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Gavel took home the coveted “Best Technology” award during the second annual American Legal Technology Awards Gala in Nashville, Tennessee in October. Out of the twelve possible categories, the Technology award honors “a technology applied in a new or novel way in the legal industry that achieves a significant benefit.” The Runner Up for the award was GlobalNDA and DISCO Cecilia received an Honorable Mention.

Gavel is firmly the automation infrastructure of choice for the modern, scalable law practice. Its pioneering legal productization initiatives and features empower firms to unbundle and diversify their services and increase access to lawyers for indigent and low- to moderate-income clients.

In accepting the award, CEO Dorna Moini, who was accompanied by Tricia Duffin and Maddy Buck of Gavel’s customer success team, said that “Gavel is honored to be awarded the ‘Best Technology’ award. It truly is a testament to the powerful infrastructure our team has built, which enables so many incredible technology companies to be built on Gavel. This award goes out to all of our customers - the experts and legal professionals who have embraced technology to advance the way they serve their clients and make access to the law universal. We are a user-first company, and every feature we build comes from solving a deep and pressing need for our customers and their practice.”

Moini believed in the power of harnessing technology to not only increase efficiency but transform and expand the possible means of delivering legal services to a wide variety of clients so much so that she left a Big Law litigation position at Sidley Austin in 2017 to launch the first iteration of Gavel. Originally, Gavel was built for her pro bono use case - a self-serve portal for survivors of domestic violence to file for a restraining order against their abusers. The Gavel platform now supports automation in any area of law or jurisdiction, with law firms using Gavel in 23 different countries and 18 different languages.

When other firms and legal clinics approached her about how they might automate their templates and create similar client-facing and on-demand digital services for their own clients in several different practice areas, Moini saw that what she created could make a bigger impact on the industry as a whole if she pivoted the business to offer a SaaS product to lawyers.

That one decision has since led to Gavel users like Nick Graham, Erin Levine and Dennis Doss creating their own legal tech empires in Landlord Legal, Hello Divorce and Doss Docs, respectively, among many others.

Of Moini and Gavel, Thomas Martin - Founder of LawDroid and Co-Founder of the American Legal Technology Awards - said, “you are a shining example of what our community strives to achieve.”

Gavel would like to thank Mr. Martin, Cat Moon, and Patrick Palace as well as the twenty-eight expert judges for this honor and congratulate the other award winners and finalists.

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All Winners:

• A2J: Individual - Quinten Steenhuis
• A2J: LegalTech - SixFifty
• A2J: Legal Aid - Everyone Legal Clinic
• Court - Judicial Innovation Fellowship
• Education - Carla Reyes
• Enterprise - UniCourt
• Individual - Sandra Sandoval
• Law Department - Farrah Pepper
• Law Firm - Clifford Chance
• Startup - RASA
• Technology - Gavel
• Lifetime Achievement - Carolyn Elefant

All Judges (assigned to different categories):

• Erin Levine
• Jazz Hampton
• Julie Sobowale
• Allen Rodriguez
• Maya Markovich
• Nick Rishwain
• Gabriela Cubeiro
• Nicole Morris
• Alex Su
• Ed Walters
• Nicole Black
• Kristen Sonday
• Quentin Steenhuis
• Colin Levy
• Amanda Brown
• Natalie Anne Knowlton
• Dorna Moini
• Joseph Gartner
• Hon. Scott Schlegel
• Nicole Bradick
• Ann Cosimano
• Sonja Ebron
• Nefra-Ann MacDonald
• Gabriel Teninbaum
• Dan Lear
• Irene Mo
• Miguel Willis
• Mark Palmer