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After testing it head-to-head against a competitor on the same document, David chose Gavel Exec for the depth and accuracy of its analysis and the curated legal knowledge behind it.
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"You're going to find deeper, better, and more accurate answers from Gavel than from some of the other legal-based AI I've used. It somehow reasons better."
— David Austin, Attorney at Law and Founder of David Austin Law
Gavel Exec is AI contract review software for legal teams that review, redline, and negotiate contracts directly inside Microsoft Word, with web access for additional contract workflows. For David Austin, it became the tool he reaches for the moment a counterparty draft lands and a response has to go back out.
Customer: David Austin, Attorney at Law and Founder of David Austin Law
Industry: Commercial Real Estate / Cross-Border Corporate
Use Case: AI contract review, redlining, and clause drafting for commercial leases, acquisitions and dispositions, and entity formation for US and Hong Kong family offices
Product: Gavel Exec
If you ask David what contract review used to look like, the answer is blunt.
"My contract review process was completely manual. I would open up a Microsoft Word document, and if I was reviewing a client redline, I'd run track changes, see what the differences were, and then manually accept and reject each of them."
Clicking through changes was the easy part. The harder cost was everything he had to hold in his own head.
"A lot of it had to do with my memory — what I previously may have accepted or not. It was extremely time-consuming and really exhausting, because it required a tremendous amount of unnecessary work."
Every agreement meant reconstructing his own precedent from memory, then breaking stride to track down the statute or principle behind a position. Over enough files, that overhead set a hard ceiling on how much work he could take on.
David has spent more than a decade in commercial real estate, working both sides of the table as an attorney and an active investor. He founded David Austin Law in 2015, and today he serves commercial real estate investors, landlords, and family offices across the US and Hong Kong, handling everything from commercial leases to acquisitions, dispositions, and fractional general counsel work. When an overseas client decides to move capital or operations into the US, David is the one structuring the entities and reviewing the contracts that follow.
He does it without a bench. There's no associate to hand a first pass to, no partner to ask whether a clause is too aggressive. That's the gap Gavel Exec ended up filling.
"I use it a lot as a thought partner. As a solo lawyer, I don't have colleagues whose office I can walk to and ask. It at least gets me on the right footing when I'm proposing changes to a document."
The feature David reaches for first is context. Rather than running a generic checklist, he tells Gavel Exec what to scrutinize and why, grounding each review in his own criteria.
"One of the best things I use right now is the context. I can have my review be based on a set of criteria I want to review it against."
From there the work turns into a back-and-forth. After he runs a redline, or has Gavel Exec mark up a client's proposed changes, he asks for alternatives that land in exactly the right register.
"I'll ask it to provide alternative clauses that are not super aggressive but not super passive. Being able to temper my redline is really helpful."
It also covers the gaps in his recall, often on questions that sit at the center of his practice. Working through a commercial lease, he might need to remember how operating expenses are typically passed through to a tenant in a given market. That used to mean a detour into research. Now he asks in the chat window and keeps moving.
Then there's the part of the job that has nothing to do with clauses: making the deal legible to clients who don't think in legal terms. Gavel Exec helps him translate.
"It'll help me explain complicated legal principles in a much more simplified manner, which is very helpful when I'm dealing with clients. They don't necessarily need to know exactly how the sausage is made. They just want to know what the sandwich is going to taste like."
It pushes back, too, laying out the upside and downside of challenging a provision, sometimes from an angle he hadn't weighed.
David didn't take any of this on trust. When he evaluated Gavel Exec, he ran a controlled comparison, putting an identical document through Gavel Exec and a competitor and grading them on a single standard.
"The main criterion for me was the quality of the response. There are features, like buttons and things like that, that really don't matter in the long run. What matters is how accurate and helpful the response is."
For David, the thing that separates Gavel Exec from generic tools isn't the interface. It's what sits underneath the answers.
"It's a misconception that things like Gavel are just a wrapper for AI. The thing that's bespoke and special is the body of knowledge it's been trained on. You're going to find deeper, better, and more accurate answers from Gavel than from some of the other legal-based AI I've used. It somehow reasons better."
Ease of use sealed it, for a reason that says something about how he works.
"It's extremely easy to use, because I work very well in conversation. That's probably why I became an attorney. It has a very conversational, interactive interface. For me and my team, it's very simple and very intuitive."
Asked to put a number on the impact, David doesn't land on a single one. The gains come from a few places at once.
The first is as much psychological as practical. Half the battle is just starting, and a blank document is where the hours tend to disappear.
"It helps you get over analysis paralysis, where you start overthinking things and going down rabbit holes. It gives a redline a start. So I can review far more agreements than before."
Time spent searching drops, too. "I spend a lot less time looking for stuff, trying to find a statute that justifies something," he says. "I can simply ask the chat window about what I'm thinking."
But the result he keeps coming back to is bigger than his own calendar. He sees it leveling a field that has always favored size.
"It's really empowered small firm owners and solo practitioners. It's democratized the way lawyers can operate. It enables smaller operators to provide the quality of review — possibly even better review — that large firms could provide, in half the time."
For one attorney going up against firms with deep benches, matching their output at twice the speed changes what kinds of clients and deals he can credibly serve.
David's recommendation to other lawyers is just the method he used himself, pointed outward.
"If you're on the fence, look at Gavel as opposed to just straight AI or competitors. The answers are deeper, it somehow reasons better, and it's extremely easy to use. Figure out whether it's easy for you to use based on the way you work, and I think you'll find that it really is."
Gavel Exec now runs through David's whole practice: how he reviews contracts, tempers redlines, works through unfamiliar law, and competes, as one person, with firms many times his size.
Yes. Solo and small-firm attorneys use Gavel Exec to review redlines, draft tempered alternative clauses, and check unfamiliar points of substantive law directly inside Microsoft Word, work that would otherwise require associates. By giving every review a strong starting point, it lets smaller practices deliver review quality comparable to large firms in a fraction of the time.
The most reliable test is to run the same contract through each tool and compare the answers on accuracy and depth rather than feature lists. Gavel Exec is built on a curated body of legal knowledge, which tends to produce deeper, more accurate analysis than general-purpose AI that simply wraps a language model.
Yes. Gavel Exec supports commercial leases, acquisitions and dispositions, and entity formation, including cross-border matters such as foreign family offices and investors setting up US corporations.
Review, redline, and draft contracts directly in Microsoft Word. Or get a demo to see context-driven review on your own agreements.
Gavel has been acquired by Relativity, a leading legal data intelligence company.
Omar Nakadi, legal counsel at a regulated financial services firm, uses Gavel Exec to review counterparty redlines, negotiate contracts inside Microsoft Word, and cut contract review time by up to 60%. After trying multiple AI contract platforms, he chose Gavel Exec for its analysis quality, Word-based workflow, and advanced risk-tiered issue spotting.
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