Beyond Law Firms: How Responsiv Found Product-Market Fit by Ignoring Traditional Legal Tech Buyers

Most legal tech companies chase law firm budgets. Responsiv took a different path. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, founder Jordan Domash explained why targeting in-house counsel unlocked rapid growth in legal tech.

The problem was hiding in plain sight. “Put yourself in the shoes of a general counsel or an in house attorney at a corporation,” Jordan explains. “Someone from the business comes to you and says, can we do XYZ? We have an employment issue, or there’s a new privacy regulation, and you need to effectively understand what is the law on that particular topic.”

These in-house attorneys face a painful choice: “They either use Google and do the basic research themselves, using whatever resources are available, or they’ll call outside counsel, which is really expensive.” This creates a recurring cost drain – companies spend thousands on basic legal questions because they lack alternatives.

Traditional legal research platforms like Westlaw and LexisNexis weren’t solving this problem. “Our early users are folks that use west law or LexisNexis early in their career… now they’re on a small team, they’re in a senior role, and they dread having to go back into a platform like that.”

This insight shaped Responsiv’s entire strategy. “Most of our peers that are building legal research tools are actually get the bulk of their spend from law firms… For us, basically we’re the anti traditional legal research tool and that we’re hyper focused on the corporate use case.”

The decision to target in-house counsel opened up a massive market. As Jordan notes, “When I say corporations, that basically means everyone.” But rather than trying to serve everyone at once, they focused on two key segments: regulated industries with complex legal needs and high-growth tech companies facing new challenges daily.

This targeting helped navigate complex budget dynamics. “There’s budget for in house people and tools. And then there’s also a separate budget that often rolls up to the general counsel in terms of outside council spend.” By positioning their solution as a way to reduce outside counsel spend, they could tap into larger budgets.

The strategy is working. Without traditional marketing or sales teams, they’ve built a growing base of paying customers through referrals. “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.”

The lesson for founders? Sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in serving neglected segments of established markets. By focusing on in-house counsel rather than law firms, Responsiv found a way to build a scalable business while avoiding direct competition with entrenched players.

Their story shows that product-market fit often comes from understanding user workflows rather than technical innovation alone. As Jordan puts it, “I don’t know if they have a appreciation for the complexity of some of these really narrow workflows. And it takes a long time to get up to speed on what you really need to deliver around the product to actually be used by a legal team or an attorney.”