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Choosing Between Threads and Review Tables

Learn how review tables and threads work together to streamline your document review and analysis.

Last updated: Dec 9, 2025

Overview

Harvey offers two core methods for analyzing legal materials — Q&A style threads and review tables. Both accelerate document analysis but serve different needs depending on your workflow:

  • Threads deliver quick, focused insights from a few documents.
  • Review tables extract structured data across large document sets.

This article covers how each query type works and how they can be used together to achieve the results you’re looking for.

Use Q&A Threads for Fast, Focused Analysis

When you ask Harvey a question, it starts a thread, allowing you to ask targeted questions and receive quick summaries or concise comparisons.

Best For

  • Quick analysis of a few documents or portions of a set of documents.
  • Extracting insights from long documents when you know what you’re looking for.
  • Interpretation or short summaries of clauses, terms, or issues.

How It Works

  • Harvey reviews your uploaded documents to provide a focused answer to your query.
  • It prioritizes relevancy and synthesizes findings into a high-level written summary or answer.

Note: The response may omit unrelated material, especially for large documents sets, to keep results clear and precise.

Example Tasks

  • Analyze a specific contract’s clause: “Is there an example of an acceleration clause that would take effect in the event of a change of control or assignment in these files?”
  • Commercial compliance review: “Summarize the commercial terms and termination rights in this lease.”

Tip: Use Magic Prompt to make your query more targeted. Harvey will automatically focus its search and reasoning for better precision.

Use Review Tables for Large-Scale, Structured Reviews

Review tables allow you to analyze many documents at once and output that analysis into a consistent, structured table view.

Best For

  • Large-scale reviews where every document matters.
  • Reviewing similar data points across hundreds of agreements (e.g., governing law, effective date, termination provisions) in a table format.
  • Comparing key data points across hundreds or thousands of files.

How It Works

  • Results populate a table for easy side-by-side comparison.
  • Each row represents a document.
  • Each column represents a question or data field.
  • Each cell represents a separate analysis that Harvey performs.
Image of a review table cell that represents the answer to the column query over an uploaded document

Think of each cell like a checkbox: Harvey must review one question and one document together to “check” that box. Harvey fills the entire table with these checkboxes and processes them all at once, ensuring every document is reviewed.

Example Tasks

  • Due diligence: “For each of these 1,000 agreements, extract the effective date, the governing law, and the termination provisions.”
  • Litigation discovery: “Review court opinions and extract procedural history, claims asserted, and holdings.”

Tip: Split merged files into individual documents before creating a review table for more accurate, consistent extraction.

Choosing Where to Get Started

Comparing Threads and Review Tables

Category

Q&A Threads

Review Tables

Best For

Quick, targeted analysis of a few documents or specific portions of a larger document set.

Large-scale analysis across hundreds or thousands of documents.

How It Works

Finds and summarizes the most relevant content to answer your question.

Runs separate queries for each document and each data field.

Focus

Relevance — fast answers based on key portions of text.

Comprehensiveness — structured extraction across all files.

Speed

Faster — optimized for targeted queries.

Slower — processes each document individually.

Output Format

Written summaries.

Structured table showing extracted data fields.

Example Queries

Example Query

Recommended Method

Why

“What is the monthly rent amount for the lease included in a document set?”

Thread

  • We are looking for a discrete piece of information within a large corpus of information.
  • Threads do a great job of extracting the relevant information and presenting it.

“What is the monthly rent amount for these 100 leases?”

Review table

  • A review excels at doing many of the same tasks as a thread, but over many more documents.
  • Instead of having to manually run the same query in a thread 100 times, a review table can run these queries simultaneously.

“What is the most common monthly rent amounts across these 100 leases?”

Both. First, create a review table to extract all of the rents, and then pass that information into a thread to identify which of those amounts appear most frequently.

  • On their own, neither a thread or review is perfectly suited to this task.
  • Threads may not identify all the rent amounts across such a large number of documents.
  • A review table can extract all the rent amounts but cannot easily determine which is the most common.

“Who are the individuals (and their titles) mentioned in this complaint?”

Thread

  • Threads are good for synthesizing information throughout a single document.
  • They are better suited for pulling facts from multiple locations within a single document and combining them into one succinct answer.

“What rights has this private equity fund granted in its side letters?”

Review table

  • When looking for similar types of information across a number of documents, a review table can look over agreements in bulk to make sure every document is reflected in its answer, without having to worry about the same token restraints.

Understanding Document Processing and Upload Limits

In general, you do not need to closely monitor file upload limits—Harvey will notify you with a banner message if an upload limit is exceeded and how to proceed. The key is selecting the appropriate workflow for your objective.

  • Use a review table when you need Harvey to review each file and extract similar pieces of information from each.
  • Use a thread when you want Harvey to find, then analyze a specific piece of information across documents.

Tip: organize your files into folders in Vault so you can easily bulk select or remove files to upload.

Key Takeaways

  • Use Q&A style threads when you need focused, quick insights.
  • Use review tables when you need large-scale, structured analysis.
  • Both tools complement each other — threads help you explore, while review tables help you document and compare.

Together, they let you move seamlessly from fast answers to comprehensive review, depending on the complexity of your task.

Additional Resources

Learn how to refine your prompts to get results that best match your intent with Prompt Writing Techniques.

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