When we tell people we are building a legal platform and starting with residential property, we sometimes get a puzzled look, as if conveyancing were a detour on the way to the real thing. We think it is the opposite: property is the sharpest possible test of everything a legal platform claims to be.
The matter almost everyone lives through
Most people never brief counsel, never litigate, never read a judgment. But most people, at some point, buy or sell a home. It is the largest transaction of their lives, run on documents they have never seen before, under deadlines they did not choose, with professionals they met last week. If legal technology is going to matter to ordinary people, this is where it will happen first.
A deal is a team that never chose each other
A property transaction is not a lawyer and a client. It is a seller, a buyer, two legal representatives, an agent, a broker, a bank, and sometimes a building inspector, none of whom picked the others, all of whom must finish one piece of work together on a date the contract chose. Today that team coordinates by email and phone tag, and every gap between messages is where deals wobble.
That is exactly the shape Donna was built for: one Space per matter, everyone who belongs to the work inside it, each seeing what their role entitles them to see. Agents send the contract in one link. Buyers watch their own progress against real milestones instead of calling for updates. Lawyers run the matter with Donna handling the admin. The deal stops being a chain of messages and becomes a place.
What property forces us to get right
- Non-lawyers as first-class users. A buyer opening their first contract needs clarity without condescension. Building for them makes Donna better for every future client in every practice area.
- Documents that leave the building. When a pack of documents is delivered to a buyer, they keep what they were sent, durably, like email but organised. Delivery, recall windows, versioned supersedes: property made us build real document custody, not just sharing.
- Deadlines with consequences. Cooling-off, finance, building and pest, settlement: property matters run on dates. Donna’s timelines track them automatically, which is a discipline every area of law turns out to want.
- Trust between strangers. Parties who have never met exchange the most sensitive documents they own. Every security decision we publish gets stress-tested here.
The wedge, not the destination
We are open about the strategy: property is the wedge. The platform underneath, Spaces, agents, citations, timelines, the ingestion pipeline, is not conveyancing software. It is legal collaboration infrastructure being proven on the hardest consumer-facing matter first. Wills and estates, small business work, family law: each is a team of people who did not choose each other, working documents against deadlines, needing to see the same truth. We will meet them in order.
Get the property deal right, and the rest of law follows.