Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 194: Dorna Moini | Using Automation to Reclaim Your Time

Transcript

194: Dorna Moini | Using Automation to Reclaim Your Time · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Dorna: I like to say think big, start small, and iterate rapidly. So I think a lot of times when people want to get into something that's totally different than what they worked in before. So I was a lawyer. I'm going into legal tech, for example. They have a huge vision for what they want to build.
• 0:18
  And that's amazing. You need that. You need to have that big vision in order to succeed. But if you try to start to execute on that big vision too early without thinking about what the stepping stones are to get there, that can oftentimes lead to lots of obstacles and mistakes. And so as a result, you need to start really small.
• 0:41
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What
• 0:45
  Dorna: if
• 0:45
  Intro: you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and our goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's
• 1:31
  Davina: Hi, this is Devina. And before we jump into today's show, I'd like first to introduce you to some of our sponsors. Over the last four years, Noble Marketing has tracked more than two fifty law firms and discovered 60 to 80% of new client calls were generated through Google my business and Google ads. Basically, you need to be on Google, noble marketing can help. I recommend them because they have an incredible guarantee.
• 2:00
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• 2:36
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• 3:14
  Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick, and I'm here today with Dorna Moini, who is the CEO and founder of gavil.io. It's formerly known as DocuMate. Some of you may know it as DocuMate, which is a no code platform for building document automation and client facing legal products. Prior to starting Gavil, Dorna was a litigator.
• 3:39
  And there, in her pro bono practice, she worked with legal aid organizations to help build web applications for domestic violence survivors to make it easier for them to complete and file their paperwork. And that led to this brainchild of this new company that she's created around helping attorneys create client facing legal products. Dorna is also the Legal Services Corporation Emerging Leaders Council member and a member of their 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.
• 4:18
  So welcome, Dorna. I'm so glad that you're here.
• 4:21
  Dorna: Thank you so much for having me, Devina. I'm a huge fan of your podcast and always love hearing the inspiring stories, so I'm honored to be here.
• 4:29
  Davina: Great. So now people can listen to your inspiring story. I love it that you're an ABA legal rebel. That makes me so happy to hear that. How do feel being a legal rebel?
• 4:39
  Dorna: I guess it's a good thing. I mean, the legal field is all about taking less risk and mitigating risk. And so I guess breaking out from that leads to lots of opportunity.
• 4:48
  Davina: I really think LegalRebel is really more legal innovator. You know, I see you really as an innovator with what you've created because you've taken a problem that you saw in the legal business and came up with not only a solution for yourself and your clients you were working with at the time, but really something that you've brought that completely can change how attorneys and law firms work to provide legal services. So I'm excited to have you on today to talk about this because I think a lot of people, light bulbs are gonna go off when they start hearing about this. So why don't you tell us about DocuMate, which now named Gavil, changed name. So we'll get into why you chose to sort of rebrand in a minute.
• 5:31
  But tell us about it. Tell us about the company and the product and what it does.
• 5:35
  Dorna: Yeah. So I always think it's really helpful to start from the origin story and explain to you why we started what is now Gavil because it sort of explains a lot of the use cases as well. I practiced law for many years, about seven years. I was at a few big firms and I also did a lot of pro bono work within my practice. And that was actually what led to the idea for entering into legal technology.
• 6:01
  So at the time, I did a lot of work with domestic violence survivors in my pro bono practice. And what I was finding was that I was spending a lot of that time on the earlier phases of the cases, the parts that were more rules based or process oriented. And so I had this idea in my head of, well, if I could turn some of these earlier stages of the case into a technology platform that would help me spend more time on these clients' cases at, you know, practicing at the top of my license, representing them in court, taking on their appeal, all the things that really technology can't handle in the same way. I got together with a friend of mine who was an engineer and I said, hey, do you want to help me build a tool that will be sort of like TurboTax and allow anyone to get onto the platform, answer questions, be guided down different paths depending on logic, and then generate documents that they needed for their case and potentially e file them. So we did that.
• 7:05
  And we did that just for domestic violence and just in California, in most of the counties, although there's 58 counties in California. And so there were a few counties that we didn't hit on. But we built that tool and we got a lot of traction for it in consumers using it, legal aid organizations using it, and our law firm itself using it for pro bono cases. But what happened was we started getting all this inbound interest from other attorneys in other practice areas, other jurisdictions who wanted to build similar tools to what we had built for domestic violence in California, but for other areas of law. Some of them wanted to use it internally.
• 7:44
  Some of them wanted to use it in a client facing way. And so that was sort of our light bulb moment of this is what really need to build is a platform for attorneys who may not have the technical expertise. They're not coders by trade to get onto the platform and easily build these solutions so that they can either bring efficiency into their practices or what we really love is when people make these client async products where they are transforming the way that they're practicing law. So long story short, Gavel is basically a no code. And the reason we say no code is because you don't need to know how to code.
• 8:23
  A no code platform for building end to legal automation and legal products.
• 8:29
  Davina: How exciting. So we're gonna get into the details of that. I have questions around that. But before we do, I want to focus a little bit more on kind of the company itself. You did start out as DocuMate.
• 8:39
  What caused you to rebrand it and change the name?
• 8:42
  Dorna: Yeah. So when we started, and to this date, document automation has always been a very big and critical part of building an end to end legal automation or legal product. However, we were starting to find that the name was becoming limiting for us because today, Gavil is used for full client intake, workflow automation, building expert systems, and also hosting the client portal. So you can actually have your clients come onto the platform, answer questions, store data, see their documents. We have some billing features that you can add in in there as well.
• 9:22
  And we're continuing to build that out in terms of the client portal features. And so we were starting to find that the document name led people to think all I can do is document automation, which is still we're definitely continuing to build out that platform. It's very important to us. But we wanted something that didn't limit us in that way and allowed you to think beyond it. And then the gavel, the reason we decided on the name gavel is for centuries, the Gavel has been used to express finality in the decision making process.
• 9:54
  So final decisions that are generated through a trusted process. And that's exactly what we believe Gavel is helping attorneys on our platform do is they're taking process, law, and their services and turning them into customizable legal products that take their expertise and bring value to clients at scale.
• 10:16
  Davina: Great. So how does this work if, let's say, an attorney has bought an off the shelf, you know, case management system, but it doesn't have all the functionality that they would like for it to have? Is this something that would integrate with case management systems, or is it kind of a standalone? Is it a substitute for that or can it be? That's a lot of questions in one.
• 10:38
  I'll just let you take it from there.
• 10:40
  Dorna: Yeah, absolutely. So it's been really important for us from the beginning to integrate with the full software toolset that attorneys use at their firms. And so we do integrate with a public API. We also integrate directly with Clio. And if anyone uses Zapier, that makes it really easy to really pass data in and out of Gavel into and out of other systems.
• 11:05
  So, that's definitely one way that people use it. We have some people who use Gavel to store their data and use it a little bit more as a case management system. Although I will say that that's something that we're building out a lot more features on. So most of our customers do use some sort of practice management system in conjunction with Gavel.
• 11:24
  Davina: What are some of the tools that you think that people are lacking and they're coming to you and saying, this is what I need?
• 11:30
  Dorna: Yeah. I mean, I will say that still number one for the reason why people start to use Gavel is that document automation functionality within that suite of things that you're trying to do. And it's combined with client intake. So it's the client intake gathering data from your clients in a way that makes it really simple for them because you can give them a big long worksheet to fill out. But if you can remove the cognitive overload that comes from having questions and information that they really don't need to be exposed to.
• 12:02
  So as an example, say you're a family law attorney, you're sending a divorce questionnaire to your client, you have a ton of questions inside of that questionnaire about kids. But your client in this case doesn't have kids. This is obviously like a highly emotional legal situation for the client. You want to have as little information as possible on the screen or in the document wherever you're requesting that information for your client to have the best experience. And so when you draft client intake in our platform, you can set all sorts of logic based rules to only show people what they really need to see and hide everything that they don't need to see.
• 12:41
  Then from there, you need to plug it into your first documents. Know, it's like you could take the client intake and then go plug that into your documents yourself. But what's better and what really removes a lot of burden and time is automatically feeding that data into documents. Because oftentimes, at least those first drafts of your documents are things that you can think rules up for. You can say, okay, I know that in most cases when someone says that they have minor children and they're in this county in this state, then I'm going to fill this out in a particular way.
• 13:18
  So client intake and really robust document automation that's easy to set up are the two main things that we see from pretty much all of our customers. And then third, I will say is unique forms of billing. So traditionally, the legal field has built on the billable hour and I think there's still a ton of room for that and that's never going to go away. But more and more attorneys are starting to think about how do I bill in a way that allows me to scale my practice and doesn't require me to work for every single hour that I make money for. And there are three main ways that we are seeing people bill differently.
• 13:56
  One is flat fees. Two is pay per use. So if you have a certain set of documents or something that you're creating, people might pay every single time that they generate those documents. And then three is subscription platforms. So you might give the platform, you might give some sort of form set to your clients and they might pay you a certain number of dollars per month and they can continue to operate based on that.
• 14:21
  And I'm talking about that in the context of gavel obviously, but subscription fees also apply very much with regular advice. Doesn't necessarily need to be attached to technology.
• 14:30
  Davina: Right. So I think for me, that's the exciting part is the possibility of productizing to use a horrible made up word, but turning your service into a product of some sort and finding some area of your practice that you might be able to create an automated passive income stream out of a certain area of your practice using this sort of technology. What if you have zero technical skill? Or maybe you're not somebody who thinks in term like, think it takes a special brain to sort of think in terms of if then logic questions. Right?
• 15:06
  And missing steps. You know, I think that a lot of people might miss steps in thinking and trying to set up logic. Do you have help available for people if they have an idea, they have a plan, but somebody there to help them flesh that out and work on that?
• 15:22
  Dorna: Yeah, absolutely. This has been really important to us from the very early days. There are two ways mainly that we provide that kind of support. And I think it's actually a lot easier than people think because if then logic is something that comes from code, but it's also something that comes from the law. The law and code are actually very similar in that way.
• 15:43
  In that if you look at a statute or a case law, it's likely equivalent to if then statement, very complex ones. And where that breaks down is where you have a factual dispute or there's a legal dispute and you actually need to go figure out, you a judge or a jury to decide that. So what we offer is we have customer support as much as you need and that's all free. So for anyone on even the free tier, on the free trial of our plan and the lowest tier, we'll give you as much support as you want. And the interesting thing is that we've done that from the beginning and we've never really had any problems because I think it actually ends up being a lot easier than people think.
• 16:23
  And we're there to support them when they need us. And then if people really don't want to get involved at all inside of the system and they just want someone else to do it for them, We also have what we call gavel experts. And these gavel experts, they range from law students who are really, really affordable through paralegals, through attorneys that are much more expensive. So it's obviously a big price range depending on who you choose. But these people can get into your documents, into your area of law, take instruction from you and build it all out for you and work with you.
• 16:58
  So some people choose that as well if they want to be less hands on.
• 17:03
  Davina: I hope you're enjoying the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, I'd like to thank some of our sponsors. In the next ten years, 90% of legal services will be delivered online. Gavel is the software lawyers are using to streamline internal document automation and build online legal products like landlord legal or hello divorce.
• 17:29
  With gavel, you can easily build client intake that generates document sets through powerful logic based document automation. Gavel, formerly known as document can be used internally or you can make it client facing. It also integrates with nearly everything. Clio even rated gavel their best integration tool. Visit www.gavel.io and mention the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast for a free fourteen day trial or just click on the link in the show notes.
• 18:02
  Wealthy Woman Lawyer helps women law firm owners scale their law firm businesses to and through a million dollars without overworked and overwhelmed. If you are a woman law firm owner who wants to make more money but doesn't want to work yourself into the ground in the process, then I invite you to check out my free training, three stages from law firm solo to ceo, how to get to 7 figures faster with my proven million dollar law firm growth roadmap. This is the exact same roadmap I've shared with hundreds of other women law firm owners so they could create and scale a profitable, sustainable and wealth generating law firm business that allows them not only to easily fund the lifestyle of their dreams, but also to have the time freedom they need to enjoy it. Do you want to travel more, spend more time with family and friends or just have more time for yourself, but you're afraid that your law firm will fall apart if you're not there day in and day out, then this is the training for you. Visit https:gogo.wealthywomanlawyer.com/training now, or you can just click on the link in the show notes.
• 19:12
  And now back to our show. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the legal tech space because I find and you're specifically your sort of journey to the legal tech space. I know you told us the origin story, but give us a little bit of your background as a lawyer. And have you always sort of been tech minded or was this something kind of new to you?
• 19:34
  Dorna: Yeah. Not at all. So I never really thought that I was going to go into legal technology. I guess my background is I went to law school like many of us, you know, bright eyed, bushy tailed lawyers thinking that I was going to work in human rights law. My family is from Iran.
• 19:51
  And so I had seen a lot of disparity in the way the legal system works there and the way the legal system works here. And so the American legal system is also not perfect. We have a lot of institutions and checks and balances that are really wonderful. And I wanted to work within that system. And I wanted to be part of that.
• 20:12
  And I wanted to see if I could help do that in other countries. And so I spent a little bit of time in West Africa doing legislative drafting. That was sort of where my passion was. But then like many law students who rack up a bunch of student debt, I decided to go to a big firm to pay that off. And then I sort of just thought that that was going to be my path because I think it's one of those things that you get into and you every day is just go by quickly and all of a sudden you've been working at a firm for for seven years.
• 20:42
  So, I never thought that I was going to leave. But when I started to get into this tool that we built for the domestic violence arena, I realized that there was so much opportunity in introducing legal technology into your practice. And I really wanted others to know about that and be able to build that. So before we decided that we were going to build Gavel, originally for a few months, I was actually helping other people build their own tools. So I was working with attorneys who had reached out to us and said, Hey, I want to build a tool for eviction defense, for example.
• 21:17
  And I was working with them and with our engineer to actually get those tools up and running. But then I realized that the overhead to build each of those tools was going be too large. Like I wouldn't be able to help all these people build areas, every single area of law and every jurisdiction. And so if we could build a platform that would allow everyone to scale their expertise much more easily.
• 21:38
  Davina: Wow. Wow. And so how is it different being in the legal tech space than being an attorney working day to day in the trenches in a big law firm?
• 21:48
  Dorna: Very different. I think in terms of commitment and hours of work, it's probably fairly similar. But, you know, it's running as many of the other speakers and your listeners and yourself. When you run your own business, you care about it so much and it's like your baby. So it's fun to spend all of your mental energy on it oftentimes.
• 22:10
  But I think I've learned a lot about things that I never learned in law school. Like when I went to law school and then when I practiced, I feel like I started to almost plateau a little bit because I knew how to do everything. I was a litigator. I did mostly employment litigation and a lot of trade secret cases. And it was very fun.
• 22:28
  I loved being a lawyer, but I didn't feel like I was learning something totally new every single day. Whereas now I have so many hats that I need to wear. And part of that is also not necessarily difference between being a lawyer and being in the tech field, but more being a lawyer at a big firm with lots of support versus being running a company or running a business. So now I have, you know, have to learn more about marketing, sales, product. There are so many support.
• 22:58
  There are so many different things that I'm learning every single day. And as our team continues to grow, there are new challenges.
• 23:04
  Davina: So Yeah. Yeah. For somebody who kind of wants to get in the legal tech space, what advice would you have for them before kind of embarking in that shifting gears like that?
• 23:16
  Dorna: Yeah. I like to say think big, start small and iterate rapidly. So I think a lot of times when people want to get into something that's totally different than what they worked in before. So I was a lawyer. I'm going into legal tech, for example.
• 23:30
  They have a huge vision for what they want to build. And that's amazing. You need that. You need to have that big vision in order to succeed. But if you try to start to execute on that big vision too early without thinking about what the stepping stones are to get there, that can oftentimes lead to lots of obstacles and mistakes.
• 23:53
  And so, as a result, you need to start really small. So for example, when we started our domestic violence platform, we started just in a few counties in just domestic violence. And I would recommend that others who are doing that really focus in on the audience that you want to serve, the jurisdiction you want to serve, and the very specific part of the practice area that you want to serve. And then finally is iterate rapidly. So, the reason you start small is because you're still trying to get to that big vision, but you are getting feedback constantly.
• 24:23
  So, you're going to be getting feedback from customers, from your clients. And that helps you make sure that once you do build that bigger vision, you have taken into consideration all the pitfalls that you experienced early on. But it's really fun and I would highly recommend anyone who's thinking about it dive in. You'll always have your law degree and you can always go back to the formal way that you practiced. But if you try something a little bit new and a new way of practice, it's only an opportunity.
• 24:52
  Davina: What do you think is some of the feedback that you got early on that maybe altered your course a little bit? You mentioned one example in that you said you were helping people and trying to be everything to everyone. So being niche is one. And also in your case, you guys, instead of doing it, you said, let's create a platform to help other people do it. What other kinds of things sort of come to mind?
• 25:15
  Was that a result of feedback or was that a result of kind of your own experience?
• 25:20
  Dorna: Yeah, definitely. This is sort of on the point of being niche, but more in terms of the audience. So when we started, we were trying to serve legal aid organizations, pro bono departments within law firms and consumers. And our product was definitely it could be something for everyone. All of those users could use it and they were finding value in it.
• 25:42
  We weren't focused enough. So we weren't really able to be everything to everyone. And there were little things that people wanted that each of those different segments and different audiences wanted in terms of feature sets or the way the platform worked that we weren't able to provide to them because we needed to sort of serve all of them. So I would say as narrow as you can go in your audience and really understanding which one is your audience, you will have an easier time scaling it up. And we had a similar issue that happened when we first started what is now Gavel, so the actual platform.
• 26:17
  We realized that there were other industries who actually wanted to use this type of platform too because, you know, if you're in sales or you're in recruiting or HR, document automation and building intakes that generate documents is very valuable. So we didn't stay focused enough in our marketing. And that led to the same type of situation where we could be like 75, 80% of what everyone wanted, but we weren't 100% of what everyone wanted, which is why we then decided, no, we're going to focus completely on legal. It's the industry we know best. So that might be another thing.
• 26:49
  Just do what you know best first and where you audience. There's always room to grow. But right now, there's so much room to grow in legal.
• 26:56
  Davina: Well, it's amazing there's so much room to grow in one vertical too. You know what I mean? Like, you don't have to go out and be in every vertical to make a multimillion dollar or billion dollar business. Right? If you have an industry that's strong.
• 27:07
  One of the things too that sort of stands out to me is you started out servicing an area that does not have a lot of cash. They do not have a lot of money. Anytime you're dealing with pro bono, low bono, nonprofit organizations, you know, as a business model, is that sustainable? You kinda have to start thinking what's a sustainable business model because we can't keep building innovative things for organizations that don't have the money for it. But we can have that for those organizations if we can find innovators who do have the money or people who you know?
• 27:39
  And so did that figure into your thinking at all or is that just me thinking that way?
• 27:43
  Dorna: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You're spot on. So so legal aid is where we started and it's still super important to our mission. We give hugely discounted rates to legal aid organizations who can't afford the platform. But in the early days, we thought that legal aid was going to be the first place we were working in.
• 28:02
  And like you said, we found that, you know, and that's another maybe piece of advice to someone who's starting legal tech is make sure you know your sustainability model because we were finding that it was very valuable to them, but we're basically begging them to use the product. And we couldn't really collect a lot of revenue from them because they just cash strapped unfortunately. So in the early days, they were actually really great audience for us to give free tools to while our software was still early days primitive, you know, a little buggy. And so they gave us really good feedback. And that was really valuable to us in the development of our product.
• 28:41
  But then we realized that the for profit market, you know, mostly a lot of our firms are small solo and mid sized firms. That was where our client base could use the platform and find a lot of value in it. And we could give it to them at a fairly affordable rate, but we could scale within that area. So that's why we made that our focus and our target market.
• 29:02
  Davina: I see a lot of that in law firms where they have solos who start out and they're getting government contracts, so they're doing low bono or pro bono, and they're doing it. And it's a great way to get experience and learn a practice area. And a lot of people are heart centered. They want to serve that audience in that population. But I always say to them, you also need a profitable, sustainable business, and you need people who can invest in that and hire you and pay you full service.
• 29:28
  And that allows you to serve more of those people that you wanna serve. So I can definitely see why you needed to make that shift. I wanna shift back to discussing because I think the exciting part for me I know a lot of lawyers are gonna be think, oh, will this work for me to create my intake process? Will this work? And that is exciting for practicing lawyers.
• 29:47
  The thing that excites me, and I know will excite a lot of entrepreneurial minded people, is this idea that they too can use your platform to create a tech tool of some sign that they may then turn around and build something around. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? And maybe if there's examples of people who've done it, it's not proprietary, Maybe you could share an example or throw thoughts out or something.
• 30:13
  Dorna: Yeah, absolutely. So there are a few platforms actually who have been built on our platform that maybe some of your listeners have heard of. I'll maybe mention three of them that I think people love. So one is Landlord Legal, another is Hello Divorce, and another is Just Tech. So these are three platforms that were built with using Gavel, didn't require anyone to have any kind of technical expertise, and they serve actually different types of audiences.
• 30:43
  So Landlord Legal was started by a firm. Nick Graham is the attorney who started it, and he was serving all sorts of different landlords in Illinois on a variety of different legal matters. And he realized that one of the areas that he was seeing a lot of people coming to him for was residential leases. And these were landlords who had, you know, lots of giant apartment buildings and needed the most up to date lease. And it was starting to actually become something that he was spending a lot of his time on.
• 31:15
  And he had initially started using Gavel within his practice to automate that process so that he could provide a faster and more efficient service. But he realized they're coming to me, they're emailing me, and then I'm drafting up these documents and I'm sending it over to them. But it's something that is pretty rules based or process oriented. So why don't I just put it in front of them? So he created a tech platform.
• 31:37
  It's a subscription platform for his customers and they can go onto the platform. They pay, I forget exactly how much they pay per month, but they pay a specific monthly fee and they have access to generating as many of those leases as they want. And he's constantly keeping it updated on the back end. That's one that's super simple, but is actually leading to a lot of really great results.
• 31:59
  Davina: It gives him back a lot of time. He can spend doing something else. And also it creates that sort of passive income stream for him once it's all set up. And then I would imagine that he invests a lot in sort of marketing because it's a volume. It's a volume sort of methodology business model.
• 32:18
  Because when you create something like that, now you've taken away because I can hear a lot of lawyers say, well, if I normally charge $2,000 for that or $3,000 for that, I'm gonna now give it away for, you know, $1.97 a month or whatever. And they may think of it as, well, why would I cut my fees in that way? But really what you're talking about is increasing overall revenue and profitability because so the amount that you keep put in your pocket once it's developed because you have automated it and now you're driving more and more people to it. So I'm sure he invests in marketing to get people to, you know, just like any other online business. Right?
• 32:56
  Dorna: Absolutely. And you know what's interesting is that when we're thinking about the old way and our former way of pricing, we really are only as attorneys, we're only able to tap into a certain segment of the population. Most of the middle class can't afford those rates. But there's a huge middle class with disposable income that they're willing and wanting to spend on legal services. And so, as you said, the volume can be exponential and it can be far out, you know, far surpass what you may have been collecting.
• 33:29
  Davina: And a lot of people may think it's people who are low income, but you're absolutely right. It is the middle class because it's become more and more expensive to live. Attorney's fees have become more and more expensive if you need anything. And for those sort of people who are in interacting and engaging with legal services on an ongoing basis, in the case of landlords, that's a great model because they need an ongoing subscription really, I imagine works well. I want to hear about Hello Divorce because that's the one I was like, oh, I've heard of Hello Divorce.
• 33:59
  So tell me kind of about that model.
• 34:02
  Dorna: Yes. So Hello Divorce, also a wonderful platform built by an attorney, Erin Levine, who has a law practice and family law and wanted to build a platform. I guess I would sort of analogize this again to TurboTax. She wanted to build sort of something like TurboTax but for the divorce process. And so she, I think five states right now, I believe that's correct, but they're expanding out into all 50 states.
• 34:29
  And they have been able to do that all on the Gavel platform. So she actually works with, you know, because it's such a huge endeavor to go into all 50 states, she works with some of these Gavel experts that I mentioned and they help her. Some of them have been law students. Like I know she had some students in New York at Cornell who were helping her build some of these tools, but they don't need to have any kind of technical expertise. They take the documents, go into the platform, set it up, and launch these products.
• 35:00
  And it's a divorce platform for it can be DIY. She has a few different models. Actually, I always think it's really interesting to look at her pricing page because it gives other attorneys good ideas of how they could be pricing their services, even if they're not necessarily in the divorce space. But there's a DIY where customers can come on, they do the end to end divorce process usually for uncontested divorces, no assets maybe, something pretty simple. And then there are further tiers where you might get additional services combined with the technology.
• 35:33
  So, you might have someone who helps you with two hours of face to face help, goes through your documents with you and helps you understand the process. So, there's a lot of opportunity here also. And that's what I think hella divorce is really emblematic of is building a tool that is technology but is a hybrid with your services and having those be hand in hand. Because it doesn't necessarily need to be that you either have full scope services or you have technology and you're completely hands off. There's definitely a middle ground there.
• 36:03
  Davina: If she's spreading into other states, then she's probably building a network of lawyers in various states to sort of use this product and this model. So there's probably opportunity there for people who might want to reach out to her and see what opportunities there are in your state. Don't what What state she's in. Was the last one that you said of your examples?
• 36:23
  Dorna: And then the last one was JustTech. So JustTech is actually a tool based out of Canada, and it's a breach reporting tool. And the reason I like that one is because I think a lot of times when we think about these tools, we think of them as being just consumer focused. But there's actually opportunity within no matter who your client base is. And Just Tech serves mostly small and medium sized businesses who may have either encountered a data breach or just need data breach policies and their businesses.
• 36:55
  And we also have, alongside that we have another customer who serves large enterprises, accounting firms, large legal organizations. No matter who your client base is, there's an opportunity to price it in the right way and give them technology that is part of that process.
• 37:12
  Davina: Right. Right. Right. And I like that discussion of sort of b to b. So it doesn't have to be just business to consumer.
• 37:18
  It can be business to business and thinking of how can I serve other businesses, what kind of technology tech tools? You were talking about breach of security, computer kind of thing. Cybersecurity is such a huge industry right now. I've been working on my CLEs because my deadline's rapidly approaching. So I've been doing listen to a lot of cybersecurity stuff lately.
• 37:40
  And of course, it's freaking me out. Oh my gosh. But it's such a big industry. So there's a huge opportunity there. I mean, there's all kinds of opportunities for those who are innovative and creative and would like to maybe get into the legal tech space.
• 37:55
  And what's wonderful is they don't have to go start from scratch and find an engineer friend to help them build that you guys can actually shepherd them through this process using your platform that's already built and fabulous. I love it.
• 38:09
  Dorna: They come with all their amazing expertise. As you're saying these, I'm coming up with I'm thinking of so many more examples of customers who are really great. Just one more example is my probate docs. It's an attorney, John Fritz, and he actually sells to other attorneys. So he's built a probate solution that he then provides to other attorneys to use within their practices.
• 38:32
  So there are so many different potential audiences that you can sell into, and it doesn't necessarily need to be your typical client base that you are serving right now either.
• 38:43
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So before we wrap up today, what would you like to share with our audience to maybe help them see the possibility of what this could do for their practice, for their business ideas, or whatever?
• 38:56
  What thought you wanna leave them with?
• 38:57
  Dorna: Yeah. I mean, I would say that we have ideas of the things that we want to build, and we have big dreams for what we want to build. And it's sometimes hard to see those be visualized. And so I would highly recommend that if you can use a no code tool, whether that ends up being Gable or something in the world, In other areas, you can build websites on like Squarespace. There's all the stuff that you can do on your own.
• 39:24
  There are so many different technology tools that are available to us now that were not available to us five years ago even. And so it's so much easier to take the dream and the vision that you have in your head and just prototype it out without a lot of cost. So I would highly recommend that people really dive into that, set aside some time because it can be a really huge opportunity and it can really transform your life and your practice.
• 39:50
  Davina: I'm sure having a conversation with you about an idea that they have will also help them get a little clearer on that and maybe move in the direction of actually making sure that it comes to fruition. You know, Through your experience, I'm sure you have a lot of feedback for people when they're starting out. They come to you with an idea, you and your partner, your team.
• 40:10
  Dorna: Absolutely.
• 40:11
  Davina: Alright. So tell us how people can connect with you and learn more about this wonderful product that you've created.
• 40:17
  Dorna: Definitely. So yes, always love chatting about building legal products and this whole area in general. Our website is www.gavil.io. Anyone can reach out to me directly. I am Dorna, D O R N A, gavel.
• 40:34
  Io is my email address. And then I'm also on all the social medias and there aren't a lot of other Dorna Moini's, so you'll probably find me pretty easily.
• 40:42
  Davina: Okay, good. Thank you so much, Dorna. I really appreciate you being here and discussing this today. I'm super excited to learn about this, and I'm sure we'll have lots more conversations about it in the future.
• 40:52
  Dorna: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Dina.
• 40:54
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