San Francisco-headquartered document automation vendor Documate has rebranded to Gavel and hired chief technology officer Pierre Martin, who until 2019 was head of engineering for Amazon Prime Video.
Gavel is a no-code platform for building legal products, and its technology underpins the likes of Landlord Legal, Hello Divorce, JusTech, and Horse Law, which have been able to build and scale legal technology companies without hiring large technology teams.
To date, legal tech companies in 23 different countries and 18 different languages are built on the Gavel platform.
Gavel says that this rebrand signals its continued commitment to enabling legal productisation, observing that for centuries the gavel has been used to express finality in decision-making—final decisions generated through a trusted process. Gavel, by analogy, helps turn process, law, and services into customizable legal products, although readers in the UK will be quick to point out that the UK courts have never used a gavel. At least now we have an excuse to use our library of gavel images.
“We founded Gavel to solve our own need to automate and spread our expertise as attorneys,” said Dorna Moini, CEO and founder of Gavel, who started the company while she was an associate at Sidley Austin. “The first step was to build the most powerful document automation platform. Since then, our customers have shown us that Gavel delivers much more, as they build expert systems, host client portals, and conduct their firm’s billing and attorney-client communication on Gavel.”
To further its growth plans, Gavel has hired Martin as CTO and has doubled its engineering team in the past three months. Prior to joining, Martin co-founded and scaled logistics software company Beacon. Before Amazon, he was senior tech product manager for Microsoft Xbox.
Moini said: “Pierre has an impressive track record in starting and growing technology companies and teams, and we’ve already seen the impact of his work at Gavel as we build the infrastructure for the future of legal services.”
Martin added: “Gavel’s rapid growth shows we are addressing a real need for legal teams and their customers. We now have a unique opportunity to invent the future of legal services with our community and help our customers make their services more transparent, accessible, and easy to use for the millions who need them. Gavel’s platform not only drastically reduces costs of legal services by automating repeated tasks; our customers now have the unique ability to launch legal products with broad reach, at scale, online. All of this, without writing a single line of code.”
Gavel is based in the US with operations globally. Learn more at www.gavel.io.