The U.S. Open Signs Its First Legal Assistant: Harvey AI!

I play tennis 10+ hours a week so for me, this is double geeking!

Every now and then a news item arrives that tickles two completely different parts of my brain at the same time, like a perfectly struck slice serve that somehow manages to clear the net by inches, and jumps so far to the sides, my opponent literally laughs at their inability to get to it.

This was one of those moments.

Because the U.S. Open has just announced a multi-year partnership with Harvey AI, making it the tournament’s first official legal assistant beginning in 2026.

Now for most people, that’s an interesting tech headline. For me, it strikes two very specific and very personal chords. First, I’m an unapologetic AI geek who has spent the past several years writing, speaking, and occasionally sermonizing about the coming collision between artificial intelligence and the legal profession. Long before ChatGPT became cocktail-party conversation, I was pointing out that AI would soon become the most consequential technological shift the legal profession has seen since e-discovery.

Second, I play tennis five or more times a week and have had the pleasure of competing at the USTA Men’s 55+ National Championships, which means the U.S. Open is not merely some distant sporting spectacle to me. It is the Vatican of my tennis Catholicism.

So when I see that the U.S. Open has signed an artificial intelligence legal assistant as an official partner, my two worlds collide in the most delightful way imaginable.

From Law Library to Center Court

There was a time when the phrase legal assistant conjured images of a diligent paralegal surrounded by towering stacks of paper, performing heroic feats of document review while surviving on caffeine and food from a dispenser.

Those days are fading faster than a wooden racquets.

Enter Harvey, an AI platform designed specifically for lawyers, which has been spreading through major law firms and corporate legal departments with the speed of a Carlos Alcaraz forehand.

Harvey helps lawyers research complex legal questions, analyze contracts, draft documents, and process enormous amounts of information with a level of speed that makes the traditional law library look like something preserved in amber for historical purposes.

In other words, the tedious but necessary work that once occupied armies of junior associates is now increasingly being handled by machines that neither sleep nor complain on social media about having to work weekends.

Why This Partnership Matters

The U.S. Open is a global stage that celebrates precision, performance, and pressure.

So is the practice of law.

And if you wanted to signal to the world that your technology is no longer a quirky curiosity confined to tech conferences and legal innovation panels, but rather a serious professional tool used by global institutions, you could hardly choose a better billboard than Arthur Ashe Stadium with millions of viewers watching worldwide.

Picture the moment.

Match point.

The crowd roaring.

And the Harvey Logo as visible and the oversized Rolex watches used at Wimbledon.

That is not merely marketing.

That is symbolism.

The Legal Profession’s Long Rally With Technology

Lawyers, as a species, have historically greeted technological change with the enthusiasm of a golfer being asked to fill in at a tennis match.

There was skepticism about email.

Suspicion about e-discovery.

And a brief but memorable era when some attorneys insisted that tablets and laptops had no place in the courtroom because real lawyers used paper.

Then AI arrived.

And instead of creeping politely into the profession, it burst through the clubhouse doors like a young phenom with a 130-mile-per-hour serve and absolutely no patience for tradition.And of course, like a young tennis player, AI made mistakes and needed coaching. Those pesky hallucinations were as bad as double faults, until the more sophisticated platforms eliminated them.

Platforms like Harvey now accurately perform tasks that once consumed countless billable hours, including research, drafting, summarizing documents, and identifying patterns within enormous bodies of legal information.

That doesn’t eliminate lawyers.

But it does eliminate a great deal of the drudgery and costs, that once defined the early years of legal practice.

Which is not a tragedy.

It is progress.

Because the true value of lawyers has never been in the mechanical production of documents.

It lies in strategy, judgment, persuasion, negotiation, and the ability to guide clients through complicated situations that have no obvious answer.

Those are profoundly human skills.

At least for now.

When Two Passions Collide

For someone like me, who spends as much time discussing AI’s impact on the legal profession as I do chasing tennis balls around the court several mornings a week, this partnership feels oddly poetic.

The sport I love and the technology I study have now met on center court.

The match has begun.

And the legal profession, much like a player facing a blistering serve down the T, will soon discover that adaptation is not optional.

Frederick Shelton is a Legal AI and Agentic AI Consultant to law firms and lawyers. He can be reached at fs@sheltonsteele.com