After more than a decade in technology and product leadership, Saumya Banker is applying his experience to one of the world’s most established professions, building Donna AI to help smaller law firms operate more efficiently and give lawyers more time to focus on their clients.
For many technology entrepreneurs, building a successful company begins with identifying a gap in the market. For Saumya Banker, the journey toward founding Donna AI began with something far more personal.
When a family member was navigating a difficult divorce, Banker helped manage communications and interactions with the legal team.
What he encountered left a lasting impression.
Important information was scattered across email conversations, communication was often delayed, and routine administrative tasks contributed to an already stressful experience.
For someone who had spent years working in technology and improving business processes, the experience raised an important question: why were highly trained legal professionals still spending so much time managing tasks that technology could potentially simplify?
That question eventually became the foundation of Donna AI, a legal technology company Banker co-founded to help smaller law firms reduce administrative workloads, improve operational efficiency, and better manage daily responsibilities.
Building a Career Around Technology and Business Growth
Before entering the legal technology industry, Banker built a career spanning more than 13 years in product leadership and technology-driven businesses.
His experience included work in financial technology and other regulated industries, where organizations must balance innovation, customer expectations, operational performance, and compliance requirements.
One notable chapter involved Fig, a Canadian digital lending company.
According to his published professional background, Banker helped scale the business from its early stages to approximately $30 million in annual recurring revenue.
The experience provided exposure to the demands of developing technology products while building the processes and teams needed to support business growth.
It also reinforced the importance of understanding how customers actually use products rather than simply building technology around assumptions.
For Banker, those lessons would become especially relevant when he began exploring the legal industry.
While financial services and legal services operate in different environments, both involve complex processes, sensitive information, and customers who depend on accuracy and timely communication.
His background provided a foundation for approaching these challenges from a product development and operational perspective.
The Personal Experience That Inspired Donna AI
Banker’s interest in legal technology grew after he helped his cousin navigate a divorce case.
During the process, he noticed difficulties with communication, billing transparency, and coordinating information across different systems.
These challenges added frustration to an already emotionally demanding experience.
Rather than viewing those difficulties as isolated problems, Banker began questioning whether they reflected broader operational weaknesses within smaller law firms.
His response was to investigate.
Before committing to building Donna AI, Banker and his co-founder spoke with approximately 75 lawyers, studying their daily responsibilities and the challenges they encountered.
The research included observing how legal professionals managed client communications, administrative tasks, billing, and case-related responsibilities.
The research clarified the pressures facing smaller firms.
Many lawyers were spending significant portions of their working days on tasks that, while necessary, did not require their full legal expertise.
For Banker, this represented an opportunity to rethink how technology could support legal professionals without interfering with the judgment and relationships at the center of their work.
Why Understanding the Customer Comes Before Building the Product
One defining characteristic of Banker’s entrepreneurial approach is his emphasis on understanding the problems people experience before trying to solve them.
His research into law firm operations highlighted the difference between how technology companies imagine a profession works and how professionals actually spend their days.
A lawyer might begin the morning reviewing documents, responding to a prospective client’s inquiry, managing administrative follow-ups, attending meetings, and later trying to reconstruct the time spent on different matters.
Each activity matters, but competing responsibilities can make it hard to stay focused.
Banker recognized that introducing another complicated technology platform would not necessarily solve the problem.
For busy practitioners, learning a new system could simply become another task added to an already demanding schedule.
In his public LinkedIn commentary, he has acknowledged that he initially misunderstood why smaller law firms were hesitant to adopt artificial intelligence.
He originally believed the main obstacle was the learning curve associated with unfamiliar technology.
Over time, his conversations with lawyers led him to a different conclusion.
The challenge was often not a lack of interest in AI, but a lack of time to add another tool to an already overloaded workday.
This insight helped shape his thinking about the importance of making technology practical, accessible, and useful within existing professional workflows.
Developing Donna AI Around Real-World Legal Work
Donna AI was developed on the idea that technology should reduce the operational burden on legal professionals rather than add complexity.
The company’s focus has included administrative automation, client intake, time tracking, and improving visibility into the work performed across legal matters.
Its published product materials describe tools designed to capture billable activity, organize work by client matter, and help legal professionals keep more accurate time records.
These capabilities address challenges Banker has discussed publicly, particularly the difficulty lawyers face when trying to reconstruct work at the end of a demanding day.
For smaller law firms, time and administrative capacity can be particularly valuable resources.
Unlike larger organizations with dedicated operations departments, solo practitioners and smaller teams often manage client communication, business development, billing, and administration alongside their professional responsibilities.
Banker’s approach focuses on identifying repetitive work that technology can support while preserving lawyers’ role in providing professional judgment and client advice.
The distinction matters.
Artificial intelligence may assist with routine processes, but effective legal representation still depends on human expertise, professional responsibility, and trust.
A Founder Willing to Question His Own Assumptions
A notable aspect of Banker’s public commentary is his willingness to acknowledge when his understanding of a problem has changed.
In discussing the development of Donna AI, he has described how conversations with legal professionals challenged his original assumptions about technology adoption.
Rather than assuming customers needed more explanation about artificial intelligence, he began focusing on practical benefits that could make their workdays easier.
That willingness to reconsider an approach reflects an important entrepreneurial skill.
Building technology products often involves uncertainty, experimentation, and learning from customers whose priorities may differ from the development team’s.
For Banker, listening to lawyers has remained central to understanding where technology can provide meaningful value.
His experience also demonstrates that successful product development is not simply about introducing advanced features.
It is about identifying problems that matter enough for people to change how they work.
Connecting Business Efficiency With Access to Justice
Banker’s ambitions for Donna AI extend beyond helping individual law firms improve productivity.
He has also spoken publicly about the relationship between administrative inefficiency and the affordability of legal services.
When lawyers spend substantial time on routine processes, those responsibilities can affect how many clients a firm can serve and the cost of delivering its services.
Smaller law firms may face particular challenges because their available time and staffing resources are limited.
Banker believes reducing unnecessary administrative work could help legal professionals devote more attention to clients while improving how their businesses operate.
During a July 2026 appearance on the Disruption / Interruption podcast, he discussed the challenges of making legal assistance more accessible and automation’s potential role in addressing them.
The discussion reflected a broader interest in using technology to improve established professional services rather than simply digitizing existing processes.
While technology improvements alone cannot resolve every barrier to affordable legal representation, they may help firms address some of the operational challenges that contribute to those barriers.
The Next Chapter for Saumya Banker
As artificial intelligence continues to influence professional services, Banker is focused on how emerging technology can be applied to the everyday realities of running a law firm.
His career has taken him from financial technology and product leadership into an industry where professional traditions, complex responsibilities, and established ways of working create distinctive challenges for innovation.
Through Donna AI, he is attempting to bring the lessons of his earlier career into a different professional environment.
His approach emphasizes customer research, operational understanding, and building technology that responds to real business needs.
This perspective is shaped not only by his professional experience but also by the personal circumstances that first drew his attention to the legal industry.
For Banker, building Donna AI represents the next stage of a career focused on understanding complex systems and identifying opportunities to improve them.
His journey shows that meaningful innovation does not always begin with a groundbreaking invention.
Sometimes, it begins by paying closer attention to problems that others have come to accept as part of everyday life.
For Saumya Banker, the opportunity is not simply to introduce artificial intelligence into law firms. It is to help create a future where legal professionals can spend less time managing administrative work and more time doing the work they trained to do.
Learn more about Saumya Banker and Donna AI through his LinkedIn profile.
