Melia Robinson

muh-LEE-ah is a @businessinsider reporter covering tech and law

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@willchen500 Just gonna leave this here https://t.co/eftGS7TJVq

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

Scoop: @harvey has held early talks with lawyers at Latham & Watkins about an IPO. The discussions were preliminary, with no listing imminent. @Techmeme https://t.co/eftGS7TJVq

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

Scoop: A former Meta researcher who worked on teaching its models to reason through legal question is in talks to raise $6 million for a new legal AI startup https://t.co/LrC2GlQOoH

[Business Insider @BusinessInsider]

In today’s first edition of Legal AI Insider, @meliarobin welcomes you to the Wild West of legal tech. She takes subscribers inside the companies, deals, and decisions transforming legal work.

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@ArgamaniNoa @VineVenturesLP @BusinessInsider @JamieHeller Thank you, Noa. You are more than your story. I can't wait to see what you do at Vine!

[Noa Argamani @ArgamaniNoa]

I'll start from the end: I have joined @VineVenturesLP. I'm excited, a little emotional, and mostly grateful to continue living my life.

This morning @BusinessInsider published an interview with me. Thank you to @meliarobin and @JamieHeller for listening and for telling my story with sensitivity and nuance.

For many people, I'm Noa Argamani, who was rescued by the IDF after 246 days in Hamas’ captivity. That's part of me, and it always will be. But it's not all of me, and I'd like you to get to know me in my new role too.

If you're building something, have an idea you can't stop thinking about or you’re in the Valley and looking to help the most ambitious founders in Israel succeed, I hope to be a bridge between the two ecosystems.

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Pulley, which offers cap table management software, says it will cease operations after December 8; it had raised $50M+ from investors, including Founders Fund (@meliarobin / Business Insider)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@TimTrytitle @DavidLat Hey, lawyers are gonna argue — that's what they do!

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@pitdesi @chiajy2000 @heshie I cannot with this Morgan & Morgan merch site

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@DavidLat @TimTrytitle Shucks. I’ll ask our standards editor if it warrants a correction. 😅

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

@TimTrytitle @DavidLat Some of the lawyers I spoke with told me a plain black suit is still the way to go for a courtroom appearance. But I agree that it would look way out of place around the office!

[David Lat @DavidLat]

A fun piece on New York's best-dressed lawyers. I was struck by how the 9 honorees have very different styles; there's no one way to be "best-dressed."

[Gabe Pereyra @gabepereyra]

Update on @harvey’s model training effort.

We post-trained a model we are calling Tenet:
- Achieves SOTA on LAB
- Generalizes 3rd party legal benchmarks
- Uses sub-agents for domain specific capabilities

Tenet uses Kimi K3 as base and was post-trained in collaboration with @FireworksAI_HQ:
- Rank-64 LoRA over the full network
- GSPO with importance-ratio masking
- 134 B300 GPUs for 2 months

Despite not being trained on 3rd party legal datasets we found improvements on:
- @mercor’s Apex Agents - Corporate Law
- @crosbylegal’s Redline Bench
- LegalBench

Tenet also learned how to use domain-specific subagents (separate post-trained models) for complex tasks:
- M&A Diligence: training in an RLM harness for long-horizon tasks (with @baseten)
- Review Table: specialist models for high-volume structured data extraction (with @appliedcompute)
- Firm Knowledge: parametric memory and structured notes for more efficient enterprise search (with @engram)

These results suggest we can significantly scale training and we plan to:
- Scale both human and synthetic data significantly and scale training to 1K and then 10K GPUs
- This scale will let us move to full parameter fine-tuning and larger models
- We are now starting to post train models in our production harnesses
- Post-train other open-source base models to provide customers with model choice

If these problems sound interesting we are hiring for our post-training team

[LegalTechLIVE @LegalTechLIVE]

Good scoop from @meliarobin. Looks like @harvey is at work building their own LLM to get out of the "wrapper" discussion and reduce costs.

It'll be cool to watch and see how this develops.

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

Typo in video. *Tenet, not Tenant.

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

.@harvey's first LLM for legal work is here.

In the near term, Harvey wants to route more work through its own infrastructure.

Eventually, @gabepereyra and @nikogrupen tell me the company hopes Harvey Tenet becomes the building block for law firms to train their own models.

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Harvey announces Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work, trained on mock disputes and case files using a version of Kimi K3 (@meliarobin / Business Insider)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Zach Abramowitz @ZachAbramowitz]

I was asked by @BusinessInsider whether I thought OpenAI was too late to the party to compete with Anthropic.

[Ashley Mayer @ashleymayer]

Obviously I'm biased as an investor, but nominating @loganbrown799 and @SoxtonAI for @meliarobin's list of "13 legal startups to watch in 2026" was the biggest no-brainer.

More demand from startups than they can handle, and huge ambitions to change the consumption model and cost structure of law for people and businesses that are underserved today. Let's go!!

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

The robo-lawyers are here, and they’re winning

[Melia Robinson @meliarobin]

The legal industry is about to see a whole lot more Kirkland & Ellis-type bombshells

[Gabe Pereyra @gabepereyra]

Model strategy for @harvey:

We are working on the first model in our legal foundation model series, inspired by @cursor_ai's Composer. Two goals:

1. Allow us to serve frontier intelligence across our product surface areas at an affordable price and a strong security posture.
2. Create the foundations for law firms to build their own specialized models and own their own intelligence.

The model series will focus on complex client matters that span months and take dozens of associates. The agentic system will learn to control legal tech tools, sub agents and ask for help from frontier models or human partners, much like a senior associate.

We’ve open sourced benchmarks for evaluating our initial post training work that represents work done by associates and in-house lawyers. We are scaling these significantly using synthetic and human pipelines as well as building private evals for firms.

Open sourcing this data has allowed us to quickly validate the feasibility of post training open weight models for legal work. With our research partners we’ve already shown promising results post training open source models to approach frontier performance:

1. @baseten - novel compaction strategies for analyzing large data rooms.
2. @FireworksAI_HQ - matching frontier performance by using frontier as an advisor.
3. @appliedcompute - improving performance and reducing cost of large scale review tables.
4. @trajectorylabs & @nvidia - sovereign continual learning over client matters.

We plan to continue to invest heavily in working with research partners and open sourcing our data, models and research as much as possible. We believe open research in legal will be important to building trust in the frontier ecosystem.

We are also scaling our research team. Harvey Labs is our internal research group, responsible for pushing the frontier of legal intelligence and working closely with labs, research partners, and academia to bring the frontier of agent research into Harvey.

Labs is run by @nikogrupen and @ItsJulioPereyra - Niko worked on multi-agent RL at Google Brain and Julio clerked and worked in BigLaw. We believe this pairing is crucial for building frontier legal AI systems. Together they have already made significant progress in scaling our data and training efforts.

The long term goal of Harvey Labs is to contribute to the research and infrastructure required for the legal industry to create a frontier ecosystem. We believe that the best version of legal super intelligence is one where each law firm, enterprise and government owns their own specialized version.

We are hiring for Harvey Labs across the post training, agent and data stack and open to acquiring talented teams / neolabs in this space. If interested please DM me.