So we're not ingesting a whole lot of other forms of data or making this a massive pipeline of data right now. It's mainly those narratives and going through the traditional OLAF processes to ensure security between the two connections.

Will Ayers (08:40):
Now, I love the fact that these law firms, they can kind of keep their workflow. A law firm's permissions, their approval process, none of those things change at all. How hard is it to build something new that leaves everything in place for a law firm? I

Matthew Guillod (08:56):
Actually think law firms are becoming more and more dynamic, and there's a general increase in the dynamism of firms due to the speed of AI and due to the speed of innovation right now and how fast companies like Harvey and Aderant can build. That said, we work within the confines of the highest security requirements there are, and so we want to ensure that what is provided and what the firm is comfortable with, we're abiding by as much as possible. So Aderant identity is one that we're relying on. Same with our own authentication layer at Harvey.

Will Ayers (09:25):
The thing I love about you and your team is that your team is very flexible when it comes to building innovation or driving innovation and collaborating with other companies. You've built against plenty other systems. What did Aderant actually have that made this integration possible and what did working alongside the Aderant team teach you guys about the back office? Yeah,

Matthew Guillod (09:46):
That's another good question. I mean, at the end of the day, you are an Aderant to submit as a lawyer and insofar as this integration's concerned, that is where you are submitting your time. That is the end of the day when you go to that system and you click submit. We recognize that that is the ground truth layer of where you're submitting those narratives to clients. And so we wanted to ensure that we could integrate at that very deep layer. Also, Aderant has the client matters and the client matter content that your practice management system would have, that labeling, which is so essential to actually submitting the billable narratives. And then of course, Aderant has all sorts of analytics and data, and so that's another thing that we're excited about to further. How is AI actually being used? If you could track these narratives on Aderant's analytics side, how do narratives from Harvey compare to narratives, not originated narratives or work product that's not within an AI platform?

(10:33):
You actually start to get in the weeds on how lawyers are actually using AI platforms and you get to that very elusive question of ROI with AI, which I think from now on up to now it's been a time savings, but I think this will enable what have we actually done in addition because of AI? Not what have we saved time to do, but what have we actually done? And a lot of that is being worked on and performed within Harvey.

Will Ayers (10:57):
Now this integration is still very early on. What excites you the most about the Harvey and Aderant integration? And if you can describe the integration to legal professionals in one word, what would it be and why?

Matthew Guillod (11:09):
What excites me the most is the possibility for fully automating this process. I think automatic submissions of narratives is something that AI should be able to do. Fundamentally, this is something that reconstructing the type of work that you did at a sentence by sentence level, accurate to the kind of content that you did, in my mind, is something that can be performed automatically so long as you have the lawyer in the room verifying that content. That's probably what excites me the most for that dream of just expediting the narrative drafting as much as possible, recognizing that there is still an obligation on behalf of the lawyer to ensure that those narratives are right because ultimately that's what goes to the client for their billables. One word, I would say seamless. We want this to be something where you're in the Harvey platform and you don't have to think about what you did.

(12:05):
You just work on your primary content, primary law research. You are working on your matters that are within Harvey and which are the nucleus of the content that you're billing, and you don't have to think about it and it'll be done for you. And that's really what we're looking for.

Will Ayers (12:19):
So at the end of the day, when you connect the front office and the back office, what does a lawyer's day look like?

Matthew Guillod (12:26):
When they're fully connected, I would actually say, for lack of a better description, you're more in flow state the entire time.That's somewhat funny thing to say that a lawyer would be in flow state doing legal work, but you really do. You really are required to perform very high level reasoning and diligence about high profile, high risk content that takes a lot of mental energy to perform. And we want to ensure that you can just do that work, that overhead of tracking what you did for your billables, ensuring the matter is associated properly, all of that stuff that is absolutely essential to the work that you're performing, but is still context switching. So I view and would hope that in the future, lawyers are performing more high quality work more of the time, and some of that other work that's more of overhead with the practice of law can actually just be automated for you.



Will Ayers (13:19):
Well, Matt, truly an honor and a pleasure to have you on Studio A for the first time. I hope you could join us again because I know that there's more news that you can share and cool things that you guys are building. So you got to promise to stop back by the show.

Matthew Guillod (13:32):
I absolutely will. Thank you, Will. It's been a pleasure.

Will Ayers (13:34):
You are welcome. That was Matt Guillod, Senior Product Manager at Harvey. If you enjoyed that conversation, be sure to check us out on all major streaming platforms. You've been tuned in to Studio A, powered by Aderant. Thanks for listening to Studio A. For more from this episode, visit aderant.com. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a beat, and we'll see you next time in Studio A.