Being a product owner is turning out to be an interesting moment to screw a bit with your mind and your thought process.
I’ve worked on DraftCheck.io now for quite some time. That process of building something is one that I love and am familiar with. I just simply love building things.
However building things for lawyers is, from my perspective, harder.
As lawyers, we are trained, and the profession requires (or at least it feels that way) perfection or near perfection. Missing small things in sentence or a word can have very negative results, even if easily fixable. And the higher the dollar value the more the importance of it. We all had that law school class where they drilled in the importance of a comma, and I would assume most lawyers have had a moment where something went for or against your client for something that small as well.
So my brain goes a little nutty when building products for me (because I am basically my target customer right now) and my friends. The same standard applies. Missing something can have disastrous results. And being the product builder/owner is very different than being the product’s lawyer (in-house or outside counsel), user, or what have you. It’s your essence in a piece of code, software, or essentially a button.
I take great pride in DraftCheck.io. The goal is to catch everything (not just some things) and to do it with exceptional accuracy and reliability. 80% isn’t ok. There are always going to be moments when a feature doesn’t work as expected, but it can’t miss stuff. The product can give you too much, but can’t give you too little. That’s the requirement of being a lawyer and therefore the requirement of building products for lawyers.
I always want that second set of eyes. And we all know a couple of things: 1. When you’ve read something 20x, some things start to blur over; and 2. Those really long documents (who hasn’t done a 150 page doc with 10 additional exhibits), no one is categorizing that doc in their head perfectly.
And so DraftCheck.io was born.
I truly hope you all love it. It’s been a labor of love for me. And I hope it’s successful enough that I can continue to build more of the products that I want (and hopefully you want to).
I’ll most likely post a lot of thoughts over the next while of the intersection of lawyer and product owner and why DraftCheck.io was created. Soooo many little decisions that have helped get the product here. And soooo many people that have helped along the way.