Latham & Watkins is working with legal AI company Harvey to develop tools for investment-fund work, including limited partnership agreements, side letters and subscription documents. The partnership targets repetitive paperwork, with the stated aim of giving lawyers more time for commercial and strategic advice.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Lawyers in Latham’s investment funds practice are working directly with Harvey’s product and engineering teams on the tools. Legal Cheek reports that the collaboration is intended to streamline fund-formation work, where lawyers navigate detailed documents while keeping clients’ and investors’ priorities in view.
Latham says the project will combine Harvey’s engineering expertise with lawyers’ practical experience. No launch date, product specifications or measured time savings are given in the report.
Why it matters
This is a specific example of a major law firm helping shape AI for a defined area of legal work, rather than simply buying a general-purpose assistant. Fund formation involves several document types and plenty of detail, making the proposed use case easy to understand: automate or speed up repetitive steps so lawyers can concentrate on decisions that need judgement.
That is the ambition, not a result already demonstrated. The useful test will be whether the tools handle complex documents accurately and fit into lawyers’ existing work without creating another round of checking.
Our read
The partnership puts practitioners close to the product team, which should help ground the tools in the work they are meant to support. That is a promising starting point, not a guarantee that the finished system will be reliable or save time. Legal AI has no shortage of confident promises; the paperwork still has to come out right.
What to watch
- Which fund-formation tasks the first tools actually support.
- Whether Latham or Harvey shares a launch date or details of availability.
- Evidence of accuracy, time saved and how lawyers review the output.
Discussion spark: Should law firms help build specialised AI tools with vendors, or keep a clearer distance from the systems they may later rely on?
Sources and evidence
- Latham teams up with Harvey to build new AI tool – Legal Cheek (29 October 2026, 08:56 UTC)
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