2026-07-24 · Notes

Harvey's ROI Math Is Right. Its Finnish Context Is Missing.

Harvey just published its Legal AI ROI Guide. The numbers are bold: typical users save 15–25 hours a month, power users 30+, and the sample calculation shows a 20x return on the license. The core thesis is right, though. Value comes from giving the model full context on a lawyer’s work.

Which is exactly why the pitch falls short in Finland. Full context here means Finlex: current statutes, Supreme Court and Supreme Administrative Court precedents, and government bills. Neither Harvey nor Legora currently offers an open MCP connection to the Finnish legal sources discussed here. They build a closed harness between the model and the user, and price the harness as if it were the expertise itself.

Laki.ai took the opposite route and shipped an open MCP server. Any frontier model can now query the interlinked Finlex corpus directly: open a section of law and the related bills and case law are right there.

On the latest Neuvottelija episode, Aleksi Paavola, who built the Laki.ai MCP, compares Harvey and Legora to Cursor before the model leap. The labs keep stripping away the harness, and Claude connected to Laki.ai plus a Finnish legal skills library can already provide stronger results on many Finnish legal tasks than closed wrappers with limited knowledge of Finnish legal sources.

So the ROI logic cuts both ways: before paying for legal AI, ask which legal sources it can actually reach in your jurisdiction.

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

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