Product design question
How would you improve Harvey's Vault for bulk document review at large law firms?
- Harvey
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a high stakes professional workflow: handling massive scale document review with accuracy lawyers can rely on.
How to approach it
- Define the user and task precisely: a litigation associate reviewing tens of thousands of documents for relevance or privilege in a large firm's Vault workspace.
- Identify the core pain today: manual review is slow and inconsistent, and lawyers do not trust an AI verdict on privilege without a way to check it.
- Prioritize the biggest lever: batch review with confidence scoring, so the AI flags high confidence decisions and routes only uncertain ones to a human.
- Design the review interface: side by side document and AI reasoning, with the exact clause or fact the model used to decide relevance or privilege.
- Add an audit trail: every AI decision logged with a timestamp and rationale, since law firms must be able to defend their process if challenged.
- Confirm with the interviewer whether the priority is speed on straightforward documents or accuracy on close calls, since the design differs.
What a strong answer includes
- Centers the design on confidence based routing, sending only uncertain documents to human review, which is how real high volume legal review scales without sacrificing trust.
- Proposes showing the AI's reasoning inline with each document, not just a label, so a partner can spot check without redoing the work.
- Adds a full audit trail as a first class feature, recognizing that defensibility matters as much as speed in litigation.
- Suggests a sampling based QA layer, where a percentage of AI only decisions are human checked to catch drift before it compounds across a full document set.
Common mistakes
- Designing for raw speed without addressing how a lawyer verifies an AI decision they are ultimately liable for.
- Ignoring privilege review's asymmetric cost, where a missed privileged document is far worse than a slower review.
- No audit trail, which fails the actual professional and legal standard law firms operate under.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you set the confidence threshold for auto approving a document?
- How would you handle a document the AI and a human reviewer disagree on?
- What would you measure to prove the feature is safe to use at full scale?
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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 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop