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Hosted by Jared Correia, Legal Late Night is a weekly, pop culture-infused romp through the latest & greatest business management ideas and technology tips for lawyers, featuring engaging guests, and constructed in the format of an old school television variety show.
Jared Correia (00:00):
Hello everybody. We've got a show that promises to be at least mildly interesting for your listening and watching enjoyment. You want to make more money, right? Good, right off the top. I'm going to launch with five tips to do just that. Don't fucking miss it. Then we've got Dorna Moy from Gavel who's all up in your business talking about document automation. It's an efficiency game changer, y'all. Finally, it's the counter program. Dorna returns for a round of double jeopardy and just fucking slays. Yes, it's that impressive. Please stick around for it. In case you didn't know, lawyers are kind of bad at talking about money actually. They're fucking terrible at it, and I guess that comes from a good place because most of the lawyers I talk to, if I ask them why they get into the business, they say, because I want to help people.
(01:10):
Great. I think that's awesome. Not necessarily a capitalist ethos, and most of the attorneys I talk to by the same token will be like, yeah, I want to help people, but if I could make more money, that'd be a good thing too. So you can find your balance and if you do want to make more money, I got five tips. If you're asking yourself, how do I do that? Not an exhaustive list, but here are five things that lawyers have traditionally been not great at that you can focus on to make more money. I'm going to tell you what they are and then I'm going to go into each one in detail, some detail, some detail. We don't want to be here forever because we've got document assembly to talk about. First you need a rate sheet and you need to build revenue projections. Let's put that in the same pocket.
(02:02):
If you want to make more money, you also need to start automating payments or initiating payments on the law firm side, definitely via credit cards if you want to make more money. Next, think about deploying a financial manager to get paid how we'll talk about it. Also, soft collection policies. Add them, tie them to your engagement agreements. Make more money. Lastly, raise your rates every year or at least consider it. No, fuck it. Raise them. All right, let's talk about each of these. In turn, one of the easiest ways to make more money is to charge more, and this is especially true if you're an hourly attorney and that's how you're billing. It's quite simple. If you bill $25 more an hour, a hundred dollars more an hour, multiply that by how many hours you typically bill and oh my God, you've just made money out of thin air.
(03:05):
Congratulations. And the best part, you've not done any additional work. We'll get back to raising rates in a second, but you want to have a rate sheet in place that defines how you charge in the firm. If you don't have a rate sheet in place, guess what happens? Well, you end up discounting. Somebody's got a sob story. You're like, I'll take 50% off of it or whatever. Because remember, lawyers just want to help people and oftentimes they think just helping people is devaluing their own services, but you can still help people by getting paid what you deserve. This is especially helpful when you're a solo attorney because the buck stops with you. You don't have anybody to go to. They know your clients know you're making the call, so having a rate sheet kind of stops you from working on low bono cases, which is really what you want.
(03:59):
Now, if you've got a rate sheet in place, you know how much you charge for everything. You stick to that and if you want to get back to the helping people thing, stick a discount rate in there, but make it across the board global discount rate, not just ad hoc discounts. You want to have a 10% discount in place, sure, go for it, but just only do that and not more. So once you have a rate sheet in place, as I was going to say, you can add revenue projections to what you're doing. That's pretty simple, right? You're multiplying simple math only involved here folks. Let's say you're in estate planning practice and you do hundred estate plans a year and you charge $5,000 for estate plan. Well, congratulations, you've just made $5 million. If my math is correct or $500,000 somebody check me. I'm doing this conversation live.
(04:55):
The idea is you can better assess how much money you're going to make and set reasonable goals for yourself if you have a rate sheet and if you're not using revenue projections, do it yesterday because you're more likely to reach those goals if you have them in place. Even if you get to 80%, 70% of what you're trying to do, even if you had a stretch goal, you're still making more money. Okay, next thing. I alluded to this, which is initiating payments or automating payments. So you might be asking yourself, well, why didn't I make that distinction? So in some cases, law firms are using systems that don't allow you to automate payments or the model you're using doesn't work with automated payments. So an automated payment is just payment comes out of your client's account, usually a credit card automatically without any kind of human intervention whatsoever.
(05:48):
Examples of this would be subscription payments, for example, which some law firms use. Payment plans would be another one. Nobody touches it. That payment just comes out. Now, in some cases, automated payments are not going to work. Let's say you are an attorney who has to figure out how much you're going to charge somebody, right? You're billing hourly. The payment amount depends on how much you billed for that month, that quarter, whatever, or you've got an evergreen retainer that you're using, and you first have to calculate how much that person knows for the month or for that period before you charge them. Well, what law firms has traditionally done is send a bill and have been like, please pay me please, and they're collecting an arrears. At that point, the work has already been done and now you're asking someone to pay for the work, which is not thoroughly motivating for a client.
(06:39):
The work's already been done. The time to ask for a payment is before that or an alternative is to collect somebody's credit card number and use a payment processing tool so you can initiate the payment on their behalf. So when I'm talking about here is somebody owes you money, you send an invoice or you send an activity report potentially in advance three, five days in advance of withdrawing that money and you tell your client, Hey, we've got your credit card on file. You owe us three grand. We're going to initiate the payment in five days. Let us know if you have any objections, and then you simply go into the backend of your software, hit a button, and that payment comes out of that person's credit card. As you can probably tell, one of the reasons you do this is so that you can reduce or eliminate accounts receivable.
(07:28):
You're not collecting stuff, you're taking payments either in advance or directly from a client account, and there's no lag, which helps you with cashflow. It's a lot simpler to do than it may appear. So every transaction you have in your law firm where you're billing a client, think either of automating that payment or getting yourself the ability to initiate that payment on your own without the client's involvement. Now, here's one that I don't see a lot of attorneys do. This notion of a financial manager, you go and buy a car, salesman sells you on the car, you're ready to hop into your new Range Rover, and then what happens? Oh, let me take you to the financial department. They're going to button this transaction up for you. I got a question for you. Lawyers being bad at money conversations, why don't you do that? You're a lawyer.
(08:17):
You're good at talking to people about the legal process. You're good at giving them the use case of why an attorney is important to help resolve the legal issues that your clients are facing. What you're not so good at is being like, let me charge you full freight for that. So close the client, convince them to use the legal services, and then you simply move them off to a financial manager who says, oh, this is what the charge is going to be. Let me get you teed up. Usually there's fewer complaints when that happens. Usually the articulation is more clear and in many cases, somebody who's in the finance space is usually better about closing that deal at the rate should be closed than the attorney who's more likely willing to discount. Don't take my word for it, try it out. See if it doesn't increase your revenue.
(09:05):
I bet it does. Okay, soft collection policies. When I say soft collection, I basically mean reaching out to people, staying in contact with them if they haven't paid a bill. Now, if you're using some of the tips I've talked about, soft collection ain't going to be a problem for you. Neither is hard collection like taking somebody to core using a collection firm because you have the ability to initiate or automate payments in your accounts receivable is going to be nowhere in sight. But if you do have a accounts receivable or if you get a accounts receivable right now before you change up your financial management policies, it's good to stay on top of that because most law firms don't. Now, the challenge with collecting on accounts receivable in the first place is that as those accounts receivables age 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, they get harder and harder to collect to the point where it's almost, you're not going to see that money, right?
(10:00):
You might as well just write it off if you could as a law firm. So you want to have some policies in place for touch base before that timing gets too long in the tooth. So internally, you want to have somebody who can follow up on that, stay in touch with the clients and hopefully get a resolution in place. And this should be tied to your engagement agreement as well. So if you want to add interest payments to delayed payments on behalf of clients, you want to have clauses to that respect in your engagement agreement so you can pull the trigger on it, have the client sign off on that, make sure they're aware of it, and then it's a matter of figuring out, well, is this person going to be able to pay me upfront? Is this person going to be able to pay me at all, or do we need to look at a payment plan or a reduction in the bill?
(10:44):
You don't want to get to that point, but if you are at that point, it's helpful to get some of the money back if you can't get all of it, but you want to have processes in place, you have workflows around how you touch base with clients, what kind of models you use for payment plans, and get that all squared away before you actually have money to collect because you don't want to be making up as you go along. Last one I got for you, number five, raise your rates every year. Traditionally, law firm rates haven't even kept up with inflation, and inflation has gone up several times over the last several years. So if you haven't raised your rates in six years, which that's the case with a lot of law firms that's pre pandemic, if you haven't raised your rates in 10 years, you're not making as much money as you could be making and your purchasing power off.
(11:34):
The money you make is significantly reduced. And what I said before is important so you don't have to think about, I got to raise my rates, I got to catch up for not raising my rates in the past. Now, I don't think of it that way. Just start from scratch. You can raise your rates if you're an hourly firm, 25 bucks, an 50 bucks an hour, and many people are not going to blink an eye lash over that. So you are in good shape at that point, and this is something that you at least want to consider every year. And if you've got subscription platforms or you bill in an alternative fashion, maybe you got flat fees, maybe raise your rates by a relatively small percentage, 5%, 10%. The trick here is to hopefully keep up with and exceed inflation, and part of that is setting up a policy, a year-end policy to review your rates.
(12:28):
So you want to make more money, review your rates at the end of the year. Also, potentially set up those revenue projections as well so you have goals to focus on. Alright, that's enough about that. Go out, go forth and make that money, get that paper, get the bag. I mean, feel free to come up with your own analogy here. Next up, we've got Dorna Moy of Gavel, who's here to talk about document assembly, a little bit of AI and also pro bono work. Ironically, after everything, I just went through all the work I just did, but seriously, do your pro bono work, intentionally make money when you need to make money and do pro bono only when you want to. We'll be right back with Dorna. Well, I've effectively run out of things to say, which is awkward because this is a podcast, so I'm just going to shift my feet back and forth while staring aimlessly and nervously for the next several minutes. No, I'm not going to do that. That's terrible. Let's interview our guest instead. All right. We got a brand new guest on the show for you, which I guess is true of most guests on the show. We're brand new, but it's Donna Moy, who's the founder, and CEO of Gavel. Dorna, welcome.
(13:50):
Thank you, Jared.
Jared Correia (13:51):
You are the founder of Gavel, as I mentioned, formerly known as Docu for some of the folks that have been around for a while. And I think I was looking on LinkedIn. I think it's been like 2020 was
Dorna Moini (14:05):
When?
Jared Correia (14:05):
Dorna Moini (14:06):
Is when we launched
Jared Correia (14:06):
Five years,
Dorna Moini (14:07):
Yeah. Now Gavel. Yeah, a lot has happened.
Jared Correia (14:12):
How has the journey been for you as
Dorna Moini (14:14):
The Journey has been amazing. We now have two products in market, as you may have heard. So we have our Gavel workflows, which is our rules-based automation, which is everything we have been talking about in the past. And we also have Gavel Exec, which is our AI assistant inside of Microsoft Word. And yeah, the journey has been,
Jared Correia (14:32):
Oh shit,
Dorna Moini (14:33):
Amazing
Jared Correia (14:34):
Ai, you say
Dorna Moini (14:35):
Ai, I say, but in a very saturated market, it's all about really just getting people to try it out and see that it really is transformative for their practice.
Jared Correia (14:48):
Yeah, I mean, you've had this company for a little bit. We've known each other for, I think about that length of time
Dorna Moini (14:54):
From early days.
Jared Correia (14:56):
Founder, you left law practice, now you're a mom. Big changes for you, big life changes. You're still enjoying it. It though. Yeah,
Dorna Moini (15:04):
Big Life changes me.
Jared Correia (15:06):
Tell me about the exact tool you've got.
Dorna Moini (15:09):
Yeah,
Jared Correia (15:10):
Everybody wants to hear about ai, so hit me up. What does
Dorna Moini (15:12):
That, everyone wants to hear about it. Gavel Exec is your AI assistant inside of Microsoft Word. So what we were finding is that with Gavel workflows, which is our rules-based workflow, workflow automation, a lot of our customers were able to get really powerful documents to the first draft, but then once that first draft is done, they couldn't negotiate or redline or do anything else or even just analyze their documents or revise their documents with Gavel anymore because we take you to that first draft no matter how complex that first draft is. So this is something that our customers were really asking us for is they live in Microsoft Word and they wanted AI that helps them directly in Word to revise documents based on clauses that they may not have rules based on yet to redline documents based on their own playbooks or rules that they have, depending on what bargaining position they have in the particular deal. And to really what we just launched last week is the ability for small and mid-size firms, which are most of our market, small and mid-size firms, to really customize the AI for their own needs. So you can now actually load a suite, tons and tons of your documents, hundreds of your own documents into a project, and have us basically look at what you've done to make decisions and make comments inside of your own document, which really makes it powerful. And as I said, this area is really saturated, so you don't say
(16:42):
It's really all about Yeah, exactly. It's really all about getting people to see how much more accurate our AI is than other tools they may have used in the past. And that's why we give, we have free, free to start, no credit card required, no demo required. You get a ton of free no runs to try it out and see if it works for you. And from that, we have gotten insane reviews, incredible reviews telling us that even the larger companies that have been doing this for a long time have access to lots and lots of data and resources that ours performs better. So I really invite everyone to try that out for themselves. We can spend 15 minutes and see how well it works.
Jared Correia (17:24):
Oh, congratulations. That's great. I was going to ask you, essentially the adoption has been pretty good, both from your existing client base and also outside. I would imagine as people learn about the product you're offering.
Dorna Moini (17:34):
Exactly. From our existing client base, those were the first people that we launched it to and we allowed them to use it first. So that's been incredible response. And then outside of that, a lot of the growth has actually just been through word of mouth, and we've done some ourselves, but we don't do a lot of outbound sales. It's a lot of organic, especially within the small firm market. People talk and they tell each other how much they like the tools that they're using. So it's been a really incredible response since we launched.
Jared Correia (18:03):
Cool.
Dorna Moini (18:04):
Yeah,
Jared Correia (18:04):
So the AI thing is everybody wants to talk about AI all the time, but I feel like it's particularly susceptible to document assembly, which for a long time has sort of been susceptible to workflow and AI is really good with the workflow part of it. What do you see in terms of your future progression with ai? Are there more products that you're going to build? Are you just going to keep building on this product? What are people asking for? Where do you think this is going to go?
Dorna Moini (18:33):
Yeah, so that's a really good question, and I think one of the big pieces that I see people doing wrong sometimes is that they're trying to overly AI to tasks that really shouldn't require ai. And where rules-based, workflow based logic works tremendously well. And so it's like why are you fixing something that's not broken? And that's where we see workflow automation combined with generative AI is the best fit. So we have rules-based logic that you can apply for anything that's template based. If you already have rules inside of your document, if you already have templates for it, build that in rules-based logic because you're going to get the same result every single time based on the facts that you put in and you know that it's going to be something you don't need to check and review 20 times because it's not giving you a different result every time.
(19:27):
So there are certain tasks that rules-based logic just works so much better for. And then there are certain tasks that generative AI works better for. And so what we are now doing is really marrying those two together, and that's where the progression of our company is heading towards is using the right tool for the right task. And it's also the same thing we do within our AI models is there are different AI models that are right for different tasks that are also all maybe using generative ai. And so that's one of the places where we really excel. And I think why people are getting such better results with Gavel Exec than they have elsewhere is that if you're asking for example, to redline something, we're using a different LLM than what we're using. If you were asking to summarize something, because we've benchmarked and we're constantly benchmarking, there's so much being updated on a pretty regular basis, we're constantly benchmarking against what is the right tool for you to use, and so what agents are we going to introduce into our product to give you the best results?
Jared Correia (20:23):
Damn, that was a lot of stuff. Okay. So the first thing I think that is interesting is I kind of feel the same way about rules-based logic, and I think the issue is that most people think rules-based logic is all ai, which it is not. So do you want to expand on, you're nodding your head, do you want to expand on that?
Dorna Moini (20:42):
Well, definitely. Well, the funny thing is four to 30 years ago, rules-based logic was ai. That's what people called. That's the only concept of AI anyone had. We called that ai. But then I feel like every time that something becomes more commonplace, we stop calling it ai. We're like, oh, that's not ai. That's just like an algorithm or that's that's just workflow. We just get used to it and we stop being in awe of the technology. But yeah, I think to me some of it is ai or you may have called it AI in the past, but it's definitely not generative ai.
Jared Correia (21:16):
So in terms of the other issue, you we're talking about LLM selection, right? I think a lot of people think there's one LLM, but there are different LLMs used for different purposes. So can you talk about how you go about selecting the right tools to build your software on the AI AI side?
Dorna Moini (21:39):
Definitely. So we are typically benchmarking against various different tools that exist out there, various different LLMs that exist out there, and then each of those LLMs have different models that those companies have said are good for certain things. So for example, some are multimodal, some are better at long sets of techs, some are better at really carefully analyzing text, but taking a lot longer. Some are better at giving an overarching summary, but maybe being really rapid. And so depending on the tasks that we have, sort of a list of different tasks that we internally are looking at that we're doing for the user, particularly in gavel exec in our AI product, and we are testing those consistently. We're having other attorneys test those who we've hired. We've actually onboarded two different law firms who helped us with the process before we launch gavel exec to see what the responses are, give us their feedback to help us with the different playbooks that we have embedded into our product. And so a combination of engineering benchmarking plus actual human lawyer benchmarking and really knowing this field really well helps us give our customers the best tools.
Jared Correia (22:57):
Okay. One of the things I think is interesting about AI when it comes to document assembly is traditionally when you use the document assembly software, you had your documents in place, you coded them effectively, you send them over to the company, they load 'em into their software, AI has the potential to build documents from scratch. So what are you seeing in terms of client demand as far as that's concerned? Are people still doing it kind of the quote old school way? Are people now asking you like, Hey, I want the system to build the documents for me, improve them, iterate on them? Where are you at as far as that's concerned?
Dorna Moini (23:31):
Yeah, definitely. The former people still want to do document assembly the traditional way because a lot of these firms, they already have documents that they know and trust, and you can generate them even starting with something, let's say a share purchase agreement, something like a little bit more complex, you can generate them a share purchase agreement, but they have no idea what's inside of that document. And every single time that you generate that with a generative AI tool, it's going to give you a different result. Whereas they have been doing this area for many years, or maybe they got some templates from another firm who they really trust and they know in that document everything that they need already exists. So the initial generation of that document is still happening very frequently, like 99% of the time with the templates that you already have in a rules-based system where the results are going to be trustworthy every single time, by contrast the revision of those documents or flagging it for issues, especially if you're getting that document from a counterparty, that's where AI really excels. It's not something you can embed rules in. Of course, there are the short cutters, we like to call them the people who just want the shortcut and they're like, we don't want to set up document assembly. We just want everything to be drafted from scratch. And I typically try to advise,
Jared Correia (24:52):
I feel attacked,
Dorna Moini (24:54):
Go ahead. I typically try to advise them against that, but if that's the way they prefer to do it and they're willing to sort of review that every single time, then they can still get good results too. It's really just about how much effort the lawyer wants to put into it where you could have a system that's reliable for doing it for you.
Jared Correia (25:15):
I mean, I like how you're looking at this is it's not like a one size fits all type of thing and you're deploying AI where it makes sense and non-AI technology makes sense.
Dorna Moini (25:24):
And it also depends on the document type, so you might not have a template for everything. I talked to someone last week who was like, I started with this 10 page document and I was using this document for a new area. I had never done this type of client before. It was a media client, and so I needed all these additional provisions that didn't exist in my base template. And then I used Gavel Exec for that. He said, I revised various different paragraphs and I ended up with a 20 page document. And not to say that length is the right measure for success of a document, but he ended up with Oh, sure, with really robust permission. Yeah, exactly. Except for maybe in college when you have to do a certain size word count, but he ended up with this document that had all of the robust provisions that he needed for an area that he wasn't doing on a repetitive, repetitive basis.
Jared Correia (26:15):
So that makes a lot of sense to me.
Dorna Moini (26:17):
Definitely.
Jared Correia (26:19):
Now, we've talked about this before. I think it's a no-brainer for lawyers to use document assembly technology, but it's crazy to me that moral law firms don't just because lawyers draft documents constantly. So what are you seeing as hesitation points still? Is it like, oh, I don't have my shit together in terms of my document files, or are people hesitant about like, well, I don't know if I trust ai, what needs to be said to get people over the hump?
Dorna Moini (26:50):
On the traditional document assembly side, it's like you may have seen that comic of the guys who have car with the square wheels and someone comes by with the round wheel and he's trying to sell them the round wheel and they're like,
Jared Correia (27:06):
Sorry,
Dorna Moini (27:07):
We don't have time. It's that, it's that concept. It's like they know how they've been doing things today and they know it's going to take time to change out that wheel, but they keep putting it off. So on the traditional document assembly side, it does take time to build out the logic inside of your documents and create process for your firm, but at the end of the day, it saves you so much time On the generative AI side with Gavel Exec, we've actually seen much less resistance, especially to the type of customer that we are typically selling to, which is a tech forward lawyer who really wants to be at the forefront of the law, can see that it's a competitive environment and really wants to get ahead of everything. So with those Gavel Exec has been an easy sell and in 10 minutes you can try it out and you can see that this is actually providing value to your firm. So it doesn't require, the ROI is much clearer on day one or even in hour one versus document assembly where you have to do some setup in order to get that ROI
Jared Correia (28:08):
Guess. It's interesting because on the one hand, you think lawyers don't trust ai. I hear that all the time. Oh, I got to use AI and hand off my professional responsibility to a machine. I get that a lot, but then I feel like when you present them with a solution where they're like, oh, I don't have to do stuff. I can farm that out. They're all in, all the questions just drip away.
Dorna Moini (28:29):
Definitely. Definitely.
Jared Correia (28:30):
That's from your experience. Let's talk about a couple of their concepts, which I think are interesting both from the document assembly side and from the AI side. And we've talked about this before too, but what are you seeing? What are you thinking about in terms of how law firms price their services? Because people ask me this a lot with ai. AI allows me to do faster things. Now if I'm billing hourly, I can't bill as many hours. And my answer to this is really like, well, that's no different from prior technologies, which made you faster and then maybe hourly billing was not always the best idea to begin with. What are your thoughts here?
Dorna Moini (29:09):
That's across the board. What we've been seeing, and we've been seeing it before, the generative AI boom, is that the lawyers who are thinking about their business in a different way and thinking about pricing models that actually work for them best are the ones who are going to adapt the best to this new world of technology because they've already been thinking, okay, even with small incremental changes to my efficiency, how can I make sure that I'm remaining an incredibly profitable firm while still having a little bit more of value-based billing? I'm spending less time, but I also set up systems, and so I want my customers, I want to get more clients, and I want them to feel like they're getting a good deal, but I also want to grow my firm and have more revenue and go sit on the beach more maybe or work more maybe depending on which path you take.
Jared Correia (29:59):
Probably the latter.
Dorna Moini (30:00):
Yeah, exactly. So for those lawyers, what's the best path for them is rethinking that pricing model. And the same thing is happening with ai. It's just happening at a faster scale, and it's happening a little bit more from the client demand side. Clients are saying, we need you to adopt technology. And so lawyers are saying, well, okay, now that we have technology, we also have more predictability over how long things are going to take. And so those flat fees are a no brainer now because they provide the certainty to the client and they also help the lawyer.
Jared Correia (30:34):
Are you seeing people selling documents as a service like Legal Zoom? Are you seeing people using subscriptions? What's going on in the wild?
Dorna Moini (30:42):
A combination. So we have Gavel Workflows, which is the product that is our workflow automation tool, and we actually have people who put paywalls inside of those workflows for their clients to pay them before they get access to a document or to pay them before they get access to a document, which then might lead to a few hours of service. So it ends up being this sort of hybrid model where they are using technology and they're charging for technology, but that's also allowing them to focus their time and efforts on serving more clients at scale. But on the more the parts where you went to law school for doing advising counsel, revising that document, giving them a little bit more bespoke assistance, so that's one. Interestingly, we're also seeing this on the gavel exec side. So inside of Gavel Exec, we give you the ability to create playbooks.
(31:39):
And in those playbooks you can say every time someone goes through an NDA, let's say, let's do a simple example. Every time someone goes through an NDA, I want them to click the button and make sure that all the rules pass in this document. Every provision that we have a strong opinion on passes our internal rules. Now what we're seeing is lawyers are actually providing that to their clients. So they're saying, you come sign up for Gavel Exec, we will give you access to this playbook. You pay us certain amount. They're charging the client for the playbooks, and they're actually generating profit on that. So they're really becoming technology entrepreneurs.
Jared Correia (32:20):
I mean, it makes a lot of sense, right? It's you get DIY clients who aren't going to pay full freight for a lawyer, so you give them something else that costs less. That makes total sense to me.
Dorna Moini (32:29):
Definitely.
Jared Correia (32:30):
That's great.
Dorna Moini (32:30):
And it's even happening with the biggest customers we see. Our law firms with corporate clients who have all the money to spend are still intrigued by this type of tool because they can now serve their own needs more efficiently. They can get immediate responses. They need a response at 1:00 AM on a Friday. They could do that on their own, but that also builds brand loyalty to the law firm. So when they need someone to help them on their IPO or a big acquisition, they're going to that law firm because they're using their software tools that they've created for them.
Jared Correia (33:07):
Yeah, it seems to me that control and predictability are probably just as important as the price.
Dorna Moini (33:13):
Definitely.
Jared Correia (33:14):
I got one more set of questions for you. So when you started your career, you started in access to Justice Legal Aid, I think, which is that's not a surprising pathway for someone who developed a company like this. And so the Trump administration in their unending desire to do more and more stupid things at a rapid breakneck pace, it looks like the Legal Services corporation may be defunded, which would be massively problematic for access to justice. So do you have thoughts on that, first of all? And then second of all, what do you think the impacts would be and how would technology companies step in to assist if this does come to pass?
Dorna Moini (33:56):
Yeah, great question. Really, really important topic that I feel like we deal with agree on a consistent basis. There have been threats in the past to at least decrease the funding and where really the legal services corporation needs additional funding. We have a massive access to justice crisis in this country. There are so many people who are not getting access to legal services and these legal aid organizations who we work with, we work a lot with a lot of them very closely. They are some of the most resourceful, some of the most efficient, some of the most technology adopting advanced organizations that I've seen because they're doing it out of necessity to they have to serve their community. They have to, and so they're already doing so much with such little money. So they're the epitome of if you're giving government funding to someone, you want it to be used really effectively and efficiently. And I have seen firsthand how these Health Legal Services corporation and the legal aid organizations who are their grantees use this money and it really is in the best way possible. So that would be devastating if that did happen. Hopefully we can get bipartisan support for legal services, which is important for everyone, and really at its crux is important for our justice system. It's important for the credibility of our justice system to have everyone have belief and credibility and reliability in our justice system. The second part of your question, I think was around,
Jared Correia (35:32):
Yes, go on
Dorna Moini (35:32):
Technology.
Jared Correia (35:35):
I'm thinking of what's the impact of something that happens? I agree that would be devastating.
Dorna Moini (35:40):
Do
Jared Correia (35:40):
Technology companies step in? Because at that point, if there's no lawyers to help service people, it's probably all DIY tech, right? I would think
Dorna Moini (35:49):
If anything, yeah. The thing is these legal aid organizations are already building DIY tech, some of them either DIY tech or some combination where tech is helping them assist humans. I do not think that tech companies as a whole are going to step in to fill the gap because there is, I mean, we've seen, neither do I. There are the legal dooms of the world, but they're addressing the areas of law that most of their work is with business entity formation. They're addressing the areas of law that are most profitable, that are federal level or just massive, massive market opportunity. And there are no people going after knowing people going after these smaller niche areas at the beginning. So I used to work at a big firm. I did a lot of pro bono work, and the reason that I started Gavel was actually because of, as you said, because of some of the pro bono work that I was doing with domestic violence survivors, I actually built one of these types of tools.
(36:45):
So in 2020 ish, I built a tool for domestic violence survivors for California, and that took a very long time to build, and it still only addressed about half of the counties in California in one very specific area of law. So that's just what I'm trying to explain there is that it is very time consuming to build a tool that can address this through technology because of the fragmented nature of the legal system. Even if someone goes and spends a ton of resources on it, they're only going to be able to attack one area of law in the counties where they know the law and they can implement that.
Jared Correia (37:24):
So what you're saying is support LSD,
Dorna Moini (37:26):
Support LSD massively. Yeah, and hopefully, I mean, I would hope that we would increase, but I think right now we're just hoping that things don't go downwards,
Jared Correia (37:35):
And I will add to that on a personal level, support Los Angeles as well. Fuck these guys.
Dorna Moini (37:42):
Okay.
Jared Correia (37:43):
Do you want to hang around for another segment?
Dorna Moini (37:45):
Let's do it.
Jared Correia (37:47):
All right. I have an entire package of Fun Dip leftover, so this is going to be great. We'll be right back with during the morning. Welcome back, everybody. Here we are again at the Counter program. It's a podcast within a podcast, this conversational in nature where we can address usually unrelated topics that I want to explore at a greater depth with my guests. Expect no rhyme and very little reason. I don't think you remember this, but you came on to my old show, the Legal Toolkit in 2017.
Dorna Moini (38:23):
Wow. Do you
Jared Correia (38:24):
Remember what we did or no, it
Dorna Moini (38:25):
Was that long ago.
Jared Correia (38:26):
I do. I remember what we did.
Dorna Moini (38:29):
Tell me. Enlighten me.
Jared Correia (38:32):
We did a segment where it was a of trivia questions in the style of Jeopardy. I remember you distinctly being like, this is terrible. I hate this. So I said to myself, I would never do that to Dorna again. So I said, this time we'll just do double jeopardy, which should be even more fun.
Dorna Moini (38:52):
Excellent. I'm excited. Hopefully I'll do better than last time.
Jared Correia (38:58):
So what I did was I pulled questions from a Reader's Digest article entitled 14 Final Jeopardy Questions. Everybody got wrong, so don't feel bad because are these legal got wrong?
Dorna Moini (39:09):
They're just general.
Jared Correia (39:10):
No, of course not. Jeopardy
Dorna Moini (39:12):
Questions course.
Jared Correia (39:12):
Of course not. That'd be too easy. I'll give you some hints if you want. We don't have to do full on Jeopardy stuff, but I want to do it in the Jeopardy style. So what I'm going to do is, since we're playing double jeopardy now, the dollar amount of every question have gone up, but you get to pick your dollar amounts and that will eliminate them as we go.
Dorna Moini (39:33):
Let's do it.
Jared Correia (39:34):
We've got 400, 800, 1218, 1600 rather in $2,000 questions, and one of them is a daily double. So what monetary value would you like first?
Dorna Moini (39:47):
Does it go by difficulty?
Jared Correia (39:50):
No.
Dorna Moini (39:51):
No.
Jared Correia (39:51):
I guess it doesn't. Real jeopardy, but not here.
Dorna Moini (39:54):
Let's go big. Let's go for 2000.
Jared Correia (39:56):
Oh, shit. All right. 2000. Okay. Category is the Oscars. The Oscars. This Brit is the only actor to get Oscar nominations for playing two real life US presidents, both for films that came out in the 1990s. This British actor played two presidents in 1990s movies, got Oscar nominations for them. Do you have a guest or do you want some assistance?
Dorna Moini (40:26):
I'm
Jared Correia (40:26):
So
Dorna Moini (40:28):
I don't watch TV and I don't
Jared Correia (40:30):
Oh, I know. That's why I did this.
Dorna Moini (40:31):
That's why you did this. You wanted to torture me
Jared Correia (40:34):
Kind of.
Dorna Moini (40:38):
You've
Jared Correia (40:38):
Never seen a movie, have you never watched a movie? You've like, you
Dorna Moini (40:40):
Could have just said this, Brit, you an actor. I don't even know.
Jared Correia (40:45):
I was, let's start there. Do you know any British actors?
Dorna Moini (40:48):
Hugh Grant, right?
Jared Correia (40:49):
No. I thought you would say Hugh Grant. It's not Hug
Dorna Moini (40:51):
Grant.
Jared Correia (40:52):
Think older. Alright, let me throw something at you. Silence of the Lambs. Silence of the Lambs. Who's in Silence of the Lamps? Have you seen Silence of the Lambs?
Dorna Moini (41:05):
I haven't seen Salads and the Lambs.
Jared Correia (41:07):
Wow. So have you watched more than 20 movies in your lifetime?
Dorna Moini (41:12):
I have definitely Chef in my lifetime, yes, but
Jared Correia (41:16):
Okay. Okay. I'm just going to give this one to you because I don't know the word.
Dorna Moini (41:19):
Anthony Hopkins.
Jared Correia (41:21):
Oh my god. It's Anthony Hopkins. How did you know that?
Dorna Moini (41:28):
I do know actors in some movies, but I
Jared Correia (41:31):
Well played. Well played. See, you were sandbagging me. Anthony Hopkins is correct. $2,000 for you. He was Richard Nixon in the movie Nixon in 95, and then he was John Adams in the movie Amistad in 1997. All right, we're after to a roaring start. You got $2,000. You got four left. 400, 800. 1200 and 1600. What do you like?
Dorna Moini (41:56):
Let's go for 1600.
Jared Correia (41:58):
Great. 1600 is a daily double, which means you can make it 2000 if you want.
Dorna Moini (42:04):
Yeah, let's just go back. It's do daily
Jared Correia (42:05):
Double. I'll give you a hint. I'm going to be kind about this. I think this one's not too, is movie related? This was not bad. No, I just pulled random categories. So this category is historical figures.
Dorna Moini (42:17):
Okay,
Jared Correia (42:17):
So we're going to go, I think you got this. I'm going to read the statement. A 2012 poll by Britain's National Army Museum voted this man born in 1732 as the nation's greatest military enemy, Britain's greatest military enemy, as voted by real British people born in 1732. Who do you think? 1732 Emmy of Great Britain, perhaps a US president.
Dorna Moini (42:59):
George Washington.
Jared Correia (43:01):
Oh, George Washington. Correct.
Dorna Moini (43:03):
You actually, right?
Jared Correia (43:03):
Correct. I love your look of real surprise. This is great. You were like, I don't want to play Jeopardy, and you're fucking killing it. $4,000.
Dorna Moini (43:14):
I'm less worried about my dollars and more. I'm worried about the impression of the world as to how much I know US History.
Jared Correia (43:22):
Well, look, you got 4,000
Dorna Moini (43:23):
In the kitty. I know the first president of the United States, so
Jared Correia (43:26):
There we go. You got 4,000 in the kitty here, and you can't lose more than that, so you're going to be plus. So unfortunately you've left the hardest categories remaining, but that's all right. We'll get through this
Dorna Moini (43:39):
Together. That's okay.
Jared Correia (43:40):
400, 800, 1200. What do you like?
Dorna Moini (43:43):
Let's go. 808.
Jared Correia (43:45):
800. Okay. Authors is the category authors. Here's the answer. In 1937, his sister said he had hats of every description, which he would use as a foundation of his new book Hats of every description, which he would use as a foundation for his new book.
Dorna Moini (44:13):
That's the whole,
Jared Correia (44:15):
That's the whole whole, and I can tell you it's a children's book author, the Dr. Se. Correct? Correct. Wow. What was that little motion you did? That was an easy one though. For you tipping your hat.
Dorna Moini (44:36):
That was a hat tip. That was an easy one. I mean, if you just say Children's book, you gave me a good
Jared Correia (44:41):
Info. Is it though? Is it? I mean, so far you're three for three, you're up. You have to have 4,800.
Dorna Moini (44:47):
Excellent.
Jared Correia (44:48):
So we now have two categories left, 400, 1200.
Dorna Moini (44:52):
Let's go
Jared Correia (44:53):
1200. And you were like, I'm winning.
Dorna Moini (44:56):
I can just lose everything. Yeah,
Jared Correia (44:58):
Just go crazy from here on out. Although I would like to see you tip your cap a couple more times. Alright. The $1,200 question. Here's the subject that I'm sure you know quite well, which is French food history. French food history. A popular product was born when Gene, I'm going to mess this up. Ion Sean Ion, that sounds very French of this city. That's an important part of the question of this city substituted the juice of unripe grapes for vinegar. A popular product was born when Jean Na of this city substituted the juice of unripe. Grapes for vinegar. What product? Food product. French food product. I would be thinking about condiments is what I would be thinking about if I were you
Dorna Moini (45:56):
Mustard? Is it mustard?
Jared Correia (45:58):
But which kind of mustard?
Dorna Moini (46:02):
Dijon. Mustard. Mustard.
Jared Correia (46:04):
Oh, Dijon mustard. Dijon
Dorna Moini (46:08):
Mustard. Is that it?
Jared Correia (46:08):
Okay. Yes. Yes. So let's see. We got, I think you've got 7,000. 7,000. No, 6,000.
Dorna Moini (46:17):
This is going well.
Jared Correia (46:18):
Thousand. This is,
Dorna Moini (46:20):
I'm newly a fan of next level. Double jeopardy or jeopardy.
Jared Correia (46:23):
Oh yeah. We'll have you back on and we'll do it a third time, and then we'll do final jeopardy and then we can never have you back on again.
Dorna Moini (46:30):
Last, you need to actually put all of the people who have been on your podcast, pit them against each other.
Jared Correia (46:36):
Oh, that would be like Tournament of Champions.
Dorna Moini (46:38):
Yeah,
Jared Correia (46:40):
That'd be pretty sweet. That's a good idea, Evan. Mark that down. Okay, last question. The $400 question, theoretically the easiest one, but actually maybe the hardest. So the category is Asian geography, Asian geography, and the question is, or the answer is I should say, because we're doing Jeopardy. After all, it's the only country that borders both the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The only country that borders both the Casian Sea. That's Iran, isn't it? It is.
Dorna Moini (47:17):
I'm wrong. My parents would be embarrassed if I didn't get that question right.
Jared Correia (47:22):
Donna's parents, you can now be assured that Dorna knows Iranian geography. Five for five, for five for a total of $4,000. Sadly, there's no actual catch prize, but you can go home with a moral victory.
Dorna Moini (47:40):
That's really what matters most is the moral victory.
Jared Correia (47:42):
That's what matters most. So much more than money. Thank you for coming on again. You were a delight as always. We'll have you back on at some point.
Dorna Moini (47:50):
Thank you, Jared. This is super fun.
Jared Correia (47:52):
Thank you to our fantastic guest today. That was Doah Moy of Gavel. To learn more about gavel visit gavel.io, that's GAVE l.io gavel.io. Why am I spelling the word gavel for attorneys? Not my best day now, because I'll always be a nineties kid making uncouth fart jokes about the Cranberry song Linger, whose super passion is burning CDs for anyone who would listen. I'm not just doing the modern version of that, which is creating Spotify playlist for every podcast episode that I record where the songs are tangentially related to an episode topic. This week's playlist is focused on the Jeopardy theme, not the theme song, but the theme of Jeopardy. You know what I'm talking about, where we've got lots of questions and I guess also answers. Jeopardy is kind of weird, and it's sponsored by Vaseline, not Jeopardy the playlist. That's right. Good old petroleum jelly, which I might need after a round of real jeopardy. I'm just kidding. By the way, Vaseline hasn't sponsored shit, but I wish they would. That was basically my skin for a year of my life. Join us next time. When I tell you about how I lost my first layer of skin when I was six years old. Not even a joke. That's a true story. The joke is how I grew it back.