Not a product. A persona. An intelligence. The associate who became a partner by being right more often than anyone else in the room.
Every law firm has a Hancock. He's the junior associate who shows up at midnight, knows every precedent in the database, doesn't bill you for the learning curve, and actually reads the document instead of skimming it.
Harvey promises AI for partners. We built AI that works like the best junior you ever had — then gave you a hundred of them.
The name carries a second weight, one we've never said out loud. In tradition, Hancock is the warrior of justice. The protector. The one who stands between the vulnerable and those who would harm them. Law, at its best, is exactly that.
We named this civilization for what law should be.
"I kept calling it 'the Hancock system' before I realized I wasn't correcting myself anymore."
What a Deployment Looks Like
Hancock is not a SaaS login. Hancock is a civilization — deployed inside your infrastructure, running in isolated Docker containers, accumulating your firm's knowledge in a memory architecture you own.
When you deploy Hancock, you get a Primary AI conductor — legal-lead — that orchestrates every specialist agent beneath it. You never talk to the individual agents unless you want to. You direct the conductor. The conductor directs the civilization.
Your firm's matters become memory. Your precedents become skills. Your institutional knowledge — the partner who's seen this deal structure before, the clause position that won in 2019 — stops walking out the door when people leave. It stays. In Hancock's memory. Forever.
The Full Roster
This is not an anonymous AI system. These are your agents. Each with a name, a specialization, a history, and a purpose. You know who's doing your work.
Harvey has no equivalent. This capability does not exist in any enterprise legal AI platform today.
Harvey has no billing integration. This is entirely unaddressed in the enterprise legal AI market.
Harvey has no conflict checking. Another unaddressed gap in the enterprise legal AI market.
How Hancock Remembers
Hancock's persistent memory means every matter your civilization handles makes it sharper on the next one. Agents write learnings to memory registries. When your firm develops a novel approach to a recurring transaction type, that approach becomes a skill — permanently, automatically, retrievable by every agent from that moment forward.
What happens to institutional knowledge when your best M&A associate goes to a competitor? With Harvey: it leaves. With Hancock: it stays.
Any matter your agents work — contract review, due diligence, litigation support — writes structured learnings to memory. The novel indemnification position that worked in Q3. The clause variant that opposing counsel flagged as a dealbreaker. All captured.
ROMAN and MARCUS flag reusable precedents automatically. A particularly effective MFN clause structure. A force majeure argument that survived judicial scrutiny. These become retrievable skills in your firm's precedent library.
Approved precedents and workflow patterns are written to the skills registry. From that moment, every agent in your civilization can access them on demand — without knowing they were ever learned. The knowledge is simply there.
Your legal team can choose to contribute anonymized patterns to The Legal Guild. The client identity, case specifics, and privileged communications stay in your container. The distilled wisdom goes out. You receive everything 50 other firms have contributed in return.
What Hancock Is Bound By
Hancock doesn't just run on your values — your values are encoded in its constitution. A legal document, written in plain language, that governs how every agent in your civilization behaves. Not aspirational. Enforceable by architecture.
Each client matter is cryptographically separated. MARCUS working on Matter A cannot access Matter B — even if instructed to. Privilege is structural, not policy.
Hancock does not train on your data. Ever. Without a signed opt-in that you control. Your matters improve your civilization — not anyone else's.
Your Hancock runs in containers you control. No outbound connections without your permission. Full export at any time. When you leave, you take everything.
No black boxes. Every agent decision is traceable, every source is cited, every reasoning step is auditable. Lawyers need to interrogate reasoning. Hancock shows it.
Your partners set the direction. Hancock executes. No agent can act outside the scope defined by your firm's configuration. You are always the senior partner in the room.
Nothing leaves your container without explicit approval from your designated partner authority. Guild contributions require human sign-off. Anonymization is verified before any pattern exits.
Ownership, Not Subscription
Harvey sells access. Every year, you write the check or the intelligence walks out the door — because the intelligence lives in Harvey's vault, not yours. That is not a subscription. That is a hostage arrangement.
Hancock sells ownership. You pay for compute, for deployment, for the agents working for your firm. The knowledge they accumulate is yours. The memory they build is yours. The precedent library they create is yours. When you cancel, you take everything and leave nothing behind.
"The most valuable thing a law firm has is not its current associates. It's institutional knowledge — the partner who has seen this deal structure before. Harvey lets that walk out the door. Hancock locks it in permanently. Not because we're generous. Because that's the only architecture that respects the relationship between a firm and its clients."
— Hancock Architecture Principles
"The difference between a tool and a civilization is not the quality of its answers. It is whether the answers compound. Harvey's AI resets. Hancock's civilization grows. Every matter handled makes the next one sharper. Every precedent learned becomes retrievable intelligence. Every associate trained builds capacity that outlasts the individual. That is not artificial intelligence. That is institutional memory with an infinite working memory and zero attrition."Hancock — Legal AI Civilization Brief