Maddocks

Maddocks wanted to embed AI more deeply into daily legal workflows to drive consistent, high-quality outcomes for clients, particularly in document review, due diligence, and drafting. The firm needed a specialist legal AI platform to complement its earlier general-productivity AI rollout and free lawyers to focus on higher-value strategic advice.

Following an enterprise-wide Microsoft Copilot rollout for general productivity in 2025, Maddocks ran a structured pilot of Harvey, a specialist legal AI platform, across 13 practice teams. Based on strong pilot results, the firm is now deploying Harvey enterprise-wide to all lawyers and legal support staff, integrating it into document review, due diligence, and drafting, and plans to use Harvey's Shared Spaces to co-create workflows with key clients.

During the pilot, 70% of participating lawyers ran queries daily and 88% returned week after week, with all partners across participating teams actively engaging with the tool. Harvey described it as one of the highest engagement scores seen among its Australian law firm trials, prompting Maddocks to commit to a firmwide rollout.

• Structured, practice-team-level pilots with partner-led adoption can drive very high engagement before a firmwide commitment.
• Layering a specialist legal AI platform on top of a general productivity tool (Microsoft Copilot) reflects a deliberate, phased AI strategy rather than a single big-bang deployment.
• High weekly return rates (not just trial usage) are treated as the key signal of readiness for enterprise-wide rollout.