Using Horizon Scanning

Overview

Harvey’s Horizon Scanning feature monitors regulatory and legislative developments across jurisdictions, industries, and topics that matter to your work, so you do not have to track sources by hand. You configure ongoing scans, and Harvey surfaces relevant changes in one place and connects them to the rest of your work in Harvey.

This article details how to create and scope scans, review and act on developments, use scans in your queries and custom agents as knowledge sources, and share scans.

Key Concepts

• Scan: An ongoing monitor scoped to the jurisdictions, industries, topics, and sources you choose. Scans run every hour, around the clock.
• Development: A finding surfaced by a scan. Each development includes a summary, a relevance rating, and pinpoint citations back to the source.
• Purpose: The plain-language description of what you want a scan to track. Harvey uses it to rate the relevance of each development (High, Medium, or Low) and to rank what appears in the digest.
• Weekly Digest: The summary panel at the top of each scan's dashboard, highlighting the most relevant developments from the past week.

Before You Begin

Your workspace admin controls who has access to Horizon Scanning. If you do not see the Horizon Scanning tab in Harvey’s sidebar, ask your admin to confirm you have been granted access.

Admins can grant view access, create access, or both. If you can open scans but cannot create one, you may have view access only.

Create a Scan

There are two ways to create a scan: describe what you want to track and let Harvey build the coverage, or select the coverage yourself.

Build a Scan with Harvey

1. Select Horizon scanning from Harvey’s sidebar.
2. In the upper right corner, select Create scan.
3. In the Describe scan window, describe what you want to track in plain language. For example: Create a scan that monitors food safety regulations in Canada, relevant to a fast food operator.
4. (Optional) Select Improve to have Harvey refine your description with more context.
5. Select Continue. Harvey selects the jurisdictions, industries, topics, and sources that fit your description.
6. Review Harvey’s proposed coverage and adjust any field as needed.
7. Select Create.

Create a Scan Manually

1. Select Horizon scanning from Harvey’s sidebar.
2. In the upper right corner, select Create scan.
3. In the Describe scan popover, select Create manually.
4. Enter a name for the scan.
5. In the Purpose field, describe what you are focused on and why. For example: I'm focused on anti-money laundering regulations that impact fintechs and banking-as-a-service operators.
6. Add Jurisdictions. Leave this blank to track globally.
7. Add at least one Industry, Topic, or Source.
8. In the Begin coverage from field, choose a start date for your scan. Developments published before that date are not included.
9. Select Create.

After you create a scan, Harvey starts searching for developments and notifies you when there is something ready for your review.

Tips for Creating Your Scan

• Leave a field blank if you want to keep it broad. A blank field applies no restrictions to the scan. For example, leaving the Industries field blank will return developments across all industries.
• Pick either topics or industries, not both. Combining them returns only developments that match both, which can leave you with very few results. Use the combination only when you need highly targeted tracking.
• Keep the default sources unless you are tracking a specific body. When you add a jurisdiction, Harvey loads all of its sources, so you do not need to pick regulators, agencies, and publishers one by one. If you only want a single regulator, open the sources panel and deselect the rest, but keep in mind this also excludes related actions from the bodies you leave out.
• Build several narrow scans rather than one broad scan. Too many jurisdictions or topics makes results noisy; too few leaves out relevant coverage. Dedicated scans for each area of focus give you cleaner results.

Edit a Scan

1. Select Horizon scanning from Harvey’s sidebar.
2. Choose the scan you want to edit.
3. Select Settings in the top right corner of the scan dashboard.
4. In the popover, adjust your scan as needed.
5. Select Save to save your changes.

Review the Scan Dashboard

You can view all scans in one place by navigating to the Horizon scanning tab in Harvey’s sidebar.

• To see which scans have new developments since you last looked, check for a New developments badge on the scan.
• To view the developments for an individual scan, select it. The scan opens to a dashboard of its developments.
• To get a summary of the most relevant developments from the past week, read the Weekly Digest at the top of the dashboard.
• To sort developments, filter by the most recent or by the most relevant as identified by Harvey.
• To go to the original source, select a pinpoint citation within any summary.

Act on a Development

Save a Development to Vault

1. Open a development.
2. Select Save to vault.
3. Choose a vault from the dropdown menu to store the finding for reuse and further analysis, then select Save to vault.

Draft an Email from a Development

Turn a finding into a client alert or internal communication without leaving the scan.

1. Open a development.
2. In the right-side panel, select Draft email.
3. Review and edit the draft Harvey generates.

Ask Harvey Across a Scan

1. Open a scan.
2. Select Ask Harvey in the top right corner of the scan dashboard.
3. Enter your question. Harvey answers using the developments in the scan.

For example, you can ask Harvey to:

• Generate a timeline view of the developments in this scan.
• Analyze how several related developments connect to each other.
• Compare these findings against a Vault or folder of internal policy documents and draft the changes needed.

Act on Several Developments at Once

1. Select the checkbox on each development you want to act on.
2. In the action bar that appears, choose Ask Harvey, Draft, Export, or Archive.

Use Scans as a Query Source

Attach a scan, or all of your scans, to a query to ask questions and generate analysis without copying anything out of Horizon Scanning. Harvey treats the developments in the selected scans as the source for your answer.

1. In Harvey’s sidebar, select New thread to open a new query.
2. In the prompt composer, select Sources.
3. Toggle on a specific scan for a focused answer, or toggle on all scans to ask across everything you are monitoring.
4. Enter your prompt. For example, summarize a week of activity, compare how several jurisdictions handled the same issue, or draft a stakeholder update.
5. Run your prompt.

Use Scans in Custom Agents

A scan can serve as a knowledge source for a custom agent. The scan handles monitoring; the agent turns the findings into repeatable work product, such as a weekly policy review memo, a recurring client alert summary, or a practice-group report that compares new developments against internal playbooks.

1. Open the custom agent you want to configure, or create a new one.
2. In the prompt composer, select Sources and toggle on a scan or multiple scans.
3. Select the scan the agent should draw from.
4. Write the agent's instructions to describe the output you want.
5. Save the agent. To produce the output on a recurring cadence, schedule the agent to run at the interval you need.

Stay Informed by Email

Harvey sends two kinds of Horizon Scanning email notifications so you do not need to check the dashboard to know when something has changed:

• Daily digest emails: A daily summary of new developments across your starred scans. Star a scan to include it in the digest.
• New scan emails: A one-time email that is sent when a scan surfaces its first developments. After that, new developments for that scan appear on the dashboard and, for starred scans, in the daily digest.

Share a Scan

1. Open the scan you want to share.
2. Select Share at the top right.
3. Add the users, groups, or Spaces you want to give access to.
4. Set the access level to View, Edit, or Full access.
5. Select Share.

Tips for Success

• Define the scan’s Purpose field clearly. It is what Harvey uses to judge relevance, so a vague purpose produces a noisy scan.
• Define the legislative and regulatory changes you are targeting and the analysis you want.
• State exclusions explicitly, for example: Exclude routine single-claim employment litigation.
• Specify the audience and objective, for example: For in-house labor counsel needing advance notice of statutory compliance deadlines.
• Keep formatting instructions out of the scan’s Purpose field. Use Ask Harvey within the scan for summaries or tables.

Troubleshooting

• Too many results: Narrow jurisdictions, topics, industries, or sources to your key areas of focus. Very broad scans may trigger a prompt from Harvey to narrow further.
• No results: Check whether you have set both topics and industries, whether you have named specific sources, and whether your jurisdiction or purpose is narrower than the subject matter requires. Widening any one filter usually helps.
• My new scan is empty: Developments populate after creation, and Harvey notifies you when the first ones are ready. If the scan stays empty, check that the scope is not too narrow, then contact Harvey support with the scan's configuration.

FAQs