Gavel
Lawyerist Rating for Gavel
Rating Breakdown
Our Rating: 4.7/5
Our rating is based on our subjective judgment. Use our resources—including our rating and community ratings and reviews—to find the best fit for your firm.
4.7/5
What is Gavel?
Gavel (f/k/a Documate) is a document assembly & automation platform that allows you to create templates and forms to speed up your document creation. Attorneys can generate document sets for internal use and create intake forms for clients. Additionally, workflows—a series of automated actions—can be easily shared with colleagues. Use the following Gavel review of its features and pricing to determine if the platform is right for you.
Starting Cost: $83/month (2 users)
- MS Word Add-in
- Guided Interviews
- White Labeling
- Weak Zapier Integration
- No Ready-made Templates
- Expensive
Gavel Features
Customer Experience & Support
/5
Price & Value
/5
Security
/5
Innovation & Future-Proofing
/5
June 7, 2022 Update Renders Software Useless for Lawyers
After using documate for over 2 years, documate randomly re-wrote their software on June 7, 2022. The software is now only useful if you have 2 or fewer “interviews” or only 1 client. The software, while it had its limitations, could at least pull answers from one interview into another answer file allowing you to use the new updated template with your client’s data. Now, however, you can no longer search answer files by client name, preventing you from finding your client’s most recent answer file and importing those answers into a new template. My office spent over 2 years building templates and training around the software as it was formerly built. All of that time is now a waste and documate has no answer or solution.
Hi Robert – We discussed and resolved this issue for you immediately after you raised it in June 2022, but I wanted to leave a note here for public visibility since this review remains live. We care immensely about building a powerful product that evolves with new features, but that always continues to meet our customers’ needs. When we heard your concerns with the new feature release and your use case, we assigned members of our engineering team to immediately add your request into the new version of Data Manager, and that resolved your needs. Thank you for continuing to trust us with your automation and online legal practice. We have also invited you to our customer feedback group, where we always run new features by current customers before we release to make sure we’re accounting for all use cases.
Thank you!
Dorna
CEO, Documate
been looking for this for years
Great product and team. Excited I found it here! Robust enough that I can do almost anything in my documents and not have to make edits after they generate. But also dead simple to get started. And it can be client-facing. Their team is responsive at all hours of the days, nights, and weekends – dont know if their team sleeps!!! I have tried pretty much every solution out there, and the others are all so developer-centric that I couldn’t figure them out, and I’m pretty tech savvy! Best platform out there – been looking for something like this for my entire time practicing.
Not just doc automation, but legal product/app builder!
I cannot emphasize how much Documate has changed my practice. I started using it for pure document automation, but I have now built a suite of legal products and web apps (e.g., I have a “TurboTax” for uncontested divorces, one for wills, and another for employment docs, and many more coming!) that I charge consumers for using Documate and the paywall integrations. So the software has paid dividends in allowing me to monetize my practice by building flat fee tools. I was going to hire a developer to help me do this, but Documate is like your own personal software development tool for your firm (but I didn’t need to learn anything about code).
It’s been easy and intuitive to set up, but whenever I’ve had questions, their customer service has far surpassed my expectations. I’ve made a few feature requests that they implemented. So, for that, you’re welcome to the rest of you… :)
Goldilocks of legal platforms
Lots of power, but also super easy to use. Justttt right.
Powerful tool for complex document automation and client collaboration
Our firm uses Documate to generate a variety of contract sets. Because no coding knowledge is required, we were able to set it up very quickly. It allows for quite a bit of complexity in formatting your documents, adding conditional logic, and setting up complex calculations. The system passed our high privacy and data security requirements, and they set every user up on a dedicated instance, which is crucial when you’re dealing with sensitive legal information.
Whenever we have had any “wish list” items, they’ve been quick to add features. The customer service is excellent.
Our firm loves Documate
Used to be HotDocs users, but we switched to Documate last year. We love the software. It’s very easy to set up workflows, but it also has been able to do everything we want it to – all kinds of formatting, conditions, calculations, etc. Thanks to the Documate team for their excellent customer support, too.