As cybersecurity company Rubrik’s sales force practically doubled, so did the volume of legal questions via email regarding contract reviews, policy clarifications, and general procedures. Rather than throwing more manual effort at this challenge, the legal team tapped Harbor Labs to help implement a custom AI-driven solution that automates a standardized knowledge base of responses.
An AI legal knowledge agent formulates responses to common questions based on past responses, while human-in-the-loop workflows escalate unusual questions to human experts. Sales reps now receive responses to most queries within minutes, accelerating the speed of business, while the legal department’s scalable solution better serves the enterprise.
In 2025, Rubrik and Harbor received the “Pioneering Use of AI” Award at the 2025 “Running Legal Like a Business” Awards organized by LegalOps.com for this project.
Our collaboration with Harbor on the AI legal knowledge agent has resulted in a model that we can continue to build on and refine, also for use in other contexts, bringing out the best in both AI and human team members. Sami Najm, Director of Commercial Legal at Rubrik
The challenge: Fielding questions from a growing sales force
Faced with substantially higher volumes of legal questions from a rapidly growing sales force, the legal operations team at cybersecurity company Rubrik harnessed a custom AI-powered legal knowledge agent to support the Commercial Legal team in tackling the volume.
The legal queries, though crucial and often time-sensitive, were largely repetitive, siphoning valuable time away from other work. On the sales reps’ end, waiting for responses often slowed down deal cycles. The team needed an efficient, more scalable way to respond faster and provide better support to a growing global salesforce.
“When our legal operations manager was first hired, we had 700 salespeople sending emails to the legal intake inbox,” says Sami Najm, Director of Commercial Legal at Rubrik. “With 1,200 salespeople, we had a choice: hire a second headcount or completely reimagine the solution.”
The solution: Automating responses to common questions
The new solution was an AI legal knowledge agent. By automating responses to common questions from sales reps, the solution allows the legal team to focus on more high-impact projects. Both the Commercial Legal (CL) and Corporate Legal teams are dedicating their time to activities like negotiating complex deals, advising on corporate strategies, and mitigating legal risks—all of which contribute to Rubrik’s overall business growth.
The AI agent operates 24/7, providing round-the-clock support to the sales force. Previously, sales reps in some time zones had to wait for the legal team to be available, with delays of eight hours or more for reps in Asia. Sales reps now receive answers within minutes, regardless of time zone. This real-time support has boosted the productivity of the sales team and strengthened internal relationships between legal and sales. Sales reps can move deals forward more efficiently, accelerating revenue.
“Scaling legal services using AI requires vision. Accuracy is the priority, first and foremost. Driving efficiencies is important as well. But ultimately, it offers the opportunity to deliver a better experience to the end user,” says Justin Hectus, Managing Director at Harbor Labs. “The legal team at Rubrik has demonstrated a keen understanding of what its users need, how to use AI to increase responsiveness, and how to help the business grow.”
AI vs. Humans: A more effective division of labor
The AI agent underwent a comprehensive testing and calibration process. During this process, the AI learned from real-world interactions to improve the rate at which it generated “ideal responses” that required no human edits. The legal team set an “ideal response” rate threshold of 80% as a requirement to go live with the new solution. In other words, once four out of five responses generated by the AI agent required no modification by the legal team, the solution was considered ready for live use. By the time the solution went live, the ideal response rate had increased to 83% and continues to climb.
Recognizing that there will always be unusual and unique questions requiring human expertise, the team doesn’t expect this solution to deliver a 100% ideal response rate. Rather, the workflow is carefully designed to escalate uncommon questions to human team members, who can now focus on novel, nuanced situations instead of repetitious, standard responses.
The AI legal knowledge agent improves its knowledge base via a continuous expert feedback loop that analyzes human edits to its draft responses. This helps to standardize and refine all answers generated, while enabling the system to generate updated answers as regulations and policies change.
Even with human-in-the-loop review of the new solution’s draft responses, average response time is under five minutes, providing fast answers to common questions. Furthermore, with expert team members freed from the burden of repetitious questions, they now handle unusual questions much more quickly too.
“Harbor understands what legal departments need and brings unparalleled experience in what it takes to solve big problems using AI,” says Najm.
“We value Harbor Labs as a partner that always challenges us to think outside the box, with a legal engineering team that has the technical expertise to implement advanced technology solutions. Our collaboration on the AI legal knowledge agent has resulted in a model that we can continue to build on and refine, also for use in other contexts, bringing out the best in both AI and human team members.”
About Rubrik
Rubrik (RBRK), the Security and AI company, operates at the intersection of data protection, cyber resilience and enterprise AI acceleration. The Rubrik Security Cloud platform is designed to deliver robust cyber resilience and recovery including identity resilience to ensure continuous business operations.
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