Adecco Group Legal cuts outside counsel reliance 5–10% with Harvey

The Adecco Group Legal & Compliance team supports over 300,000 contracts and numerous employment-related litigations each year across 45 countries and dozens of jurisdictions, in a low-margin, high-volume industry where speed and consistency are essential. An internal analysis found lawyers spent too much time on administrative and low-value work under constant cost pressure to do more with less. Without lawyers in every country, the team frequently relied on outside counsel for specialty advice, research, and jurisdictional comparisons.

In 2024, the team tested multiple generative AI platforms on real use cases including contract review, policy drafting, and cross-border research; Harvey was selected for its interface, legal precision, and multilingual high-volume capability. Rollout began in mid-2024 with licenses for 100 lawyers, supported by AI champions, structured training, and prompt engineers. Harvey is now embedded in daily practice for research, first-draft analysis, jurisdictional comparisons, litigation strategy modeling against historical rulings, contract risk analysis, and policy simplification.

The team achieved a 5–10% reduction in reliance on outside counsel, freeing resources for innovation and upskilling, and is bringing more specialty work in-house that previously went external. Lawyers report saving up to eight hours per week on routine work. Adoption surged beyond the initial rollout, with a waiting list for access, and the team is scaling Harvey to new regions and deeper workflows.

• • Parallel evaluation on real legal workflows (accuracy, usability, multilingual scope) helped select a platform lawyers actually adopt.
• • Structured enablement—AI champions, training, and prompt engineering—accelerated confidence and created organic demand (waiting list).
• • Measured outside-counsel reduction and weekly time savings free capacity for strategic advice and human-centered lawyering, not only efficiency.