There’s a distinction I find myself making more often in conversations with law firms: the difference between the practice of law and the business of law.
AI tools are advancing fast on the practice side. Harvey is a good example, helping lawyers research, draft, and reason faster than was possible even two years ago. Firms are adopting these tools. Partners are asking for them. The adoption curve is real and accelerating.
The business of law is also trying to advance with AI, and it has to. It needs to support the demands of the practice, keep pace with the speed firms now operate at, and do all of that without compromising in the areas that carry real risk: client commitments, regulatory requirements, ethical obligations. That infrastructure is under pressure, and that gap is where most firms are getting stuck.
I was at the Harvey Partner Roundup, and that tension came through in almost every conversation. Firms want to say yes to AI. Their lawyers want it. Their clients are starting to expect it. But the risk and compliance infrastructure many firms are running on wasn’t built for an agentic world, and leadership knows it.
The compliance problem is specific, not abstract
When I talk about AI compliance in this context, I mean two things.
First, general requirements that apply to any firm using AI: model selection, data residency, how outputs are used and reviewed. Most firms are working through these.
Second, and harder: the responsibilities unique to professional services firms. Client commitments. Regulatory requirements. Ethical obligations. These aren’t generic compliance requirements. They’re the foundation of how a law firm operates, and they’re the ones that break when AI scales without the right governance underneath it.
Right now, most firms are managing these with manual controls and limited capabilities. That works until it doesn’t — and the firms I talk to know they need something more durable, more comprehensive, and more systematic.
Intapp Walls enforces matter-level boundaries so that AI agents operate within the compliance policies the firm has already established. That’s what makes governed AI deployment possible at scale.
Why Harvey and Intapp together
At Intapp, we activate Firm AI for the business of law while connecting with practice-of-law innovators like Harvey so both sides move in lockstep. Walls for AI is how firms make sure their data, people, and agents stay governed as they scale. The integration between Walls and Harvey is a direct expression of that — firms can push the frontier on AI without compromising what their clients and regulators expect.
Carl Fuda, VP of Partnerships and Business Development at Harvey, describes what firms are asking for: “The firms we work with are deploying AI into real workflows across research, drafting, and document review. The first question we hear from CIOs is: how do I govern this at scale without slowing my lawyers down? They want the guardrails seamless — ethical walls, data boundaries, access controls that just work inside the AI, not bolted on after the fact. That’s exactly why the Harvey and Intapp partnership matters: it lets firms push adoption forward with the confidence that their compliance infrastructure is keeping pace.”
The window to get this right is now
If your AI rollout has stalled, or if it’s moving forward with governance still an open question, the answer is to close the gap before the exposure compounds.
Firms that get this right in 2026 will be operating while their competitors are still deliberating.
Want to see how Intapp Walls supports governed AI deployment at your firm?
Learn more about the Harvey and Intapp partnership here.