Estimation question
Estimate the billable hours Harvey saves a mid-size law firm per year.
- Harvey
- Estimation
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests structured estimation: sizing time savings across common legal tasks for a defined firm size.
How to approach it
- Define the firm: assume a mid size firm with 100 attorneys, each billing roughly 2,000 hours a year.
- Identify the task categories Harvey speeds up: legal research, first draft generation, and document review, each with a different time savings rate.
- Estimate hours spent per attorney on these tasks today, assuming 30 percent of the 2,000 annual hours, or 600 hours, goes to research, drafting, and review combined.
- Apply an efficiency gain per category, assuming Harvey cuts that time by roughly 25 percent, saving 150 hours per attorney per year.
- Scale to the firm: 150 hours times 100 attorneys is 15,000 billable hours saved firm wide per year.
- State clearly that 2,000 annual hours, 30 percent task share, and 25 percent efficiency gain are assumptions you would confirm with real firm data.
What a strong answer includes
- Builds the estimate task by task rather than guessing a single blended savings percentage, making the logic auditable.
- Clearly labels every input, 100 attorneys, 2,000 hours, 30 percent task share, 25 percent gain, as an assumption open to adjustment.
- Converts hours saved into a business framing, noting 15,000 hours is either redeployed to more billable work or represents pure efficiency, and states which framing matters for the firm.
- Sanity checks against the earlier pricing tension, noting firms may not want to bill fewer hours, so savings may show up as capacity instead of cost cut.
Common mistakes
- Giving one estimate without showing the task level breakdown that produced it.
- Ignoring that saved hours do not automatically become cash savings if the firm just does more work in the same time.
- Not flagging the numbers as assumptions, presenting them as if they were known facts.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this estimate change for a firm focused mostly on litigation versus transactional work?
- What would make the 25 percent efficiency gain too optimistic?
- How would you validate this against real firm usage data?
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More questions from Harvey
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop