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How to define the scope of a legal product or tech product by starting small, thinking big, and iterating quickly based on your learnings.
Easy intake and document automation to auto-populate your templates.
Before you begin building your legal product, several critical steps will help ensure its success. First, choose the right model and gather the necessary tools. Next, establish a structured approach to building, including user research, competitive analysis, and problem identification. Only after conducting thorough research should you create a prototype, followed by user feedback and iterative improvements until you have a product worth investing in.
After completing user research, define the scope of your product. For automated legal documents, this means deciding what to automate. The key is to start small, focusing only on essential features to develop an MVP—a functional product that attracts early users without unnecessary complexity.
Once you receive user feedback, iterate on your product, gradually adding features and expanding its scope (e.g., covering additional legal document types or jurisdictions). Using the right tools, such as Gavel, enables rapid prototyping, helping you refine your product efficiently while minimizing wasted time and resources.
Your research should drive decisions—avoid committing to specific product versions too early. Instead, validate your ideas with user feedback before finalizing the MVP.
Prioritizing Features: To build an effective MVP, prioritize features based on user needs. A useful method is lean prioritization, categorizing features into:
Additionally, tools like LucidChart can help visualize and refine your development process.
Once you have scoped out your project and estimated the necessary time and budget, stick to those estimates. Marty Cagan, in Inspired: How to Create Tech Products People Love, emphasizes making a "high-integrity commitment"—a disciplined approach to ensuring product viability and sustainability.
Throughout the process—before, during, and after building—conduct ongoing market research. Understand existing solutions and identify how your product provides a better alternative. Incorporate this insight into your MVP and all subsequent iterations.
To create a successful automated legal product, ensure it is financially sustainable for both your business and your users. Consider:
User financial due diligence, like market research, should be an ongoing process before, during, and after development.
Once you've followed these steps and are ready to build your MVP, the next phase will involve gathering further user feedback, refining your product, and planning for version 2.0. These next steps will be covered in the following article in this series.
Transactional lawyers are turning to AI tools to draft, review, and manage contracts faster and more accurately than ever before. In this guide, we break down the top AI tools lawyers are using today, and how they help firms deliver high-quality work with greater efficiency.
See how estate planning attorneys use AI in doing their legal work. Use AI like Gavel Exec directly in Microsoft Word to streamline trust reviews, redline outdated clauses, and deliver clear, client-friendly updates. This article outlines five practical use cases with real-world prompts to help lawyers modernize their estate planning workflow using AI.
This guide offers practical, step-by-step best practices for using Gavel Exec, Gavel's AI assistant in Microsoft Word. You can review, redline, and negotiate contracts more efficiently. Whether you're drafting in Chat, creating reusable Playbooks, or managing more complex Projects, the guide walks you through how to structure prompts, use context files, benchmark clauses, and train the tool to reflect your preferences. We're written this specifically for transactional lawyers using legal AI in their practice.
