Harvey vs NexLaw: how they compare in 2026
NexLaw sets up this comparison in its own pricing FAQ, calling Harvey a general purpose legal AI and itself a litigation operating system. Harvey serves more than 3,500 law firms and in house teams in over 85 countries, including more than 80 of the AmLaw 100. Its agents run legal work end to end, Vault analyzes document sets in bulk, and Knowledge draws on more than 500 regional sources. Harvey connects to Word, Outlook, iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint, and runs on Microsoft Azure with processing in the EU and Switzerland or Australia on request. NexLaw is narrower and built around the trial. NeXa researches and drafts with each answer linked to its authority, ChronoVault ties every fact to its evidence, and Deposition Insights finds contradictions in transcripts. TrialPrep and Courtroom Assistant then carry the case into the hearing room. Licenses start at $2,999 a year per user, with data held in the United States. A large firm or legal department working across practices will find more in Harvey. A litigation boutique preparing cases for trial gets a tool shaped around that one job in NexLaw.
At a glance
All 15 axes, side by side
The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
Agents, Vault review tables, Knowledge research, Contract Intelligence review, Intake triage and Horizon Scanning all produce their output with language models. No document management or workflow system sits underneath that a firm would buy on its own. Vault stores matter documents, and its purpose is extraction, comparison and reporting across them.
Each module is model work aimed at a stage of litigation. NeXa researches precedent with source citations, builds arguments and counterarguments, and drafts memos, motions and pleadings. Document Insights summarizes thousands of pages and flags risks, Deposition Insights finds contradictions and key admissions in transcripts, and ChronoVault maps each fact in a case to its supporting evidence on a timeline. TrialPrep assembles witness outlines and trial materials, and Courtroom Assistant recalls arguments and exhibits in real time. The Professional tier adds a red team that argues opposing counsel's best case, bad fact detection and outcome probability modeling. Matters and files are the only parts that would function without the models, and the terms describe the AI services as machine learning models that produce probabilistic output.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
In the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, a third party benchmark set against a lawyer baseline, Harvey Assistant was tested on six tasks. Its results ranged from 65.0 to 94.8 percent, and it beat the lawyer baseline on five. Document question answering reached 94.8 percent, 24.7 points above the baseline, with responses under a minute. Answers on scanned and badly formatted court transcripts reached 77.8 percent, 24.1 points above it. That study measured task accuracy rather than citation validity, and Harvey did not enter the later Vals study of citation authority. BigLaw Bench, Harvey's own benchmark, publishes its task categories and judging criteria on a public repository, with hallucination and source results by model. It defines a hallucination as a factual claim that a source of truth can disprove and tracks reasoning errors apart. Harvey reports that its systems hallucinate less often than the foundation models on legal tasks while giving longer answers. Every agent claim links to the source passage behind it, and the full BigLaw Bench dataset is available on request.
Every research answer links to the controlling authority it relies on, whether case law, a statute or a regulation, so an attorney can open each source before it goes into a filing. NexLaw markets the research as hallucination free with 100% traceability, and a shareholder at Marquis Aurbach Coffing credits it with 100% citation accuracy on medical record summaries. No test set, error rate or method stands behind the accuracy claims, and the retrieval method and research sources are not described. Output is described in the terms as probabilistic, and assessing its accuracy for each use falls to the user.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
Agents show their plan before they run, so a lawyer can adjust the scope and approve the work before Harvey begins. While an agent works, Harvey brings the lawyer back in when a judgment call is needed, logs every step and cites a source for every claim. Intake applies routing rules the legal team defines to send each request to an approved agent, to Contract Intelligence or to a lawyer. Reports and reviews can run on a schedule, and admins govern access through roles and workspace permissions. The point at which an agent stops on its own, and what Harvey commits to when an agent's work is wrong, are not stated.
Users and their end users are accountable under the terms for every decision made, advice given and action taken on the strength of the AI output, which is described as probabilistic and to be assessed for accuracy. ChronoVault ties each fact to its evidence, and research answers link to their authority, which gives a reviewer something to verify against. No review step, approval point, threshold or route back to an attorney is described for drafts, red team analysis or outcome modeling, and nothing says what happens when the courtroom assistant surfaces a wrong exhibit or argument.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Customer stories name the firm and give figures. Reed Smith, with about 1,800 lawyers in 34 offices, reports 700 Harvey users a day, 1,400 a month and AI certification for every associate. Repsol's legal division started a pilot in January 2024 with 50 lawyers in 12 jurisdictions and reports cutting the time on one process by more than 90%. CMS reports 95% adoption. Other named customers include A&O Shearman, Gleiss Lutz, Cuatrecasas, Macfarlanes, KKR, PwC and Deutsche Telekom. The figures are usage counts and time savings as each customer reports them, with no stated method for how they were measured.
Nine case studies name the attorney and firm, each published with the client's consent. Randi S. Sirlin of Sirlin Law Firm in Phoenix cut drafting of complex family law pleadings from 8 to 10 hours to 4 to 5 using NeXa Deep Research, Build an Argument and the pleadings tool. The Scott Practice reports cutting discovery auditing time by more than 90% in estate litigation. Christian T. Balducci, a shareholder at Marquis Aurbach Coffing, says medical record summaries went from three days to 15 minutes. Other studies cover Southern Arizona Legal Aid, Williams Oby Law Group, The Hingerty Law Firm, Steele Law Corporation, EMC Law and Resnick & Louis. The before and after figures come from the attorneys' own accounts of their hours, the studies carry no dates, and each warns that individual results vary.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Neither Harvey nor its subprocessors may train any AI model on customer content or data, and model providers work under zero data retention. A firm can ask for a bespoke model trained on its own data and used only for that firm. Harvey syncs and enforces the firm's existing ethical wall policies and never creates, modifies or deletes walls, so the walls provider stays the system of record. Workspaces are logically separated, access follows roles, and data is deleted within 30 days of termination. If the law or a court compels disclosure, Harvey gives advance written notice where it is legally permitted. Attorney client privilege and work product are not addressed as such.
Privilege gets its own section in the trust center. Client and matter data is not used to train public models, and each firm works in a logically isolated environment with access controls against leakage across matters and clients. Firms set their own retention rules, and role based access limits who inside the firm can see or act on a matter. NexLaw says it is built around ABA Model Rule 1.6, offers an ethics opinion from outside counsel on request, and includes a data processing agreement in every deployment. The published terms are broader than these commitments. They license user content to maintain the service and to improve NexLaw's products and create aggregated, deidentified information, and they let staff reach content to comply with legal requirements. Zero data retention is described for enterprise users only, and the data processing agreement is not published.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
Output is not legal advice and may contain errors, misstatements or gaps, and the Platform Agreement calls the service a research tool. Harvey sells to lawyers, legal departments and professional services firms, and its agent pages leave the judgment on every task with the lawyer. Access credentials belong to one named user and may not be shared. Nothing addresses competence and supervision duties under professional rules, or the jurisdictions where the product may be used.
The terms make users and their end users accountable for all decisions made and advice given on the basis of the AI services, and describe output as probabilistic. They do not say that NexLaw gives no legal advice. The product is sold to litigators, from solo practitioners to trial teams, yet the about page also invites individuals seeking legal clarity. No disclosure for people who are not lawyers is published, and no jurisdiction limit is stated beyond the focus on litigation in the United States.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification covers Harvey's AI management system, and the Statement of Applicability published with it sets out the controls in scope. Its AIUC-1 certification, an AI security and safety standard, was conducted by Schellman and, in Harvey's account, validates its adversarial testing and AI security program. The trust center adds IRAP attestation, an EU AI Act item and AI Governance, AI Monitoring and AI Overview documents, with an AI Acceptable Use Policy among its policies. An AI Policy dated 26 December 2025 commits to testing the accuracy, reliability and suitability of the AI in the service and to change management for continuing legal compliance. No accountable owner is named, and nothing is published about uneven output across matter types or populations.
Neither an AI policy nor a governance framework, accountable owner or testing program is published. The trust center's section on AI transparency covers the site's llms.txt file and how crawlers may use NexLaw's web content, not how its models are tested. Nothing addresses uneven output across practice areas, jurisdictions or parties, including for the outcome modeling and red team features.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Customers choose what to upload, set their own retention policies and can delete data at any time. Within 30 days of termination, Harvey deletes remaining customer data and content unless told otherwise, and the DPA extends return or deletion to every subprocessor. Access runs on role based controls, logical workspace separation, SAML SSO, audit logs and IP allow listing. The Subprocessor List, updated 21 September 2026, names each provider with its purpose and location, and subscribers receive at least 30 days' notice of an addition with a right to object. Under the Security Addendum, Harvey notifies the customer of a security incident without undue delay and within 48 hours. It then reports the incident's nature, the investigation and the mitigation, and keeps relevant logs for at least a year.
Legal data is kept for seven years or as the law requires under the privacy policy, and firms can set retention rules so matters and AI outputs are kept or deleted in line with their own policies. Data is encrypted with TLS in transit and AES 256 at rest in databases and object storage, keys are rotated under internal policy, and requests are authenticated and authorized before processing. Change management, access management and incident response procedures are described as formally defined and tested, with continuous monitoring and regular vulnerability assessments. Audit logs record logins, matter actions including each AI analysis run, and permission changes, and administrators can export them. No subprocessor list or breach notice period is published.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
The Platform Agreement, last updated 9 January 2026, sets out what Harvey stands behind. Section 8 indemnifies the customer against third party claims that the service infringes intellectual property. If a claim arises, Harvey may substitute the service, secure a license to continue, or terminate and refund prepaid fees. The indemnity excludes materials Harvey did not provide and output from input the customer knew was likely to infringe. Harvey warrants that the service conforms to its documentation, is delivered in a professional manner and complies with applicable law. It also commits to carry industry standard insurance with insurers rated A- or better by A.M. Best. Total liability is capped at the greater of 12 months of fees or $250,000. Payment, indemnity and claims the law will not let a contract limit, such as gross negligence, sit outside that cap. Data breach and confidentiality claims carry a separate cap of twice 12 months of fees or $500,000. After a security incident, the Security Addendum commits Harvey to an independent forensic investigation at its own cost. The agreement states that output is AI generated and may contain errors.
The terms of service, last updated 30 July 2025, exclude liability for indirect, incidental, special, consequential and punitive damages, including lost profits and data, and state no cap on direct damages. The service is provided as is with all defects, and merchantability, fitness, non infringement and error free operation are disclaimed. Users carry responsibility for every decision and action based on the AI output. No indemnity runs from NexLaw to the customer, and no warranty on output or insurance is offered. Annual contracts paid in installments stay payable in full if cancelled early, under the refund and cancellation policy.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Word, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint all run Harvey inside them, and Vault syncs documents from iManage, SharePoint and Google Drive. The iManage connection is a direct OAuth integration with an embedded web extension, and NetDocuments access follows the firm's existing permissions. Intake takes requests from email, Jira, Slack, ServiceNow, iManage, Google Drive and SharePoint and sends updates back to the source channel. Command Center syncs employee profiles through SCIM. Aderant and Ansarada integrations are documented in the trust center, and customers can build their own integrations, including through an MCP connector library. LexisNexis content reaches research through Ask LexisNexis.
NexLaw runs as a standalone web platform. Files are uploaded through its own secure uploader, smaller firms are offered its built in document management, and audit logs export for internal review. No connection to a case management system, a document management system, Microsoft Word or a court filing system is named, and bespoke configuration at onboarding is described without listing what it connects to.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Microsoft Azure hosts Harvey's cloud environment, with each customer's data logically separated and access set by role. Customers can keep data in region in the EU or Switzerland, the United States or Australia. Customers with localization needs can also have processing in the EU and Switzerland or in Australia, and that commitment extends to Harvey's subprocessors. The Subprocessor List gives each model provider's processing locations. Where Anthropic or Mistral models are not offered in a chosen region, Harvey reaches them through hosting platforms such as AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex. What changes between plans or tiers is not stated.
All data is stored and processed on servers in the United States, with no cross border transfers, on what NexLaw calls a private cloud built to store and protect client data. Each firm has a logically isolated environment, and the engineering team configures the deployment to the firm's data environment before it goes live. Every plan runs on that same deployment in the United States. The cloud provider is not named, and no on premises option or choice of region is described, although the demo form takes requests from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
Schellman audits Harvey for SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 every year, and the 2026 audit and certification renewal are complete. The trust center also lists ISO 27701, ISO/IEC 42001, AIUC-1, IRAP, TX-RAMP, GDPR, CCPA and an EU AI Act item. It publishes Statements of Applicability for ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001. Schellman, NCC Group and Bishop Fox perform external audits, and third party penetration tests run every year. Reports, the CAIQ v4.0.3, SIG Core and SIG Lite questionnaires and the data flow and network diagrams are released through a self serve access request, with bulk download.
SOC 2 Type II certification, independently audited across the security, availability, confidentiality and privacy criteria, is claimed, with the full report available under NDA on request. The trust center describes the same program as aligned with SOC 2 Type II and the infrastructure as aligned with SOC 2, without naming the auditor, the review period or the scope. GDPR and HIPAA compliance are listed as badges.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The Subprocessor List names ten AI providers with their processing locations, among them Microsoft, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic and Mistral. ElevenLabs supplies voice services, DeepL machine translation, and Baseten and Fireworks.ai further model hosting. Claude and Gemini models run through Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI, as Harvey's subprocessor FAQ explains. Model providers work under zero data retention, with no human review and no training on customer data. Under the DPA, customers who subscribe to the list receive notice at least 30 days before a new subprocessor is added and may object. Which model serves which feature is not stated.
The AI services are described as machine learning models that generate probabilistic predictions from patterns in data, and the trust center separates NexLaw's environment from public AI services. No model, provider, host or region for the models is named, nothing says whether the models are NexLaw's own or licensed, and no notice of a change in models is promised.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Fees are set in each customer's order form and invoiced under the Platform Agreement. If an order form is terminated early under the agreement, Harvey refunds a pro rata share of prepaid unused fees. Undisputed late amounts carry a finance charge at the Federal Funds Rate plus 1.5% a year. No rate, plan, tier or unit of charge appears on Harvey's site, and buying starts with a contact sales form.
Prices are published in USD as annual licenses per user, with no minimum seat count. Essential costs $2,999 a year for solo practitioners and boutique litigation firms, covering research, IRAC structured drafting, deposition analysis and document review. Professional costs $3,999 a year and adds ChronoVault chronologies and timelines, red team stress testing, bad fact detection, outcome modeling, volume seat licensing, dedicated training and a custom retention and DPA arrangement. The license includes onboarding, updates, standard support and bespoke configuration, and NexLaw states there is no implementation fee. A five day trial is offered, and qualifying firms can run a pilot scoped to one practice group, ending in an ROI report. Annual contracts paid by installments remain payable in full after cancellation.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
Large law firms, mid sized firms, in house legal departments and professional services firms are the stated buyers. Industry pages cover healthcare and life sciences, technology, energy and utilities, and media, entertainment and telecom. More than 200,000 lawyers at over 3,500 organizations in more than 85 countries use Harvey, including 80% of Am Law 100 firms and five of the Fortune 10. Solutions pages address litigation, transactional work and innovation teams, and research spans legal, regulatory and tax questions across jurisdictions. Firm sizes or practice areas the product is not built for are not stated.
Litigation in the United States is the focus, for solo practitioners, boutiques, trial teams and high volume litigators, with enterprise plans adding SSO. Practice areas named include personal injury, medical malpractice, criminal defense, family law and appeals, and estate litigation, and the case studies add legal aid and multistate practice. Solution pages cover discovery, litigation strategy and contested contract and breach analysis. Outside litigation, coverage is not described, and no practice area or jurisdiction is stated as unsupported, although demo requests are taken from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The 12 legal signals, side by side
Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
Under the Platform Agreement, Harvey will not train any AI model on customer content or customer data, and its subprocessors will not either. The term covers both uploaded documents, which Harvey calls customer data, and the prompts and answers it calls customer content. A firm that asks for it can have a bespoke model trained on its own data and used only for that firm. Harvey may use usage data, such as feature and session statistics, to develop and improve the service, and usage data excludes customer data and content.
Section 4 of the terms licenses user content to NexLaw to maintain the service, to improve its products and services, and to create aggregated and deidentified information, with no exclusion for model training. Matter data is promised never to train or improve any AI model under a contractual guarantee, and client data is said not to train public models. The data processing agreement that would carry that guarantee is not published.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Customers decide what to upload, how long it is kept and whether it can be shared inside the organization, and they can delete data at any time. No default retention period is published. Model providers work under zero data retention, and subprocessors other than cloud storage providers may not retain or log content for human review. After termination, Harvey deletes remaining customer data and content within 30 days unless the customer instructs otherwise.
Firms set their own retention rules for matters and the AI outputs tied to them. The privacy policy keeps legal data for seven years or as the law requires, and zero data retention is described for enterprise users only. Professional plans add a custom retention arrangement.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
NetDocuments permissions carry through, so a user sees only the cabinets, matters, folders and files they can already open, and Harvey does not change those permissions. The iManage connection is a direct OAuth integration that respects iManage permissions and ethical walls. Harvey also syncs the firm's own ethical walls provider and blocks walled users from reaching or sharing restricted content.
Each firm has a logically isolated environment with access controls meant to stop data passing between matters or clients, and role based access limits who in the firm can view or act on a matter. How matter permissions are set, and whether they follow a document system's access rules, is not described.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
If law or a court order compels Harvey to disclose a customer's confidential information, the Platform Agreement commits it to advance written notice where legally permitted and to help seek confidential treatment. The DPA makes the same commitment for law enforcement requests for personal data. Where the law forbids notice, Harvey seeks a waiver and tells the customer once the prohibition ends. Its Law Enforcement Requests policy sends agencies to the customer first, challenges requests its lawyers consider unlawful and answers foreign requests only through channels such as a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. No transparency report is published.
The privacy policy lists law enforcement cooperation where the law requires it, and the terms allow confidential information to be disclosed to comply with applicable law and let staff reach user content to meet legal requirements. Neither commits to telling the customer about a demand for its data, and no transparency report is published.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
Knowledge connects questions to legal databases, curated public sources and Harvey's data partners, more than 500 legal sources across jurisdictions. The Subprocessor List names RELX, doing business as LexisNexis, for Ask LexisNexis, and Parallel Web Systems and you.com for web browsing and knowledge sources. Harvey's AI Policy commits it to obtaining the rights and licenses its data sets require. No source list by jurisdiction, license basis per source or update schedule is published.
Research answers draw on case law, statutes and regulations, focused on federal and state litigation in the United States, and one case study cites Arizona statutes and court rules. The databases or publishers behind the research, the rights basis and the update cadence are not named.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Knowledge answers from more than 500 legal sources and draws LexisNexis content through Ask LexisNexis. Harvey does not describe a treatment signal or a later history check on the authorities it returns.
Answers link to the controlling authority they cite, but nothing describes a check of whether a cited case has since been reversed, overruled or questioned, or any treatment signal shown beside it.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
BigLaw Bench publishes hallucination rates and explains how Harvey defines and detects hallucinated claims, and agents cite a source for every claim. No setting or behavior is described for declining to answer when Harvey cannot ground a response.
Research is marketed as hallucination free, and nothing describes what the product does when it finds no controlling authority or how it signals uncertainty. The terms call the output probabilistic and leave assessment to the user.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
The AI Hallucination Cases database, maintained by Damien Charlotin, records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and names the tool involved where known. It lists one matter naming Harvey, Hill v. Foundation Media LLC (S.D.N.Y., No. 25-cv-5947). On 22 September 2026 the court directed defense counsel to say whether AI was used on a brief with two questioned quotations and a citation, and a week later it took no further action.
Harvey is named only in counsel's own letter to the court, which says the brief was prepared with Harvey. No order makes any finding about Harvey or its output. A Galicia High Court order of 7 July 2026 lists Harvey AI among verified legal AI tools while setting a €1,800 fine, again with no finding about the product. Harvey's agreement states that output is AI generated and may contain errors.
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming NexLaw or its NeXa assistant. NexLaw's terms leave every decision based on its output with the user.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Harvey's terms call the service a research tool whose output is not legal advice, and the agent pages leave the judgment on each task with the lawyer. No named ethics opinion appears, such as ABA Formal Opinion 512 or a state bar opinion.
The product is described as built around ABA Model Rule 1.6 on confidentiality, with matter data kept out of training and held on servers in the United States under a data processing agreement. An ethics opinion prepared by outside counsel is offered on request. No mapping to ABA Formal Opinion 512 or to state bar opinions is published.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
ROI calculators for law firms and in house teams sit on Harvey's site, and customer stories report time saved, such as Repsol's. Command Center reports adoption by user, practice group and role. Nothing records AI assisted work per matter for billing, or addresses how a firm bills for that work or discloses it to clients.
More than 20 hours freed a week is the headline claim, along with an Essential license that pays for itself in three billable hours. The case studies report drafting time halved and discovery auditing cut by more than 90%. The buyers bill clients, and nothing addresses how AI assisted work should be recorded, billed or disclosed.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The trust center offers a Data Processing Addendum, a Business Associate Addendum and a Data Subject Requests item. It adds the CAIQ v4.0.3, SIG Core and SIG Lite questionnaires, data flow and network diagrams, a HIPAA report and a Security Welcome Packet. Sensitive items are released through a self serve request with bulk download. Statements of Applicability for ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 show what each certification covers.
The public Subprocessor List names every provider with its purpose and location, and subscribers hear of additions 30 days ahead.
The SOC 2 report goes to eligible customers under NDA, an ethics opinion from outside counsel is offered on request, and a data processing agreement comes with each deployment, bespoke on the Professional plan. No subprocessor or model provider list is published.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Audit logs are a standard enterprise control, agents log every step, and every claim links to the source passage behind it. Command Center reports usage by user and feature. No export brings together the model used, the sources retrieved and the human review for one document.
Audit logs record matter actions including uploads, exports and each AI analysis run, and administrators can export them for regulatory reporting or litigation holds. Research answers link to their authority. No per document record ties a filing to the model used, the sources and the attorney who verified them, and no court disclosure template is published.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Good Law Verification
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
Which one fits
Choose Harvey if
- Your firm works across many practices, not only litigation. Harvey's agents, Vault and Knowledge cover transactional, regulatory and disputes work at more than 80 of the AmLaw 100.
- Your documents live in iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint. Harvey connects to each, along with Word and Outlook.
- You need data processed outside the United States. Harvey offers processing in the EU and Switzerland or Australia, and its subprocessors follow the same localization.
Choose NexLaw if
- You run a litigation boutique or a trial team. NeXa, ChronoVault, Deposition Insights and TrialPrep follow a case from research through to the courtroom.
- You want a published price before a demo. Annual licenses per user are listed, with onboarding and configuration included and no seat minimum.
- Your cases turn on medical records and depositions. NexLaw summarizes records, maps each fact to its exhibit and flags contradictions and admissions in transcripts.
In summary
Harvey
Harvey is a legal AI platform used by more than 200,000 professionals at over 3,500 law firms and in house legal teams in more than 85 countries. Its agents carry legal work through end to end, Vault handles large document sets, and Knowledge draws on more than 500 regional sources. According to the AI Legal Index, Harvey runs on Microsoft Azure with processing available in the EU and Switzerland or Australia, and it enforces a firm's existing ethical walls rather than creating its own.
NexLaw
NexLaw, from NexLaw Inc., is an AI assistant for litigators in the United States, founded in 2024. NeXa researches and drafts with citations to controlling authority, ChronoVault builds fact to evidence chronologies, and TrialPrep and Courtroom Assistant support work at trial. According to the AI Legal Index, NexLaw publishes annual per user prices and keeps all data on servers in the United States. Its case studies name firms such as Sirlin Law Firm and Marquis Aurbach Coffing.
Questions buyers ask
Is NexLaw a Harvey alternative for litigators?
NexLaw pitches itself that way. Its FAQ calls Harvey a general purpose legal AI and NexLaw a platform built for the litigation lifecycle, from intake and discovery to trial prep and courtroom support. NexLaw publishes annual per user prices, while Harvey sells through its sales team. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which one connects to a document management system?
Harvey integrates with iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint as well as Word and Outlook. NexLaw names no integrations, and files go in through its own uploader. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Where do Harvey and NexLaw store client data?
NexLaw stores and processes all data in the United States. Harvey hosts on Microsoft Azure and offers processing in the EU and Switzerland or Australia for customers that need it. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do Harvey or NexLaw train on client data?
Harvey's Platform Agreement bars using inputs, outputs or uploaded documents to train underlying models. NexLaw says matter data never trains any model under its data processing agreement, though its published terms license content to improve its products. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
NexLaw publishes its own comparison with Harvey in its pricing FAQ. NexLaw Inc. was founded in 2024 by Francis Lui. Neither vendor reviewed this page.