Dorna Moini is the CEO and founder of Gavel (www.gavel.io), a no-code platform for building document automation and client-facing legal products. Prior to starting Gavel, Dorna was a litigator at Sidley Austin. There, in her pro bono practice, she worked with legal aid organizations to build a web application for domestic violence survivors to complete and file their paperwork, which led to the idea for Gavel.
Gavel has been named Best Technology by the American Legal Technology Association and Disruptive Technology of the Year by Law.com. Dorna is on the Legal Services Corporation Emerging Leaders Council and a member of LAFLA’s Advisory Board. She was named an ABA Legal Rebel and a Fastcase 50 honoree. She also teaches the Legal Innovations Lab at USC Law School.
Company URL:
www.gavel.io
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Interview Transcript
Casey
Hello and welcome to the Lawyer Mastermind podcast. I’m your host, Casey Meraz. Today I’m delighted to welcome Dorna Moini. Dorna is the CEO and founder of Gavel, a no-code and AI enabled platform designed for building document and automation and client facing legal products. Before founding Gavel, Dorna worked as a litigator at Sidley Austin where her pro bono efforts included developing a web application to help domestic violence survivors complete and file their paperwork. This work inspired the creation of gavel. Thank you for joining me today, Dorna. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Dorna
Thank you so much, Casey. I’m really glad to be here.
Casey
Awesome. Well, I’m so glad that you could join us today, and today we’re going to be talking about something that’s important, but it’s also kind of unique in the legal field and that’s legal productization. Our plan is to kind of explore how legal services can be transformed into remarkable products like TurboTax or LegalZoom that productizing legal services has been a game changer and it’s something we’re probably going to see a lot more of in the future, especially your product with ai. What’s your thought there?
Dorna
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe just as a little bit of background for your listeners who might not know about this area as much. Legal productization is the process of taking your legal services and turning them into scalable legal products that you can put in front of your clients, and I heard a stat that in the next 10 years about 90% of legal services are going to be delivered online. So this is definitely something that attorneys should be paying attention to because it’s changing the way that the legal field is
Casey
Adapting. Yeah, there’s been so many changes already and there’s some legal tech yet you still have attorneys that are offline or using X machines primarily. Right. So thank you for explaining what legal productization is, what inspired you to explore the legal productization route?
Dorna
I’ll give you a little backstory about my background that tells you how we ended up with what we’re doing right now and helping lawyers productize their legal services. So I practiced as an attorney for almost a decade, and my pro bono work was primarily with domestic violence survivors. So we would help domestic violence survivors at all stages of the process. It could be early stages when they were filing domestic violence restraining orders. It could be taking them to their hearings or it could be later on where there were potentially novel issues of law or all across the spectrum. But what I was finding was that we had so many people coming in the door who needed our help and so few people who we could assist and take all the way to the end of that process. A lot of times I didn’t have time in the number of pro bono hours that I had available to take advantage of in a year to spend that time on their appeals.
So what I really wanted to do was build a tool that would help my clients or potential clients take advantage of the legal system on their own and empower themselves to take part of that process. I was thinking what would be the best way to do this? And things like tools like TurboTax and LegalZoom were very clear examples of how you could get onto a platform and generate certain documents. I know lawyers have varying opinions on how much they trust those tools and how good they are, but that idea was very attractive to me and something that I could potentially be hand in hand or holding the hands of my clients through. So I did not know how to code. I got together with a friend of mine who was an engineer and I said, I’m the lawyer. I know all the things about domestic violence.
I have done this inside and out. Can you just help me take my idea and turn it into an end-to-end legal product where people could enter data in answer questions and then generate documents that either I see or they see depending on how I wanted it to work for their particular stage of the case. So we built that tool. It was a tool that we called Help Self Legal. We launched it. We were actually using it internally within the firm to assist us to rapidly process through these restraining orders. We were also using it with clients to just have them go through the process on their own. So there were varying ways we were using it depending on how complicated the case was, and we were getting quite a bit of traction. Not only were seeing that these end users, the people who were domestic violence survivors were using this platform, but we were seeing that attorneys were reaching out to us, asking us to build them similar types of tools but for their areas of law. And so fast forward to now the expertise that exists in their heads and put it into a technology platform, what was necessary to lawyers engage in this very new form of economy and expand their services to more of the middle class.
Casey
Wow, that’s awesome. I think anybody that isn’t taking advantage of that now as far as legal technology and productization, these people are going to be left in the duff. There are other firms are going to adapt to this and that has to have a big line on profitability. Just like the amount of work you can do and the amount of people that you can actually help, I mean, are those numbers changing with what you’re talking about?
Dorna
Definitely interesting that you say that because a lot of times I think we hear this more from people outside of the legal field than inside, but people will say, well, why would lawyers want to do that? Because they’re billing on the billable hour, and so they don’t want to become more efficient. There’s perverse incentives here, but actually in a lot of these areas where you have rules-based work pricing has already been pushed down and lawyers are working towards flat fees, subscription fees, fees that are different than the billable hour. So it is leading to much higher profit margins and actually outsized our profit margins for attorneys who are able to turn their services into a legal product that sell to many more people. We have attorneys who we’ve seen generating six and seven figures of revenue in the first few months of launching a tool because they already have that audience and they already had that demand, but now they’re able to provide it at a more affordable rate at scale without having them or more staff work on that case.
Casey
And there’s a ton of upside to that from a financial perspective too, right? A company perspective, there’s a lot of wins there that you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a win? This gives people time to focus more on cases or clients if they’re taking advantage of this, they’ll actually deliver a better service or a better outcome for their client?
Dorna
Absolutely. Because what you’re then now spending your time on is what you went to law school for. You are really able to practice at the top of your license instead of doing the work that you probably didn’t want to do at all in the first place. Another thing that’s interesting here is that a lot of the scale that is being generated by attorneys who are building these types of legal products is being delivered to consumers who were never using attorneys in the first place. And so it’s the type of work that the attorneys didn’t want to do to a market that the attorneys didn’t want to serve because they couldn’t afford them. But now consumer gets legal services because they’re able to access in an affordable way, in a way that makes sense to them, and the attorney now has access to a much larger market share. So the consumer legal market is really expansive. So it could be a consumer, it could be also a business. You could be building a legal product for business end users as well.
Casey
Well, I’m really impressed by that, but one of the part of that reason is I’m committed to always helping the little guy or the underdog, and I think that’s been one of the barriers. People personally or family members that should have hired an attorney but didn’t because of financial reasons or other reasons, there’s a limit there. They couldn’t even get involved, and this is going to just make it much more accessible to so many more. So I’m excited about the possibility of that personally.
Dorna
Yeah, definitely. You may have heard the stat, 92% of legal needs go unmet and 77% I think is the latest stat of legal needs are met not through an attorney. So people just trying to do things on their own, figuring it out online, not successfully.
Casey
Yeah, exactly. I think you’ve already touched on this too, talking about the benefits, but let’s dive a little bit back into the productization part of it and talk about what are some key benefits for legal productization for both lawyers and clients just to kind of differentiate those and go over them.
Dorna
Absolutely. I would say on both sides you have some transparency in what the costs are going to be. So that definitely attracts many more consumers to your product, and if you are building a tool that you know how long it will take, if you have any attorney involvement inside of that process, that gives you transparency as well. The primary benefit I think, to attorneys is the scalability and the additional profits that you’re able to generate a much larger market and oftentimes without necessarily needing to spend any of your time on it, we see a lot of hybrid legal product. It’s a hybrid of technology and people, so you might have something that your client can get on, answer questions, generate documents, but then those documents go to you. I’m going to give you an example, like two hours of legal review and then you pass it back over to your client.
So you’re really creating this something that operates more as a machine and enables you to know for every time that I get X number of I’m spending this amount of time and that’s full scope of that. So you’re really able to expand your market, do that while not necessarily being in front of your computer. A lot of our lawyers, I was actually talking to one of our lawyers a few days ago, one of our customers who spends half his time in Cabo, I think he works there too, but he is able to just really live a very different lifestyle while building this legal product that he has scaled. So the scalability, the transparency, the ability to serve much larger markets, and then also when you’re using automation technology, you are able to have certainty in the work that you’re doing so that you’re not pouring over what mistakes could I have potentially made in these documents because you know, built rules into the system that are going to operate the same way every single time.
Casey
Wow, that’s amazing. And I really liked because I actually just recorded a different podcast episode on kind of building the firm of your dreams and a lot of the stuff is kind of future outlook and mindset and living the life you actually want, not just putting in a hundred hour work week and there’s so much that technology is going to bring to that and AI and this productization, but that’s the outcome, that’s the dream life that you just painted. And I want to touch on the opposite of that. What kind of challenges do attorneys face when they’re trying to turn their services into products to get to that point?
Dorna
Yeah, I would say that the biggest challenge is that you are basically becoming a product manager when you’re building a legal product. So you’re taking on a little bit of a different skill than you typically have as an attorney. You’re having to sort of outline what do I want this product to look like? It’s taking a step back and thinking about what are the steps that my clients need to go through and what is the logic steps that will lead people down different decision treats. Actually the biggest challenge is just figuring out what you want this to look like and mapping that out. And that mapping out process is sometimes a different skill than lawyers are used to on a day-to-day basis. Once you have that, you can build that out into the system. And actually for that reason, we sometimes we’ll help attorneys with this process through the workflow building and the workflow planning process. We also have people who we call gavel experts who can really just take your documents. You tell them, this is my process that I go through, but just giving them your template documents and they can build that out for you. So that’s oftentimes the biggest challenge, but you really want to fine tune that product to make sure it’s exactly what you want it to be and clients are going through it in the right order.
Casey
Okay, well that makes sense. I think it’s changing now, but a lot of the attorneys that have been around for a while are probably not as tech savvy or tech friendly, and so I think it might seem like at least a mental barrier. Let’s talk about regulatory and ethical considerations. Are there any hurdles that are glaring people might encounter if they start productizing their services that they need to be aware of?
Dorna
I think the biggest one that you’re going to probably see is the concern about UPL issues is this, if you’re providing an end-to-end legal product where you’re not forming an attorney-client relationship with the client situation. So in many situations you may still be engaging in an attorney-client relationship with the client, but you’re providing that service through this hybrid model where technology takes care of part of that process. Many other cases, you may want to launch a tool where you have no interaction with the client and you do not want to engage in an attorney client relationship. Zoom has faced and they’ve faced so many lawsuits on this, but have also prevailed in all of those lawsuits or come to some kind of settlement agreement that allows them to operate and they’re still operating in all of those states. The main thing is you want to make sure that when you’re going out with this, you have the right disclaimers on your website about what you’re providing, what kind of relationship, and just making that clear on its face. So there’s some, a professional ethics rules that give you some language that you can use for those disclaimers on your website to just make sure that you are giving a clear and understandable disclosure on that front.
Casey
And if you’re new to productization and you have an idea, how can you identify which services are going to be most suitable for productization as well?
Dorna
That’s a really good question. We actually do this exercise sometimes with law schools because we do some law school programs where law students can get into the product and we actually have that write out all the different areas that they think are high volume, meaning you’re doing this at a very high rate, you’re not just doing this once a month. Then also write down all the different areas that are rules-based. So that means it’s not negotiating something against another party. It’s areas that are more rules-based. So things like estate planning, family law, corporate law, anything that’s transactional, anything that you would’ve a template or a form for. You take those two types of areas and you see what is the overlap between the process oriented ones and the areas that are high volume. That is going to be your sweet spot. Whatever that overlap is is going to be your sweet spot of what you want to try first because it’s going to give you something that’s easy to automate and easy to put in front of clients in a process oriented way, but it’s also something that you can do at high volume, which means obviously that’s going to lead to more work, more volume and more scalability.
Casey
Yeah, that makes sense. So if I have an idea for what I could make a product into, what are the practical first steps somebody should do to start heading down this road?
Dorna
I would say the first step is to make sure that that assessment is correct. I have that process oriented in rules-based way. The second thing I would say is think about what your vision is for this product. So let’s say for example, you want to build a family law product and your vision for this product is you want to address all of family law across the world and anyone who wants to do anything in family law, the first product that you want to start with, very limited in scope in exactly what the practice area is and also exactly what the jurisdiction is. So I recommend starting with divorce in California, in LA County, even building that out because you want to get this to market as fast as possible. In the startup world, there’s this concept of something that’s called a minimum viable product. It’s your MVP.
So you want to build your minimum viable product when you’re launching because if you get that product out, let’s say it’s divorce in Los Angeles in California, you can get that into hands of users, they’ll start using it and they’ll have tons of feedback because you’re becoming a software technology entrepreneur. And so you want to understand what are they, where are they getting stuck? Are your questions phrased in the right way? What do they need? Do they need more videos? Do they need more images? Do they need more guidance through this process? And from that, you’re going to learn a lot, which will help you as you expand into San Francisco and other counties and then other states and then move into other areas of family law. So really starting with a small idea and iterating rapidly throughout that process. And then one more thing I’ll say on that is just constantly having test users, whether those are your clients or friends and family who you have sit in front of the product, it obviously depends on the area of law. If it’s something that’s more consumer based, it’s easier to have a friend and family sit in front of it, but have people test it and give you feedback constant because that’s going to be really helpful as you
Casey
Grow. Yeah, and I’m glad that you brought up the MVP. That’s actually where my head went initially and started a lot of ventures over the years, but before I read Grace’s book, I was building too much before selling or getting user feedback and then ultimately developing something that maybe people didn’t want. I think that for the audiences here, for what you’re creating, at least in this field, is there any option for pre-selling or is it really just getting that MVP out and getting people to use it in that feedback? I mean, what’s your thought there? Is there anything you can presell or is that
Dorna
Yeah, so I’ll actually give an interesting example of when I built that domestic violence product that I was talking about earlier. We ended up working with a lot of legal aid organizations. These legal aid organizations have so many people flooding through their doors, such few time and resources to serve all of them. So they were really, really looking for technology to assist them on this. And so it was actually an easy way to provide them that assistance, get them on low cost plans. And even though it was a product, there was still a lot of kinks in it that we were working out. They were willing to adopt it. They were like, we will work with you on this process if you’re working with early users that you can pre-sell to. If those early users are invested in the process and they feel like you’re building something just for them, they will be loyal. They will overlook some of those early kinks and they will participate in that process because they know they’re going to get something that’s much more than whatever number of dollars you set as the price in value from
Casey
This. Yeah, that’s really great advice and it seems like you have a ton of experience and a lot of great advice from your journey so far. Is there any other insights that you can share from your own journey in legal productization
Dorna
Thought process of making sure that what you’re building is going to be sustainable from a pricing model? And that is something that we space it a little bit with the domestic violence platform, but we see our customers facing this all the time. We have customers in so many different legal areas and so many different practice areas, and they’re oftentimes coming to me and saying, how much should I charge for my product? And I’m like, for example, if someone does horse law in Texas, I was like, I don’t even know what horse law is. I have no idea what the right price is for your product. So a lot of times the answer is not cut and clear. I can’t give you a scientific answer of this is the price you need to set. It needs to happen through testing. So what I typically recommend is just like if you’re building a software company, you put out some pricing and either tested in phases.
If you don’t have enough volume, you don’t have lots and lots of people coming to your website already. You will want to try out some pricing for two weeks, see what the response is, watch how many people are coming through, and then try another set of pricing for another two weeks and see which one was better. One of ’em might have higher volume, lower volume, higher click through and follow through. But or another option is doing AB testing on that pricing. So if you have enough volume on your product, what you can do is you can display two different sets of pricing to your users and see which one is leading to higher follow through and completion in that process. So that’s definitely something that I would say you want to think about upfront, but it’s also something that you can change your price over the early stages of that product to make sure you have the right sweet spot.
Casey
Sure. And do you have any insight on marketing a product that nobody knows exists? Obviously they know the service probably exists, but what about the product? How does that differ?
Dorna
Yeah, definitely. So this is something that it depends a little bit on whether you already have a network in that community. So for example, we have some customers who build out these legal products and they already have the network. They’re like, I’m already getting so many people coming through the door and I just can’t even respond to all of that. In that case, you’re golden a sign that you need to go into that market. There are some though who don’t have that area. And so those are people we can definitely work with them. We love working with people on the PR side when products due to different reporters to help them with that process as they go live. But the other thing is you really just need to put yourself out there. So a lot of these legal products, the ones that I see succeed, are succeeding because they’re really differentiating them.
When we talked about LegalZoom or TurboTax, these legal products are succeeding because you’re differentiating yourself from that. You’re saying, I’m not just technology platform that has no attorney involved. This is actually a technology platform where I’m putting myself first and I’m showing you I have this experience, this expertise that leads me to be able to provide you the best product and you are going to get something of quality when you come to talk form. And so if you have that expertise, put that forward and social media, you just can’t lose with that. There are so many ways to reach audiences and draw them in large numbers. And so that is one of the first things that I would do is establish a social media presence and put yourself on your website, like put videos and images to build that trust and credibility from users. And then obviously there’s all the traditional ways depending on your building conferences could be a good thing. Google Ads, building out the SEO for your website, all of that could be helpful
Casey
As well. Okay, got it. It definitely sounds like a different starter approach, but there’s a way to do it. Right. And I like that you said you have to be different because a message that is really lost in marketing, especially attorneys websites, do you go to that look like exactly the same why you want to be better. Really what you have to be is just different. You just have to stand out, find that marketing side. But that’s something that I’m passionate about. What advice would you give attorneys that are hesitant to take this approach, go down this road? I
Dorna
Would say one of the mottos that I have for our attorneys who are building legal tech products is we talked about start small. So start small, iterate rapidly and think big. And if you have those three elements, that’s going to help you be successful. So have that big vision, but start with something really small and if you’re hesitant, you can test the waters. It’s not going to take you that much time. That’s why our tool exists and you’re able to do things with low cost, fairly low commitment and launch it and see how it works. This is actually the same thought process I went through when I left my law firm to go start the domestic violence product. I started doing that full time before we started Gavel is if I leave my law firm and I launched this product, and a lot of the attorneys who are listening probably don’t even need to leave their product, they can do it as part of their law firm.
But if you leave your law firm or if you take a little bit of time away from that to launch this product, you have nothing to lose. You can always go back to doing things in the way you used to do, but you also have so much to gain in transforming the way that you are practicing. The legal field is changing dramatic. With the advent of so much new technology and the change to the pricing structure, you really want to be ahead of the game in being able to provide differentiated legal services to your potential customers today. So I sort of feel like while there used to be this hesitance to dive into legal products, you can’t not dive in now because this is the direction that the world is going
Casey
In. That makes sense. And then last question for now before we start the wrap up here. Investment or no investment, go it alone, bring in partners. What’s your kind of thought there?
Dorna
Yeah, I think that there are so many low cost ways for you to get up and running early on that I would definitely say at the very beginning stages, unless you have some way to get incredible terms. Sometimes if you’re a repeat founder or something like that, you can get incredible terms at the very early stages. But otherwise, I would say don’t take on investment early on because you don’t want to dilute yourself, launch that product and prove that it is something. Once you have traction, then you can decide. And the way that I would decide at that point is do you need more funding to be able to scale faster and is it worth the dilution that you’re going to take on or is this the type of product that you don’t have many competitors you can continue to scale and build at fairly low cost. There are off the shelf tools like Gavel to build out these tools and you can continue growing without that. So really depends on whether you need it or not. If you don’t, I would say you don’t have any competitors and you’re building affordable to build it, do it on your own because you’re going to reap all of the rewards from
Casey
That. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all of your insights today. Is there one key takeaway that you hope our listeners will gain from this discussion? I
Dorna
Hope that every single person who is listening to this today will go think about what are the areas of their practice that they can change. Because I think as lawyers, we have operated in the same way for really centuries, honestly for new things that have been introduced to the field. But for the most part, we’re practicing in the same way in a lot of ways. And the field is changing so much faster than it has ever before. And if you can think about whether it’s a technology change or a pricing change that you can make to bring yourself to be more competitive in the field, that will really set you up for success in the next several years.
Casey
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share all of your experience and background with us. You’ve accomplished a lot and it’s just so refreshing to see how passionate you clearly are about this and just to see what you’ve accomplished. How can people reach you and learn more about your services and offerings as well?
Dorna
Yes, so our website is www.gavel.io and if anyone wants to reach out to me, I am at dorna at Under gavel Dorna at Gavel on pretty much all the social channels. And I also do some content on legal productization. They’re all bite size, they’re like one minute videos on legal products, legal technology that people might find interesting there as
Casey
Well. Okay. And that’s on social mostly?
Dorna
I’m on all the socials, yes.
Casey
Okay, awesome. Well, I’m going to subscribe right now. I’m beyond that. So thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time and I look forward to seeing how legal changes with productization. It’s just so cool to see. I love it.
Dorna
Yes. Very fascinating how the industry is changing and I’m excited to see where we’ll be in 10 years from
Casey
Now. Awesome. Yeah, me too. Well, again, thank you so much. I appreciate it. And take care. Thank
Dorna
You so much for having me, Casey.
