A conversation
“Good conditions make good lawyers”

A conversation with Jovita and Andrius, founders of the Lithuanian firm Gabne. Gabnys, on why seriousness is not the same as professionalism, what artificial intelligence takes from lawyers and what it leaves behind, and why legal design begins right at the entrance to the office.

I first saw Jovita on stage at the Legal Design Summit 2025 in Helsinki. I was speaking at the same summit, so I had the chance to watch the room from the side. Her talk was impossible to miss. Black and white slides, no visual clutter, all substance: that kind of delivery grabbed your attention at once. Jovita spoke about things many lawyers discuss among themselves, yet far fewer are willing to say out loud.

The thesis that finally took shape for me after her talk is a simple one: seriousness does not mean professionalism.

It takes more than a serious face and a formal suit. Lawyers find this hard. Maybe it is time to change something. We listened to Jovita all the more closely because there was a solid record of real legal practice behind her words. She is one of us. Without that, the legal community meets any new idea with hostility, and that is understandable.

A few months passed after that talk, and my own affairs brought me to Lithuania. I remembered that this was exactly where Jovita was based, and I could not pass up the chance to continue the conversation we had started at the summit. For technical reasons this text is coming out almost half a year late, but we felt it was important to share it anyway.

Jovita met me together with her partner Andrius at the entrance to their office. My visit happily coincided with the finish of a renovation: Gabne. Gabnys had just completed a new and very stylish space.

That detail in particular charmed me. If you are going to bring your dreams to life, then do it in everything, with no exceptions. There are no small things here.

Andrius and Jovita both have a strong hard legal background. They did not arrive at a creative specialization out of inexperience; they chose it deliberately, from within their own practice. It was a curious insight for me that Lithuania is among the leaders of the gamedev industry. Seen against that backdrop, the firm’s focus on law for fashion, art, and the creative sector looks far less counterintuitive than it might at first.

Most likely it comes down to the approach. This specialization grew not out of a marketing analysis of the market, but out of an honest answer to a question worth asking yourself: what is it that I truly want to do. And it is needed not only because it lets you do the work that brings real pleasure, but also because it is directly tied to professional fulfillment. Specialization is the path to becoming the best at what you do.

We could not, of course, avoid the subject of artificial intelligence, which has already firmly entered our profession.

It is hard to argue with that. While I was preparing this material, one of the first companies in legal design, Dot from Helsinki, announced that it was shutting down with a very similar wording. As for soft skills, the number of conferences, offline meetups, and professional events only keeps growing. Covid showed clearly how hard it is for people to connect and work together even through a screen. For lawyers, the ability to build a living rapport is needed, perhaps, most acutely of all.

A conversation about the future of the profession naturally led us to the question of the skills a modern lawyer needs.

A lawyer used to be able to stay a craftsman. By that I mean an approach where you master a skill once and then use it for the rest of your life, roughly like riding a bicycle. Today the pace of change is such that the moment you lose momentum, catching up becomes very hard. Even the fashionable talk of a right to make mistakes is, in essence, an expression of that same ability to make decisions.

We did not skip the economics of legal design either. As it happened, by the time this text was published Antti Innanen had written about closing Dot as a standalone practice in legal design. The economics, sadly, really do not add up if this is the only thing you do and nothing else.

That is where the strength of Gabne. Gabnys lies. Because of this approach, their product clearly stands out on the market. And the legal services market itself, according to Jovita, is being pulled in two directions at once.

At the end I returned once more to the question of a lawyer’s key qualities. The answer from Andrius and Jovita had not changed: curiosity and the ability to make decisions. And, frankly, I have nothing to add to that. Every other quality flows, one way or another, from these two.

Legal design is about conditions and about process. It has to be in everything: from how the entrance to the office looks to how the invoice sent to the client is drawn up.