Inside Responsiv’s Design Partner Program: Building Legal Tech Through Customer Collaboration

Building legal tech requires more than just great code – it requires deep trust. Rather than rushing to market, Responsiv started with carefully selected design partners who could help shape their product. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, founder Jordan Domash revealed their collaborative approach to product development.

The process began with Jordan’s legal tech network. “It started out with a couple of folks in my network. I’ve been in legal technology for a long time and so I built a number of relationships which enable us to get started really quickly,” he explains. These initial partners were crucial – they “believed in the vision and identified the pain point that were articulating.”

This selective approach helped address the fundamental challenge of selling to lawyers: “You don’t want to get something wrong. And their whole job is managing risk for the company.” By working closely with design partners who understood both the problems and constraints, Responsiv could build trust while refining their product.

Their experience at Relativity informed this strategy. Having grown from 350 to 1,800 employees, they understood the importance of product-market fit before scaling. “I’ve been building AI enabled tools for attorneys for ten years,” Jordan notes, highlighting how this background helped them understand attorney workflows.

The design partners helped validate their focus on in-house counsel rather than law firms. As Jordan explains, “If I’m a solo GC at a tech company, right, maybe my expertise is in m and A or transactions and now I’m dealing with privacy or employment in all these different jurisdictions.” This insight shaped their product development.

The approach generated powerful word-of-mouth growth. “Most of the new customers that we’ve signed in the past month or two have come from referrals from existing customers,” Jordan reveals. “We haven’t done any marketing. We just had our first salesperson start this week.”

Even after initial success, they maintained controlled growth through a waitlist. “Since we publicly launched, we have a bunch of paying customers happily using the product, but we haven’t really turned on our go to market motion yet,” Jordan notes. This allowed them to continue refining their product based on user feedback.

The strategy helped them navigate AI adoption concerns. “There’s incredible interest and it’s really easy to get a attorney to take a demo of what we’re building. But at the same time there’s a natural concern for folks that aren’t really close to the underlying tech.” Design partners helped them address these concerns through successful implementations.

Their focus on specific workflows proved crucial. “The market in general talks about legal as one problem. In reality its several major categories and even within those categories there are very specific workflows,” Jordan explains. Design partners helped them understand these workflows deeply.

For founders building products for risk-averse markets, Responsiv’s approach offers valuable lessons. By starting with trusted design partners, focusing on specific workflows, and growing through referrals, they created a playbook for building trust while developing innovative technology. Their story shows that sometimes the best way to move fast is to start slow.