What the Harvey Agent Changes About Legal Research
By Steven Van ·
Harvey's agent now traces citation relationships across 8 million+ opinions from over 2,100 US courts to ground its legal research answers.
Harvey's agent now maps the citation relationships across its entire case law corpus, tracing which cases cite which, how they're treated, and where a line of reasoning holds or breaks, before it answers a research query. Instead of returning a flat list of results, the agent retrieves authority, follows citations and distinctions, checks its work, and returns an answer with inline citations.
This builds on the US Case Law knowledge source Harvey made available to customers in June. It covers more than 2,100 federal and state courts, including over 8 million published opinions plus scanned reporter copies, and includes comprehensive reported case law for all federal and state jurisdictions alongside unpublished decisions. Harvey has indexed and enriched each opinion so the agent can:
- Search by publication status, date filed, court, citing references, and cited-by references
- Review Bluebook citations and isolate specific page breaks from reporters
In the announcement, Harvey said US Case Law usage has more than doubled every month since the June release, and that lawyers attach documents to US Case Law queries at twice the rate of other sources, run more deep research tasks with it, and query it more often through the Harvey for Word add-in. Harvey plans to expand coverage of unpublished decisions and state trial court orders in the coming weeks.
