How SUSE's legal team brought acquisition due diligence in-house with Harvey

SUSE, the enterprise open-source software company, gave its small in-house legal team Harvey to take M&A diligence, regulatory work and disputes back from outside counsel without hiring. The team reviews contracts against its standard positions, ran a full acquisition diligence in-house in one month, and Harvey reports 60% faster contract reviews and a projected 50% cut in outside counsel spend.

The problem

SUSE's legal team is lean and spread across EMEA, the Americas and APAC, working under several regulatory regimes, and it had to keep pace with the company's growth and acquisitions without adding headcount. High-value work such as M&A diligence, regulatory matters and disputes was going to external firms, and contract negotiations gate revenue, so slow reviews held up deals.

How they did it

1. Let the legal team trial competing AI platforms side by side and pick one; SUSE chose Harvey for answers that cite exact source quotations, a multi-jurisdiction legal knowledge base and enterprise security.
2. Get an executive sponsor (here the Chief Legal Officer) to frame the tool as a business enabler, and have Legal Operations own governance, change management, integrations and ROI reporting.
3. Pick four regional Power Users so every sub-team has local, peer-to-peer support during rollout.
4. Start with the highest-volume task, reviewing customer, partner and vendor agreements against your standard positions, and run Harvey inside the tools lawyers already use (Microsoft Word, Google Drive).
5. For diligence, load the target's data room into Harvey Vault, let Harvey do the first-pass review and flag risks, then have lawyers verify each flag against the cited source; SUSE used this to single out 12 high-priority contracts for deep review of termination rights, liability, indemnity and open-sourcing limits.
6. Review prompt logs every quarter; when SUSE found inconsistent prompting and output quality, the champions and Legal Operations rolled out standard templates and agent workflows.

Results

• 60% faster contract reviews and 32% faster delivery of legal advice to the business, as reported by Harvey.
• A full acquisition due diligence done in-house in one month, with a 73% reduction in manual review time and up to £80,000 saved in external fees on that deal, as reported by Harvey.
• Nearly 1,500 hours saved in four months, against a 3,500-hour annual target, as reported by Harvey.
• Usage up 207% year over year, from 2.8 to 8.7 hours per user per month, as reported by Harvey.
• 94% of users say Harvey lets them go deeper into complex issues and 65% report fewer errors, as reported by Harvey (user survey).
• A projected 50% reduction in outside counsel spend this year, as reported by Harvey; this is a projection, not a measured result.

As reported by the source (Harvey customer story); AgentGid did not measure these figures.