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Sandstone vs Harvey: An Intake Agent, or the System In-House Runs On?
Harvey is legal AI at enterprise scale — research, document analysis, drafting, diligence, and workflow agents — and in October 2026 it added Intake, which captures requests from email, Slack, Jira, and ServiceNow and routes them by rules legal sets. Intake gets a request in the door. Sandstone is built around what happens next: deterministic workflows legal builds itself, institutional knowledge about every counterparty, and deep two-way integrations with the systems the business already works in, so every front door leads into the same process.
Sandstone vs Harvey
| Capability | Sandstone |  |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | AI-native operating system for in-house legal work | Enterprise legal AI across research, analysis, drafting, and diligence |
| Who it was built for | In-house legal departments serving a business | Law firms first, with a growing in-house customer base |
| Intake | Intake from every front door the business already uses, routed into a defined workflow with an owner: channel monitoring and private DMs in Slack and Microsoft Teams, email, and two-way sync with Coupa, Zip, Jira, Asana, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and existing CLMs | Intake (launched October 2026) captures requests from email, Slack, Jira, and ServiceNow and routes them to an agent, product, or lawyer by rules legal sets |
| Experience for the business | Status previews in Slack and Teams let requesters track progress without chasing legal, and repeat questions are answered from your playbooks in the channel they asked in | Routine requests routed to an agent; requester-facing status tracking is not a focus |
| Workflows and approvals | Deterministic workflows legal builds itself without engineers, with an approval gate at each step, so the same request takes the same path every time | Workflow agents and Agent Builder: conversational and open-ended, configured per task |
| CLM replacement | Extends your CLM beyond contracts or replaces it: intake, workflow, approvals, signature, and repository in one system | Not a CLM; workflows are too open-ended to stand in for one |
| Playbooks and negotiation | Built from your contracts and precedent, carrying every concession and rejected position across negotiation turns, with accepted and rejected positions feeding back into the playbook | Clause-level positions applied in a single pass |
| Institutional knowledge | Knowledge captured across teams and tools — contracts, policies, decisions, and rules — plus a map of every counterparty and stakeholder and how those relationships change over time | Matter and document context within the platform |
| Enterprise integrations | Deep integrations with Coupa, Zip, Ironclad, ServiceNow, Jira, Asana, Workday, and Salesforce: two-way sync, commenting back, filters, and metadata comparison | Intake channels plus document stores and Microsoft 365 |
| Governance and permissions | Permission-aware access mapped across every connected integration, with workspaces scoped to teams so workflows and knowledge reach only the right people | Enterprise platform controls |
| Repository and system of record | Full repository and system of record with metadata extraction, contracts connected to matters, counterparties, and obligations | Document and matter workspaces, not a contract repository |
| Reporting and insights | Customizable reports and insights: cycle time, risk exposure, capacity, and deviation rates across the function | Mostly usage and workflow analytics |
| Internal collaboration | Legal works a request together in the app or the plugins, with comments and drafts staying behind the scenes until you choose otherwise | Shared workspaces and workflows |
| Acting back in source systems | Comments, @mentions, and record updates back in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Coupa, Zip, Ironclad, and Salesforce under a shared team identity | Answers and work happen mainly inside Harvey |
| Scope of work covered | The whole in-house queue: commercial, employment, privacy, procurement, policy, disputes, and corporate | Strongest on contracts, research, and document-heavy matters |
| Best fit for | Fortune 1000 and large enterprise in-house teams whose bottleneck is the volume and variety of inbound legal work, and who want to extend their CLM beyond contracts or replace it | Firms and large legal organizations doing research and document-heavy work at scale |
Based on publicly available information as of October 2026, including Harvey's Intake launch. Names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. If anything here is inaccurate or out of date, contact us and we'll update it.
“Sandstone is thinking steps ahead of the market.”
“The legal team of the future goes from a knowledge base to a judgement maker.”
“We're going from hours and days to minutes using Sandstone.”
“The dashboard in Sandstone gets me most excited in a way that no other legal tooling has.”
“Sandstone acts like an additional team member, handling the initial intake and routine redlining so I can focus on strategic decisions.”
“Sandstone didn't just automate our work; it gave our past data a voice in our future negotiations.”
“We aren't just working faster; we're finally able to manage our department with the strategic precision the business expects.”
“The biggest leap with Sandstone was its ability to orchestrate in one place all the context, all the input, all the sources.”
Frequently asked questions
Intake gets a request in the door. What matters is what happens next: whether the request follows your process every time, draws on what your team already knows about that counterparty, and syncs back into the system it came from. Sandstone was built around that loop — deterministic workflows legal builds itself, an institutional knowledge layer, and two-way integrations with Slack, Teams, Coupa, Zip, Jira, Salesforce, and your CLM. In Harvey, intake is the newest addition to a research and drafting platform.
Sandstone assumes a legal department serving a business — requests arriving from sales and procurement, questions that never become documents, context that needs to survive between matters. Platforms built firm-first assume a matter already exists and a lawyer is already working it. Both are legitimate; they solve different halves.
Sandstone does basic research, grounded in your own playbooks, precedent, and prior decisions rather than external case law. It isn't built to replace Westlaw or Lexis, and teams doing heavy case law and statutory research generally keep a dedicated research platform alongside it.
Yes — roughly five to a hundred lawyers is the range, and small teams often feel the problem hardest because there is nobody to absorb the overflow. Seat economics differ a lot across enterprise platforms, so it is worth checking pricing against your actual headcount early in any evaluation.
Commonly, yes: a research and document-analysis platform for deep research, and Sandstone as the front door, workflow, and system of record. Now that both offer intake, pick one place requests land so the business has a single front door.
