Harvey vs Legora: the brand war in legal AI

Transcript

These two AI companies are at war right now, and not one shot has been fired at the product. Harvey and LaGora are two of the biggest names in legal AI right now, and the war they're fighting is over a few centimeters of space inside of a lawyer's head. I mean, take a look at the casting here. LaGora sponsors a pro-sweetage golfer. Harvey signs Harvey's spectre. Then LaGora goes bigger. The Yankees, Aaron Judge, Jude Law. Harvey answers with PSG, Fulham, and the US Open. So why are two AI companies suddenly behaving like consumer brands? Well, because underneath these products, it's intelligence that they didn't build. Open AI and Thropic Google, they're renting the models. And now, though, same model companies are moving closer to the customer, like Anthropic literally launched Cloth or Legal and then partnered with Freshfields. Imagine your own supplier walking into the category you're trying to create wearing your customer's badge. How do you compete with that? You just take the fight somewhere else, and you do everything it takes to become the first name a lawyer can think of when someone asks the question, what should we be using for AI? That is mental availability. And these brands want to own it because it's the best way for them to justify these outrageous valuations and a product anyone with an API key can approximate. Well, that's maybe a bit exaggerated. I know they spend a lot of time only distribution and becoming a go-to and all of that, but, branding has a big part of that. And Harvey had an incredible head start, by the way. For years, suits had already been connecting one name with the legal world, Harvey. Netflakes reruns kept that memory fresh. Then, the AI company comes along, signs Gabrielle Macth, and suddenly all those old associations become useful. I don't know if they did this intentionally, but they pretty much just found a memory structure that already existed and moved into it. And this is what I find so interesting about AI, because when everyone is renting the same brain, so to speak, what you can actually own becomes much more valuable. Your name, your associations, this space you can occupy in someone's brain.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.