Harvey's CEO tells BI: Don't sleep on junior lawyers in the age of AI (www.businessinsider.com)

Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told Business Insider he’s “100%” committed to hiring and training junior lawyers, arguing that AI won’t make apprentices obsolete but instead makes their roles and training more vital. Weinberg — the 31-year-old founder of the $5 billion legal-AI startup (about 340 employees) — said younger attorneys raised on AI will adopt new tools faster, outpace senior partners in AI fluency, and take on higher-risk work earlier, accelerating their development. Harvey is expanding globally (an APAC office just opened in Sydney with ~15 planned hires this year), underscoring the company’s bet on junior talent as a competitive advantage. For the AI/ML community this reframes product and workforce priorities: legal-AI systems should be designed not just to automate tasks but to serve as training platforms that accelerate learning, reduce error, and enable new practice areas. That creates opportunities — and responsibilities — for toolmakers to embed explainability, guardrails, and pedagogy into models so juniors don’t become over-reliant or complacent. The trend also feeds talent flows into legal-tech startups (an ABA survey shows many grads are moving outside traditional firms), meaning more human-in-the-loop workflows, novel datasets, and UX patterns that favor rapid iteration and upskilling.