Harvey Kaye’s four steps to a modern legal mindset

Harvey Kaye, Fractional General Counsel and Summize’s very own legal consultant, followed the traditional route that many lawyers do. After years of big-law practice, he jumped into the in-house world at WeWork and then Head of Legal at a venture-backed consumer tech startup.

But Harvey knew there was more to his output than a traditional in-house legal role. Today, as the founder of +GC, he provides fractional support to companies that need senior legal input but not a full-time hire.

“Businesses are often stuck between two imperfect solutions: hire a lawyer full time, or go to a law firm. In my head this is an attractive offering where you get the best of both worlds from someone who’s been in-house for a number of years.”

Harvey’s mindset is about rethinking how legal works, the tech it’s using and where it adds the most value. That approach forms the four steps he talked through in his spotlight.
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Step 1: Getting heard in the business

For many in-house teams, the biggest hurdle isn’t the work itself, but being invited to the right conversations early enough to make a difference, a challenge that Harvey sees across both established and first-time legal functions. A lot of his contribution is education – helping businesses understand that legal is more than the “no-police” or a risk manager.

“I’ve always been really keen to break the stereotype and show that while it’s really important for lawyers to manage and mitigate risk, we can also drive growth, increase revenue, input on strategy and be operationally involved to make things more efficient.”

For any lawyers wanting to make that shift, Harvey offers three main ways to do it:

1. Spend real time with commercial teams – not via Slack messages or email, but in person. Observe how sales, ops, finance and product teams actually think to help remove the “us versus them” perception.
2. Learn the language of the business and immerse yourself in their world to pick up terminologies, priorities and the lens that commercial teams make decisions through.
3. Give your view, even outside the traditional legal lane. Lawyers are brought into organizations because people value their judgement, so Harvey advises to use it. As he told a junior lawyer he mentors, “back yourself to add value in areas that aren’t strictly legal.”‍

He notes, however, that this requires confidence, and sometimes more than a little resilience.

“I won’t suggest that’s an easy thing to do. You’ve got to be a bit thick-skinned, but just because someone doesn’t take your view or decides a different course of action, that doesn’t mean you should give up. Not being afraid to voice your view is important.”

Step 2: Understand the problem before introducing tech

Building that credibility within a business gives you permission to slow down and diagnose the problems before putting new solutions in place – this is exactly Harvey’s approach when it comes to the introduction of tech and AI, “You have to have suffered the pain, acknowledged the pain and identified the pain to then realize you need a solution to solve it. A lot of people I talk to say we need to use AI and to that I say what are you trying to solve? You need to know what that is.”

Maybe it’s broken contracting flows, overloaded inboxes, repetitive reviews or questions, intake chaos – whatever the problem is, it can’t be solved by adopting shiny new tech without understanding where things are going wrong in the first place.

That clarity becomes the springboard for Harvey’s next step – once you understand the problem, you can start thinking about what (and who) can help solve it.
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Step 3: Putting it in place

Knowing the problem is half the battle, and implementing the solution is the other half, which is where resource constraints often hit legal teams the hardest. This is a challenge Harvey sees across many businesses he supports: legal wants to adopt tech, but the day job doesn’t leave a lot of room for leading a transformation.

Here, he emphasizes finding a bridge – someone who can translate legal needs into technical requirements.

“Otherwise you end up stuck between people who understand the legal issue and people who understand the tech. So if you’re thinking about implementing tech, find someone who can help you bridge those two things together.”

Harvey also advises not just restricting yourself to legal resources. There are brilliant operators in product, revenue ops, IT and other functions who love solving workflow challenges and have the problem-solving instincts tech implementation needs.

“There are people who just genuinely have an interest in tech and having those people on your side and being able to leverage them to come and help you is a great way of being able to share the challenge. It’s a really effective way of empowering others.”

Once you have the right partners, Harvey advises simply getting stuck in: testing tools safely, gathering data to prove whether they’re actually solving the problem and start small – only scale when the value is really clear.
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Step 4: Championing the human aspect

With solid implementations in place, it’s time to understand what tech can do, what it can’t and where humans are still essential. Trust plays a huge part in this process – a word that many lawyers can be skeptical about. Harvey says that trust is the biggest hurdle most legal teams have when it comes to AI.

With the likes of AI, lawyers are curious and enthusiastic, but they’re not ready to hand over full control, and Harvey doesn’t think they should be. Right now, he sees teams using AI for tasks such as contract review to get 70-80% of the way there, while still keeping human oversight on the final outcome. That’s because the remaining 20-30% - the part AI can’t do – is where lawyers provide their real, irreplaceable value.

“The stuff AI isn’t good at are the things that help humans build trust. Humans need to become better at the things AI isn’t good at, and that’s where the most successful lawyers will end up.”

In other words, instead of fighting that gap, lawyers should lean into it. The most successful lawyers will be both technically excellent and the ones who are exceptional at the inherently human things like contextual judgment, emotional intelligence, negotiation based on experience and nuance and reading the room.

“If you’ve negotiated certain types of contracts before, you know where you do and don’t want to concede. Something might not seem logical in isolation, but in the context of specific deals – sizes, relationships, leverage – that gut instinct is where lawyers can add real value.”

Crucially, Harvey rejects the idea that AI undermines the role of the lawyer, often being asked if it’s bad for the profession – to which his answer is a firm no, saying “I just don’t engage in that whole ‘AI is going to take your jobs’ thing. It’s a catchy headline, but it’s not realistic.”

In the same way as many of our Disruptors, Harvey’s approach to modern legal work isn’t about buzzwords or big gestures. He combines commercial awareness, human judgment and the right use of technology to help businesses move faster and make better decisions.

His career shows how lawyers can build roles that play to their strengths, collaborate more efficiently and use tools like AI to remove repetitive tasks rather than replace themselves. It’s a shift from being reactive to being genuinely useful and embedded in the organization.

You can follow more of Harvey’s work and thinking on LinkedIn by following Harvey here.

And to learn even more about how you can disrupt the legal role and achieve a modern legal mindset, download our Legal Disruptors report.