Choose Harvey if
You want contract review, diligence from a legal standpoint, regulatory analysis or matter support, and you would rather the firm's lawyers and playbooks own it. Harvey is built for that.
Starch vs Harvey
Harvey is built for legal work.
We are built for the field of finance.
Harvey is the strongest AI platform we have seen in legal work; Starch runs operated workflows for the field of finance. On an M&A deal those two meet, including inside the law firm.
Facts about Harvey checked
Choose Starch if
You have the finance side of a transaction: the RFP, the data room, the deal workstream, the weekly coverage process, and you would rather someone operated it.
Two products, two departments.
| Axis | Starch | Harvey |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Operated finance-desk workflows: RFP response, data room readiness, deal management, coverage. | A legal AI platform: agents, Vault, Knowledge and Spaces. |
| The general workspace | Included. Agents, automations and apps, with a library and an inbox. | Is the product. A legal assistant. |
| Built for | Any team running finance work: coverage groups, deal teams, and the M&A diligence team inside a law firm. | Law firms and in-house legal teams. Five of the Fortune 10. |
| Has a finance product | Is one. Finance is the entire product. | Not a published one. Harvey describes itself as AI for legal and professional services, and counts its customers as legal organizations. |
| Where they meet | The finance half of a transaction: missing items, owners, workstream status. | The legal side: diligence review, contract analysis and matter work. |
| Whose knowledge base | Ours to wire and keep current, from your precedent and systems. | Yours. The firm builds playbooks, standards and workflows; customers build agents. |
| Where your data sits | On premises in your environment, or a dedicated single-tenant cloud. Never pooled, never used to train a model. SAML SSO, SCIM, exportable audit trail. | Harvey's own environment. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001, among others. |
| How it is priced | Scoped to the workflow and the desks it runs on. A build, then the running of it. | Not published. Harvey's site is a demo request; third-party figures disagree. |
| Output | A sourced draft in your format, routed to a named approver. | Legal work product returned to the lawyer who asked for it. |
This is the one page in the set where the two products are mostly not substitutes. Harvey does the legal work; we run the finance work, including the diligence a law firm automates on a deal.
Where Harvey is genuinely ahead.
The enterprise trust stack
The credential set that gets a platform through procurement, plus ethical-wall governance inside Spaces.
Built for one profession properly
Vault, Knowledge and Spaces are legal constructs, with the firm's own standards as the configuration surface.
Scale in the profession it serves
Harvey cites 75 or more of the Am Law 100 and has released its own post-trained open-weight model.
Where the overlap stops
Four questions the comparison raises.
The rows above describe what each product is. These four describe how the work lands: what onboarding asks of you, where the records sit, whether any of it changes from desk to desk, and the cases where the answer is not us.
What onboarding actually involves
Onboarding is white-glove, and it begins before anything is built. We learn how the team works, which workflows the desk actually runs, and what the week is spent on, then judge whether Starch fits that picture. Where it does not fit, we say so early, before a build begins.
Where it fits, we build the workflow, tailor it to the team's formats and approval rules, and deploy it in their own environment, with security handled as part of the build. We work forward-deployed, so the same engineers who built it keep working on it, and the upkeep stays with us.
Where your data sits
Everything lives in the customer's tenant. The workflow runs there, the records stay there, and our access sits inside that boundary rather than beside it.
That access is small on purpose. It reaches what the work needs, redacted logs being the usual example, and it can be permission-based, so the customer decides what we can see.
Does it differ from desk to desk?
The service does not change with the desk. Onboarding, deployment and customer service are run the same way for a coverage team as for a deal team, because the way we work does not change.
The product is what differs. Different desks get different workflows, built around what each desk does, and that is the main difference from one desk to the next.
When not to pick us
There is a version of this where we are not the right call, and it is worth saying plainly. If the workflow you need is one we have not built, and it does not sit on the same machinery as the workflows we do run, we will tell you the fit is wrong and turn the work down rather than stretch a build to cover it.
The second case is legal work proper: contract review, research, matter support, the judgement a lawyer owns. That is Harvey's ground, and a team that wants legal analysis to stay with its lawyers should buy it. What we build for a law firm is narrower and more mechanical: the diligence workflow on an M&A deal, where the job is collecting, checking and tracking documents against a checklist, and the judgement stays with the lawyer.
Asked about Harvey
Is Starch a Harvey alternative?
Not for legal work. Harvey is built for legal work as a whole, and we are not: what we build for a firm is the M&A diligence workflow. If the job is contract review, research or matter support, Harvey is the right buy. On an M&A deal the two sit beside each other rather than one replacing the other.
Does Harvey do financial work?
Harvey is built for legal work and publishes no financial-services product. It writes about M&A diligence from the legal side, and the firm is expanding, so confirm with Harvey directly.
Does Starch do legal work?
Not legal analysis. Our workflows are RFP response, data room readiness, deal management, coverage and the AI Workspace underneath. M&A diligence automation is one of them and a law firm can run it, but contract review and legal judgement are not what we build.
Can a firm use both?
Yes, and on a transaction it is the natural split. The legal team works contracts in Harvey while the deal team works the data room in Starch. Same deal, different job.
What does Harvey cost?
Harvey does not publish pricing, and third-party figures disagree with each other, so they are not authoritative. Ask Harvey directly.
See it run
If the week is contract review,
talk to Harvey.
Bring us the worst recurring process in your finance work and we will show you the finished version.
Book a demoSources and methodChecked 2026-09-16
Everything stated about Harvey on this page comes from the material below, checked on 2026-09-16. Pricing and product detail change; confirm on their site before deciding.
- Harveywhat Harvey is and who it is built for
- Harvey: funding announcementprofessional-services scale and the firm's own model work
- Harvard Center on the Legal Profession: Harvey's strategic evolutionindependent analysis of Harvey's strategy
Harvey is a trademark of its owner. Starch is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Harvey. Statements about Harvey on this page come from Harvey's own public materials and the independent analysis listed, on the date shown, and may since have changed; confirm with Harvey before deciding. Nothing here describes what Harvey cannot do.