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No-code automation: adding legal services to your firm || GNGF LIVE w/ Mark Homer feat. Dorna Moini

April 1, 2022

About Our Guest

Dorna Moini

Dorna Moini is the CEO of Documate, a no-code software platform for turning templates and forms into intelligent workflows. Documate empowers lawyers to create powerful document automation, collect client data and build full-fledged legal applications. Documate was born out of... Learn More

Description

Jump to the extended interview: https://youtu.be/Cz3JtB4Dm18?t=1377

Former lawyer, Dorna Moini, saw a need for faster & easier document generation to balance her pro bono work.
Dorna started creating the no-code software out of a need for greater efficiency, but it has grown into a platform to bridge the gap between lawyers and legal tech.

Former lawyer, Dorna Moini, saw a need for faster & easier document generation to balance her pro bono work. Dorna started creating the no-code software out of a need for greater efficiency, but it has grown into a platform to bridge the gap between lawyers and legal tech....
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Show Notes

  • More GNGF
  • Documate
  • Talk with Documate (tell them GNGF sent you for a special deal)
  • Chat with a marketing consultant
  • More GNGF
  • Documate
...
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Transcript

– Thanks for joining us. This is our extended interview with Dorna Moini, founder and CEO of Documate. The first part of this video is from our GNGF Live, which happens every other Wednesday, over on our Facebook page. The second part here in this bonus, extended interview, we dive into some of the most popular areas of law in Documate and we’re going to talk more about those who are building these really cool legal tech products. If you already saw the live, I’ll put the timestamp to the exclusive extended interview below. Of course, be sure to like this video, and subscribe to our channel, so you can follow along with all of our great conversations on legal marketing in the business side, of running a law firm. Welcome to GNGF Live, your bi-weekly, ask the experts about all things law firm marketing, and business growth. I’m Mark Homer, author of “Online Law Practice Strategies” and founder of Get Noticed Get Found. On this show, we focus on the business side of growing and running your law firms. So I’m excited to have today’s guest, Dorna Moini, founder and CEO of Documate. If you haven’t heard of Documate, they are a great company with a great product that helps lawyers build document automation, shareable workflows, and even legal tech apps. As always be sure to like, and subscribe to our page, not just the video, so you can get updated when our next episode goes live. And of course, it never hurts for you to show just a little love and hit that like button on the video too, it does really help us a lot. We’ve got moderators in the chat, so please ask questions and interact during the premiere. If you’re watching this in the future, after we premiere, we do monitor the comments, and we’ll reach out to our guests and answer any follow-up questions you have. That’s because we love you all, and we love getting to meet you online, and I’m excited to say, we’ll be in person again soon. You can find a list of our upcoming webinars, CLEs, and all of our other events where we’re going to be speaking, over on our website at gngf.com/events. We have an extensive library of videos, including extended interviews, as well as our in-depth “GNGF Tips Series” over in our YouTube channel as well. You can watch those videos, well after this interview, of course, at that link in the chat. All right, let’s get to the interview. Dorna Moini, thank you for joining me today.

– Thank you so much for having me, Mark, it’s great to be here.

– So, you know, I love being able to kind of watch, like what’s been happening with you, we just realized that we had met, a few years ago at the tech show, when you were in Startup Alley. So this is so cool that, you know, I go on your website and see all the things you guys are doing now, and just following along, and just seeing you everywhere, right? Hearing everybody talk about you. So, thank you for coming and talking to our audience, but just for everybody else’s benefit, who didn’t get to meet you in Chicago, tell us a little about your background.

– Yeah! Thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be here. I’m an avid listener of this show. And so it’s great to be one of your guests. So a little bit about me, I am a former lawyer. I used to practice, I practiced for about seven years, last at Sidley Austin, and actually worked on, a little bit of work, pro bono, that led me to what is now Documate. So I’m now the founder of Documate, we’re a no-code document automation software platform. That sort of started from some of the work that I did at my old firm, and transitioned us into building legal products.

– So yeah, that was gonna be the question, what was this Genesis story, right? So I’m sure you’re working at the firm, you’re doing some pro bono stuff. What was the kind of ‘aha’ moment that wow, this is needed, and this is something that could be built?

– Yeah. So my main practice was mostly corporate litigation, but I also did some work with domestic violence survivors, pro bono. And what I was finding was that many of the areas that we were helping these clients with, were, while very complex from a factual and legal perspective sometimes, they were very rules-based. And so, similar to code, you know, you could kind of break it all down to, “if this, then this” rules. Kind of like code works.

– Right.

– So what we wanted to do, me and my now CTO, we wanted to build out a platform for domestic violence survivors, almost like TurboTax, where they could come onto the platform, answer a series of questions, and then generate documents or interact with the client with the lawyer at that point. So we built that, that was a totally different product, it was called, “Help Self Legal” we built that, launched it, had a bunch of users and actually a few different types of audiences, our customers were consumers, they were legal aid organizations, they were law firms who had pro bono attorneys. But then what happened was actually, funnily, Bob Ambrogi, who I didn’t know at the time, I had no idea he was like a big deal in the legal tech world. He reached out to us and said, “Hey, I’d love to write an article about this tool that you’ve built for domestic violence survivors.” So he wrote an article about us. I was like, “Oh, sure, legal blogger, go ahead, write an article about us.” I had no idea who he was. Didn’t realize that we would get all of this inbound interest after he wrote this article. But interestingly, the inbound interest wasn’t from our target customer, who were these domestic violence survivors and consumers, rather, they were a ton of lawyers. And what they were coming to us and asking us for was, “How do I build something like what you built for domestic violence law, but for other areas of law, other jurisdictions and other practice areas?” So at that point, what we did is, we sort of took a step back and we realized, yes, there’s this huge gap between consumers and lawyers and the ability to deliver legal services. But there’s also this huge gap between lawyers and technology. And that is exactly the gap that we’re trying to bridge now, and that’s what led us to what we’re doing at Documate. We’re now a no-code platform for lawyers to be able to build any type of legal application, without having to go hire a software developer to do that. So that’s sort of how we started, and now we don’t do anything with domestic violence anymore, but we have in many different countries who are, and in other areas of law as well.

– So, you know, your first, I guess not iteration, but you had another product that was and then you switched and built Documate. I talk to a lot of legal tech companies and just software companies in general. My background’s actually in software development from back in the day, it’s really hard getting a technology-based product off the ground, right? I mean, it’s very hard. So who were some of those early users of Documate that kind of said, “Okay, we’re jumping in, we’re going to try some things.” And, how has that shifted over the years?

– Yeah, so, we came from the legal aid space, because we built this tool for domestic violence survivors, we were working with a lot of courts, legal aid organizations who were using this for their pro bono staff and for their actual legal aid attorneys on staff. So, we were giving our software to them for free, early on. And those were some of our early users, which was great because, obviously when you first launch a legal technology product or a technology product at all, you’re going to have bugs, you’re going to have features that aren’t complete, that you’re still working on, and you really love that feedback that comes in. And so we kind of found this really great balance with these legal aid organizations, where we worked very closely with them, we built them some custom tools, we were very involved in their entire creation process on Documate. And they in exchange, we gave them free software and they gave us feedback, and really helped us develop the product to where it is now. So those, we still have tons of legal aid organizations on the platform. We have really low rates, or sometimes we give it for free to legal aid organizations, courts, and nonprofits, and they’re still very much a part of our mission.

– So, that’s actually fascinating, right? So by kind of having that pro bono, giving some, the software for free, right? You got the feedback, but you also get a little forgiveness with that too. So that kind of works, right? It’s like, “Hey, work with us on this.” So now how has it shifted? What are the typical Documate users, or, maybe chunks of users?

– Yeah, definitely. So, our whole mission has always been to make legal services more accessible by empowering lawyers. And so what we’ve found is that there are lots of for-profit attorneys who are trying to do exactly the same thing. On average, a lawyer in the US is $350 an hour, most people can’t afford that rate. So a lot of our customers now, are for-profit law firms, who are trying to provide legal technology to groups of people who might never have purchased their services on an hourly rate basis. And so what they can now do, is they’re building software, they’re launching out into the world. There’s a few different ways that they usually launch that, sometimes they’re using it completely internally, to make their practice more efficient, sometimes they’re using that, I would say there’s kind of three different ways they’re using it, one is completely internally, two is combination, where they’re having the client be part of that process, part of the data entry process, but the work product is then being generated in house, at the law firm. And then three, is full fledged legal product, which is really what we’re gunning for, and we love when our customers are doing, so they’re putting that completely into the hands of their customers, to be able to generate work product and maybe having some additional services after that. So, right now our kind of target customer is small, medium-sized law firms. We still love legal aid organizations, we have some of the largest firms in the country and world on our platform. For example, Wilson Sonsini built, for one of their summer programs, they built out a bunch of tools on our platform. So definitely broad range, but where we work most with, is the small and medium-sized law firms.

– Got it. So, you mentioned those kind of three areas, of the internal, document automation and some things, maybe some of the workflows, sharing the external and then full-on products, which I really want to definitely get to. But before we jump there, on maybe each of those sections, or especially the first two, if that’s the majority where people start, can you give us some examples, like what are some actual kind of like tools that a law firm is able to, with no code, you know, that’s pretty cool, build?

– So, I’ll maybe focus on, there are so many areas of law that people are building in, some of them, you know, even as someone who’s been in the legal field for a while, I encountered them, I’m like, “I didn’t even know this was an area of law.” So, I’ll focus more on the ones that most people probably know about. For example, in that first category, estate planning, big area, there’s so much data that lawyers are gathering from their clients. Sometimes thousands of little pieces of data that they need to gather about children, grandchildren, debts, trustees, executors, all of that. And so they may be using that completely internally to build a custom tool that generates their documents in house. And maybe not interacting with the customer at all. Then in that second kind of tier, they may be actually starting to involve the customer in that process. So they’re taking that tool that gathers data and spits out a bunch of perfectly generated documents, because they’ve added all of their logic, calculations, loops, you know, all those intricacies, that were their expertise in their brain, into Documate, that built that all out. So the second tier would be, they’re taking that, but actually involving the customer in that process. This is something that we’ve seen a huge acceleration in over the past two years, because you know, less people are meeting in person. So they may send either a link, or they may put it on their website, or they maybe completely white label it, and put it in front of the customer. So the customer can sit on their couch, watch TV, and at the same time enter all their legal data into the system. And then the lawyer, in a second, generates the first draft of those many documents. So, estate planning is a big one, family law is also another big one. Those are two kind of consumer-facing ones that we see a lot, and that most people are kind of familiar with. So they’re more digestible.

– Got it. And so, again, the idea here that, that conversation was going to have to happen with the client. Right? And so, you’re going to have to gather this information and build these documents out, that’s what happens all the time. Being able to push that out directly to clients just saves a whole bunch of people a lot of time. And now you’re just kinda like clarifying stuff and then having stuff go automatically, that’s… I think there’s some of those things exist, right? But one thing I think is really cool is, Documate, you use this term we’ve talked about a couple of times, you talk about no code automation. And it really, it’s like kind of drag and drop and pick and choose, so can you talk a little bit more about what no-code means and this is kind of happening a lot, right? Like there’s a lot of things where it’s becoming less code and more kind of a drag and drop. So, you call it kind of no-code movement, maybe. Tell us more about that.

– Yeah, definitely. So the idea here is that you, as a legal practitioner or anyone who wants to build a legal product, not necessarily a lawyer, you’re coming onto the platform and you have this idea, this dream as to what you want to build, and we want to make that possible, no matter what it is. So we are the toolkit for you to, without learning any code, to be able to build that full fledged legal technology application. So kind of taking a step back and talking about the no-code movement; 20 years ago, even to just build, have hosting infrastructure, this has happened already with hosting infrastructure, and now it’s happening more with like web development. 20 years ago, you had physical servers, they were expensive, you had a dev ops team that you needed, just to put something onto the internet. And if you had too much traffic, your website crashed. So nowadays we have things like AWS, we have Google cloud, Heroku, these types of tools make it super easy. And even dev ops teams now use these tools, and they’re the ‘no code tools’ to be able to scale their platforms. And they’re reducing the amount of time and coding expertise that’s required, to translate an idea into something that people actually can use, as members of the public. So you no longer need a programmer to build things on the internet, which thereby empowers a new wave of makers from different backgrounds, different perspectives, who can build products and that minimum viable product, you know, that first version of the product can be built without writing any code, including by programmers who can code. So that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with Documate. We have this toolkit, you don’t need to know how to code, and we’ve given you all the building blocks that you can create intake tools that are customized to your practice, to your areas of law. One of the really cool things about this, is that you can have rapid scaling applications when new changes of the law are introduced. So for example, we have, actually a few clients, a few of our clients have done this, where the eviction moratoriums went into place. That was an immediate change, that was going into effect, that members of the public needed to take advantage of. And you don’t have time to go out and build a whole software product and launch it. So what a lot of our customers did is they came onto Documate, and they built out that tool to allow tenants to take advantage of the eviction moratoriums in multiple different jurisdictions, according to the CDC, moratoriums and state specific and county specific rules. And they were able to launch that in hours, sometimes days, sometimes hours. So that is what no code empowers you to do.

– Yeah. And even five or six years ago, you had to basically call the developer up, hope they had some bandwidth, have some time, test it, try things, like you know, they make mistakes along the way. I mean, that’s very, the time savings, right, you said days, that would have been months, just to catch up to something that happened immediately.

– Definitely.

– Overnight. So the other thing I think I’m fascinated about, all these no code, like you said, no code movement, but just all these different kinds of platforms out there is, is you can actually kind of take the best of each and glue them together now, with things like Zapier, which I know you guys have, Zapier integration, right. Or you may already have some integrations to, somebody wants to collect credit card information in the process or something, so people can use the best of other tools, and then connect them together. So all these different kinds of no-code tools, you literally can build like an entire app of just the best of each of the thing. It’s like Zapier and like all these other tools like that, it’s amazing what can be done now by non-developers.

– Definitely. Yeah, there are, I’ll just give you one example of that. We had a few weeks ago, a customer who was trying to send, at the end of their application that they’ve built, a physical letter. And they were like, “Oh, this is probably the most annoying part of the process because client goes through, enters all their information, we get the work product, we can give it to them, but we still need to go print it out, put it into an envelope, and send it off to the court and a few other entities that needed it. So what they used is Zapier integration, with a tool called ‘Lobe’ which actually does exactly that, they do mailings and you’d never have to leave your office to go to the post office. So they connected that through Zapier into ‘Lobe’ and now the end of that process is actually just being triggered, and they don’t have to do anything or walk to the post office and stand in line for it.

– That’s awesome. So along with just being able to take something you’re already doing and just make it better or faster, what are some of the ways that, ’cause I know we’ve talked about offline and I’ve heard you talk about in other webinars and stuff, lawyers are literally kind of shifting their thinking on even how they’re practicing law or what they’re delivering. Using Documate and these types of tools.

– Yeah. So, I mean, this is also, this goes back to kind of our hypothesis, when we started Documate. We were thinking that lawyers are very much, historically have been very much working on a billable hour model, and that’s all they have done. And in the recent past few years that’s been shifting dramatically. And so, whereas, previously lawyers worked on a one-to-one model, billable hour model. They are now shifting fundamentally their business model, to becoming more of, obviously the billable hour will still always exist, but at least part of their work can be a one to many approach, where you’re building technology tools that you can price differently, that you can package differently, and that you’re serving many people at one time, and that makes it a better quality of life for everyone. There are consumers who can have DIY tools, many consumers don’t actually want to interact one-on-one with a lawyer. They want to have something that they can mostly do online and then maybe have a few phone calls at the end. So that’s being enabled. That’s something that we’re seeing a dramatic shift in. And obviously, you know, I hate to be the cliche, but COVID has accelerated all of this, as we say all the time, something that we were seeing kind of slowly happening two years ago, is now, lawyers were thrown into the deep end, and are now doing this at a much more rapid pace.

– Yeah, the expectations of consumers has changed dramatically in the last five years. And of course, yeah, I mean last year, it forced some things, but just these behaviors have been changing for a while. And I think it’s, as soon as there’s a few people that are in like a… it may not even be lawyers, right? In the professional services world, maybe it’s your accountant, maybe it’s your doctor or whatever, somebody… It starts offering portals and offering this ability to interact without having to go meet in an office and park somewhere and stuff. The expectation just keeps rising, right?

– Exactly. And actually there’s a funny, there’s a good stat from the recent Cleo Report; Lawyer Cloud use is up 35% in 2021. Huge! So just to put that number to the anecdotal evidence.

– Yeah, and I have a lot more questions though, and I think we’re running out of time on our Facebook portion here. So if you don’t mind sticking around, ’cause I would like to ask some more about, what practice areas of law, you know, if people are out there listening, that are small, medium-sized law firms, and these kinds of practice areas, you’re seeing a lot of success. I want to talk more about that. And then I’d like to talk more about these legal products, because I think that is this really cool opportunity, and obviously just listening to you talk about it, you light up about like the ability to change the way people are even practicing for the benefit of both the consumer and the lawyer. I want to dive more into some of the examples there. So do you mind sticking around?

– Definitely, sounds great. I’d love to.

– Awesome. But before we wrap up, where can people find you Dorna?

– You can always contact me at dorna@documate.org. We’re not, .com we’re, .org. Twitter, @documatelaw, or Dorna_Moini. And then we always love to kind of chat with people, show them our product, or just chat with you about legal products in general. So, we do have a Calendly page, calendly.com/documate, where you can book, we have a few different options of things that you can book with us. So, looking forward to chatting with you all.

– And Dorna, documate.org, right? All the pricing and all the information is up there?

– Yes, exactly. And also for any GNGF listeners out there, we are providing a discount code. You can contact us at hello@documate.org mention GNGF, and we will give you 10% off your subscription, and a $50 credit towards your first month of Documate. So we’d love to show you how to build your own products.

– Well, that’s awesome, ’cause it’s already a really good price, so that’s great! So yeah, take advantage of that everybody. So thanks for sticking with us. Just bear with me one moment, and I’ll wrap up and then we’ll come and record the rest.

– Awesome.

– So thanks for joining us today everyone, be sure to like, and subscribe to our Facebook page, so you get notified when our next episode goes live. We have new interviews about law firm marketing and the business side of running your firm, here, every other Wednesday. We’re going to keep going here in the GNGF studios, and you can watch the full extended interview with Dorna Moini, founder and CEO of Documate, this Friday over on our YouTube channel. We’ll be diving in a lot more detail about, these popular areas of law, Documate, and really talking about successfully building legal products as well. So we’ll see you then. Dorna, thanks for sticking with me. And lettin me take some more of your time, ’cause I got more questions.

– Yes. Great to be chatting with you!

– Awesome. So, one of the questions, we talked a little bit about it, but I wanted to kind of go a little further, about these different practice areas. You mentioned a few of the more popular ones, but then you also said there’s all kinds of ones that you’re always surprised by, but, what are maybe some of the more common ones? So if somebody out there listening is like, “Oh, that resonates with me.” And what are people doing? Like maybe some of the example tools as well.

– Yeah, definitely. So we have people building in all different areas of law, in all different jurisdictions and all different languages. We have 18 different languages that we know of, being built on Documate-

– Oh, wow.

– 23 different countries represented, people in 23 different countries building applications on Documate. I think we were at like 30 practice areas that people have told us about. Obviously we don’t know everything. So there’s a lot that you can build, and whatever your area of law is, you can likely build on Documate for it. But there are a few areas that we see a lot of, and I would say those are, we touched a little bit on estate planning, family law, real estate law, employment law, and really anything like business transactional. And then another one that we’ve been seeing quite a bit is franchise law? Another big one. So lots that you can build. Let me kind of dive a little bit deeper into some of the tools that have been built on Documate, ’cause I always love to talk about some of the stuff that our clients are building, when they’ve been very open and shared that with the public, because it’s very inspirational to me, and hopefully it will be to others as well. So, one that I know you’ve had on your podcast before, is Hello Divorce. Erin has built an incredible, basically the TurboTax for divorce. I believe she’s in four states right now, and is expanding into all 50 states now. So they built that on Documate, great example. Another one that I love is a tool called “Landlord Legal” they are a law firm, turned legal technology company, and they’ve built a whole set of tools that help landlords, provide all kinds of legal assistance to their… To all kinds of, whatever they need, like tenant agreements or workflows that help them make decisions about discrimination in the housing process. So they’ve built a whole series of tools that both take them through decision automation, document automation, and then they’ve also embedded a bunch of videos in that process, I think they’re at the landlordlegalteam.com it’s a cool one to check out. We mentioned some of the rapid response tools for the eviction moratoriums. We have a few different ‘TurboTaxes,’ and I always use the example of, the kind of analogy of the ‘TurboTax four,’ or the ‘legal zoom four’ estate planning. The first ‘legal zoom four’ estate planning in the middle east was built on our platform. And then there’s a tool called “Molly Legacy” that was built on Documate, that’s pretty cool. So, lots of examples and I’m happy to share more with anyone. If you want to go to our website, at document.org/resources, we have a bunch of case studies there as well.

– Yeah. Awesome. And, you know, we didn’t mention this in how to contact you, but since we are on YouTube right now, people should check out your YouTube. I mean, you’ve got all kinds of how tos out there. You guys have a lot of content out there on YouTube as well.

– Yes, definitely. And that’s just youtube.com/documate.

– Yeah. And Daniel we should probably a throw a link to the interview we did with Erin Levine. ‘Cause she’s from Hello Divorce, and how, she’s kind of approached things, and like you said, the shift, and I’d like to talk about that shift for a second. So you mentioned a law firm, or somebody who was at a law firm and then they kind of switched to legal tech company a little bit. Now, not everybody’s going to make that massive shift, but you also, in our Facebook portion, right, you talked about the idea that billable hour, switching your products and changing the kind of approach to starting off by just gaining time back and then incorporating the client, then having a product. How have you seen law firms kind of shift their pricing over time?

– Yeah. So we’ve seen them introducing new models of pricing. So whereas previously they may have only been charging on the billable hour, they can now do flat fees. They can do mixed alternative fees where they’re providing some form of technology for a specific flat fee, plus maybe two hours of document review. So for example, I’ll just go back to the estate planning context because I know that’s one that everyone kind of understands. So let’s say you build an estate planning tool, your customer has generated their documents, but they want two hours of additional document review at the end of that process. You can provide it to them for a flat fee, or for some additional subscription rate over the course of the next few months, you can also provide kind of hourly rate advice, on top of that technology tool that you built. And in addition to that, the hot topic, hot area right now, I think is subscriptions. So we’re seeing a lot of folks providing a set of tools to their customers for a flat monthly rate. That’s something that I personally, coming from the law firm world, when I only understood the billable hour and I thought the billable hour was amazing ’cause you’re like, “Wow, someone’s going to pay me this many hundreds of dollars or a thousand dollars for an hour of work? That’s amazing!” But when I went into the technology world, I realized that recurring revenue is even more amazing for lawyers. So you can build a tool that you, yes, you’re going to obviously spend a lot of time and diligence on it, and you’re putting a lot of your mental energy and expertise into it, and you’re keeping it updated, but, it can kind of pay dividends for you, because you can have a massive number of users who are generating value from a tool that you’ve spent, one chunk of time on. So subscription tools, we’re seeing a lot in the employment arena. For example, a firm may put a series of employee offer letters, separation agreements, contractor agreements, all sorts of forms they would have been providing to a company one-on-one, they can now provide that on a website, and give them subscription access to that platform. The “Landlord Legal” tool that I was telling you about, also they’re doing that on a subscription basis as well.

– Yeah. And we have some clients that are doing the business law, subscription based, they’re actually providing services combined with some of these kind of document, self-serve document tools. I’m seeing it more and more, and we’re getting, people call us and say, “Hey, you know, how would we this?” So it’s awesome that law firms are able to go out and, with no code, do this on their own, and maybe it’s not totally changing their billing models, so what you’re kind of saying is like, it’s a way to kind of layer some new things in, and then once I think people see recurring revenue and learn the benefits, maybe layer that a little bit heavier than what you did in the past.

– Definitely. We often say document automation, which is kind of like one tool that we provide to customers, we say document automation is the gateway drug to legal products. So just dip your toes in the water a little bit.

– And we’re big fans of subscription model as well. We had, I think Kimberly Bennett on the show talking about subscriptions, and obviously she’s always out there, you know, see her speaking on that all the time. So speaking of marketing, so I said, we have some clients, but like how are you seeing people who are building legal products? How should they be thinking about the marketing of that? Right, ’cause it’s different than just, “Hey, you have a problem. Come into my law firm’s office.”

– Yeah. So I think when you’re building a legal product, that could also be a marketing tool for you. So sometimes you’re building a legal product that you’re solely going to monetize immediately. So you’re putting it out there in the world, before anyone gets any kind of value from it, that you want them to be paying for it. So that’s like a completely revenue generating product, but you can also use legal products to generate leads for your firm. So we’ve seen this happen, where a firm may put out a tool, that is completely free, and that anyone can generate a small subset of documents for, but then what happens is that company or that potential client has now built trust in your firm, because they’re like, “Oh, I built this amazing set of documents early on in my company’s career, in my company’s life cycle, when I maybe didn’t have enough money to spend on a lawyer, but six months down the line or five years down the line when I do need that lawyer, that’s the lawyer I’m going to be thinking about, because they’ve already built my trust.” So we’ve seen this happen in many different areas. One example is startup documents, you know, we have lot of law firms who serve startups, or serve companies across the stages of their life cycle. And so they’ll put out documents for, early documents that a startup might need, but then a year down the line or five years, 10 years down the line, when that company is either raising the funding round or is IPO-ing, you’re the firm they’re going to think about, because you’re the one who provided them that free subset of documents. So, the legal product itself can be that marketing tool.

– Yeah. And then even just the splash around it, like I’ve seen, people getting a lot of press just because they’re doing something unique in their area. And again, from a digital marketing perspective, it’s kind of what we do, right? Getting press is also called like getting links and authority, which really helps the search engine. So, there’s… Whenever one of our clients is doing something unique like this, we’ve got one that’s got an amazing chat bot integration that they did really early on in the days of chat bots, and that kind of stuff. Like they got a huge splash just by the marketing, which helped their actual overall, from marketing. So to kinda wrap up, if somebody is going to start using Documate, what’s one piece of advice that you would say, here’s something you need to think about, when you become a Documate customer?

– Yeah. So what I like to tell people is start small, think big and iterate rapidly. So, you may have an incredible big idea for how you want to change the legal field, and across the world and in many practice areas. But early on, and that’s wonderful, you know, big ideas and big dreams are what make make you successful. But early on, start with something small. So start with one practice area, one jurisdiction that you can focus on, and build. And that’s the last part, is iterate rapidly on, because you’re going to learn a lot from your early customers. That’s going to cause you to change the way that they interact, the UI, the types of questions you’re asking, the way that those documents generate. So if you can learn those lessons early on with a small subset, you can apply those as you grow and expand. So I think thinking about that is gonna make you really successful.

– That’s awesome. I love that. I’m going to probably totally steal that from you, if you don’t mind, so think big, start small, and iterate often. That is great advice for all kinds of things when it comes to technology. And so the fact that it’s, you don’t need to, you can start small because you don’t need to hire a whole team of developers, and you don’t have all those costs and everything, is wonderful. So again, Dorna, thank you so much for joining and talking about this, I love what you’re doing. It’s great to see your success from Startup Alley, to all the people using you for such cool examples. Every day, I’m sure you have more examples to talk about. So, this is great. Thanks again.

– Yes. It’s so fun to see what people build. So thank you so much Mark, for having me, great to be chatting with you, and look forward to talking soon.

– Thanks.

– Hey, what’s up? I’m Josh. Thanks so much for joining us. If you feel like you learned something today, think of how beneficial it would be to chat with myself, or another one of our marketing consultants, one-on-one. Go ahead and visit our website to schedule your free consultation. It only takes a minute.

- Thanks for joining us. This is our extended interview with Dorna Moini, founder and CEO of Documate. The first part of this video is from our GNGF Live, which happens every other Wednesday, over on our Facebook page. The second part here in this bonus, extended interview, we dive into some of the most popular areas of law in Documate and we're going to talk more about those who are building these really cool legal tech products. If you already saw the live, I'll put the timestamp to the exclusive extended interview below. Of course, be sure to like this video, and subscribe to our channel, so you can follow along with all of our great conversations on legal marketing in the business side, of running a law firm. Welcome to GNGF Live, your bi-weekly, ask the experts about all things law firm marketing, and business growth. I'm Mark Homer, author of "Online Law Practice Strategies" and founder of Get Noticed Get Found. On this show, we focus on the business side of growing and running your law firms. So I'm excited to have today's guest, Dorna Moini, founder and CEO of Documate. If you haven't heard of Documate, they are a great company with a great product that helps lawyers build document automation, shareable workflows, and even legal tech apps. ...
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