Ownright Law
Founding design @ Ownright
I joined Ownright as the Founding Product Designer where I worked closely with the founding team to define and build out the road map for our legal conveyancing product, Conv.ai.
Ownright is a real estate law startup, helping home buyers and sellers close their homes after they've had an offer accepted. "Conveyancing" is the legal term for transferring ownership from one party to another.
Role & timeline
Team
Founder/PM, 4 Engineers, +1 Product Designer
Timeline
2024 to 2025
Role
Strategy
Research
Product design
Ownright offered clients a home closing tracker app that was powered by a backend legal process.
Problem
Our team was wasting hours each week on manual steps like tracking closings in spreadsheets and switching tools. As a result, each lawyer could only handle a limited number of closings per month, which put a ceiling on how fast the company could grow.
Problem sizing
These same problems were common at real estate law firms. In Ontario, there are more than 2,000 small to midsize law firms, spending $2-4mm on software annually. Ownrights vision was to sell Conv.ai to these law firms in the future.
Problem in numbers
5
Initial # of closings per lawyer, per month, or our measure of capacity.
20
# of closings per month we were closing when I joined.
Research
I led a continuous discovery process with our legal team to uncover their biggest issues. I joined their stand-ups, paired on workflows, and shared prototypes async to gather feedback. Common pain points included:
Multi-tasking
Lawyers often worked on multiple closings at once but lacked clear visibility across them, making it easy to miss important deadlines.
Collaboration
The team needed to know who did what on which closing and what was next, but they didn't have inline tools to do so, so they relied on Slack messages to fill in the gaps.
State visibility
Closings ranged from 7–60 days, with key milestones throughout. Early on, 1 in 4 closings missed deadlines and fell off track.
Building Conv.ai
To accomplish our goal of nearly doubling the number of closings per lawyer per month by addressing many of these issues uncovered in research, we decided our best chance was to build an internal product that would support the legal conveyancing process from end-to-end.
Feature highlights
Features like Mortgage Tracking (called Encumbrances when selling a property) enabled the legal team to facilitate more of their process in Conv.ai.
We built tools like global todo lists and a closing peek view to help address the team's ability to multi-task closings in progress.
A centralized dashboard improved the state visibility of a lawyer's closings, and what needed attention at any given time.
We incorporated inline note tools and status review widgets to facilitate greater collaboration on closings.
Outcomes
By the end of the year, we reached 80+ closings per month and our team's capacity more than doubled. At $1,000 per closing, we were able to demonstrate more than one million dollars in annual revenue which helped us raise a seed round in late 2024.
120%
Increase in closings per lawyer per month
320%
Revenue growth, year end 2024