When we started Donna, we made a decision about who it was for. Small and mid-sized law firms do some of the most demanding legal work there is, usually without a procurement team, an innovation function or anyone whose job is AI. The most capable legal AI has mostly been built for firms that have all three. We wanted to change that.
As Donna has grown, that decision has shaped a lot of others: what we build, what we leave out, how we price it and how we work with the firms and the forensic and litigation support teams that use it. Values are only useful if they change decisions like these, so we have written ours down in the form we actually apply them. There are three.
Access by Design
Serious legal AI should not depend on the size of the firm. A practice of ten lawyers has the same duty of care as a practice of a thousand, and often a heavier workload per person. What it does not have is the time to run a six-month procurement process or the staff to manage an implementation.
So we build Donna to be adopted the way smaller firms actually adopt technology. A firm starts with one workflow that matters commercially, alongside the systems it already uses. We connect those systems as part of setting Donna up, and there are no paid add-ons for it. Plans run month to month, and the 90-day AI Uplift is included with Teams. The firm expands when the value is clear, and not before.
In practice, this value is why every plan includes unlimited users, why pricing is per firm rather than per seat, and why forensic teams that need their own environment can have one, with data and processing kept in Australia.
The Lawyer Leads
Donna can research, review and draft using the firm’s instructions, knowledge and trusted sources. It can take on a large piece of work and bring it back finished. But the professional judgment, and the responsibility that comes with it, stays with the lawyer. We do not see that as a limitation to be designed away. It is how legal work is meant to be done.
This value shows up across the product. Anything Donna does that would change a matter in a way others can see stops at an approval point first. Claims about the firm’s documents come with citations that open the page they rely on, so checking the work is quick. Workflow Agents carry the firm’s own process, written by its own lawyers, rather than our idea of how law should be practised.
It also shapes what we decline to build. When a feature would make Donna appear more capable by making the lawyer less involved, we leave it out.
Clarity Is the Product
We do not measure ourselves by features shipped. We measure whether the work moved faster, whether fewer steps were repeated, whether clients knew what was happening and whether lawyers had more time for judgment. If a change to Donna does not make the work clearer, it does not go in.
This is why a firm’s first workflow starts with success measures agreed upfront, taken from the firm’s own matters. It is why each matter has a brief that stays current as documents arrive, and why clients see where their matter stands without needing to ask. And it is why we keep the product simple to use, even where the work underneath it is not.
Putting Them to Work
These values are not new to us. They are how we have made decisions since the first version of Donna. Writing them down makes them easier to hold ourselves to, and easier for the firms we work with to hold us to as well.
We will use them when we decide what to build next, when we take on a new firm and when we bring new people onto the team. If you work with Donna and see us fall short of one of them, we would like to hear about it.