How Docavra started

An idea that stayed with me

In 2021, I did my national service at the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) in Tamale, Ghana. I was assigned to the Prosecutions Department, where I worked under a lawyer who became my boss.

We had an ERP system at SSNIT that supported our work, but I noticed something else. A lot of the department's day-to-day work still involved physical documents, files, correspondence, and paperwork. My boss was constantly moving between these things, trying to keep everything together and make sure nothing was overlooked.

I remember looking at all of that and thinking there had to be a better way to work.

The interesting thing is that, at the time, I wasn't even a software developer. I was just beginning to learn programming. I could see something that I thought technology should be able to improve, but I didn't have the knowledge or experience to build a solution.

So I didn't do anything about it. I simply carried that observation with me.

Four years later, a conversation brought it back

Fast-forward to 2025.

By then, I had become a software developer and was working at Hereafter Ghana, a non-profit organisation. I had built systems for the organisation, including a donor management platform and a comprehensive content management system for its website, with features such as newsletter management and publishing tools.

One day, I was having a conversation with my former boss from SSNIT. He had since moved to Accra and was practising law at ADBA Solicitors.

I was telling him about my work, the systems I had built, and how far I had come as a developer.

He was impressed.

At some point during the conversation, he mentioned that if Accra weren't so expensive to live in, he would have loved to hire me at his firm. He felt I could help him a great deal with his work.

I understood his concern. Moving to Accra, paying rent, and taking on the cost of living there wouldn't have been particularly feasible for me.

But then I thought: why would I need to move to Accra to help him?

I told him that even from Tamale, I could build a system for him and his firm. Something that would help them manage their work more efficiently, bring their processes together, and reduce the amount of manual work they had to deal with.

He liked the idea. In fact, he said he would love to have something like that.

And just like that, something I had noticed four years earlier began to feel like a real possibility.

But I didn't start building it immediately.

At the time, I already had a lot on my plate. I made a few attempts to get the project going, but other responsibilities kept getting in the way. I would start, pause, and eventually leave it alone for a while.

We barely even talked about it again.

When I finally decided to build it

In 2026, things changed.

I had left my job at Hereafter Ghana and started a new remote software development role. With a little more flexibility in how I managed my time, I decided to revisit the idea.

Initially, I was still thinking of it as a system I could build for my former boss and his firm. I knew it would involve managing cases, clients, documents, and other aspects of legal practice.

But the deeper I went, the more I realised how much I had underestimated the problem.

A proper law firm management system wasn't just a place to store case records or upload documents. There were matters, court proceedings, deadlines, billing, client funds, accounting, staff responsibilities, approvals, correspondence, and countless workflows that depended on one another.

And these weren't just features to put on a dashboard. They represented real work being done by real people, often with serious consequences when something went wrong.

It became clear that I wasn't looking at a small project I could finish over a weekend.

I was looking at something much bigger.

And if I was going to build it, I wanted to build it properly.

Then I started looking at what was already out there

Before committing myself fully, I wanted to understand the market.

Surely, I thought, there must already be several good law firm management systems available to firms in Ghana.

So I started researching.

I looked at systems being advertised to law firms, explored their websites, read through their feature lists, and signed up for free trials wherever I could.

I ended up exploring roughly fifteen systems.

And I was surprised by what I found.

A number of them made impressive claims on their websites. But when I actually got into the applications, the experience was often very different from what had been advertised.

Some were little more than basic record-management applications. Others had features that seemed incomplete or workflows that didn't go particularly deep. In several cases, I struggled to see how the systems could support the full day-to-day operations of a busy law firm.

Of course, I hadn't worked inside every law firm, and I couldn't claim to know every problem lawyers faced. I also knew that there were established international products doing serious work in this space.

But among the local systems I had personally explored, I wasn't finding something that made me think, yes, this is the kind of system I would confidently recommend to my former boss.

That discovery changed how I looked at the project.

Until then, I had been thinking about building something for one law firm.

Now I was beginning to wonder whether there was an opportunity to build something that many law firms could benefit from.

From helping one lawyer to building Docavra

The original motivation was simple: I wanted to help someone I had worked with, someone who had believed in what I could do, and someone whose daily work had unknowingly inspired an idea years before I was capable of building it.

But as I began understanding the problem, I realised that whatever challenges his firm faced were unlikely to be unique to his firm.

Other lawyers were probably dealing with similar problems. Other firms were managing documents, tracking deadlines, handling client money, coordinating staff, and trying to keep their work organised.

And perhaps some of them were doing all of that with tools that weren't really built around how they worked.

So I began thinking beyond that first firm.

What if I could build something genuinely useful for legal practice? Something comprehensive, carefully designed, and capable of growing with a firm rather than becoming another tool it would eventually outgrow?

What if I could build it here in Ghana, with an understanding of how legal practice works in our environment, without limiting its usefulness to Ghana alone?

And what if, in the process, I could turn it into a sustainable business?

I won't pretend the business opportunity wasn't part of the motivation. I'm a software developer. Building useful software is what I do, and I want to make a living from it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

But I also know that building a product and building a business are two very different things.

I can write code, design interfaces, and build systems. That doesn't automatically mean law firms will trust what I've built, adopt it, or pay for it.

That trust has to be earned.

And that's the challenge I've decided to take on.

Why I'm building it

My professional experience didn't begin with Docavra.

Since January 2025, I've worked professionally as a software developer, building internal platforms and working on client projects across different industries. From donor management and content publishing to business websites and other operational systems, I've had the opportunity to see how much difference thoughtfully built software can make to an organisation.

But Docavra is different for me.

It's the first project of this scale that I'm building around a problem I personally witnessed years before I knew how to solve it.

I didn't wake up one morning, look at a list of profitable SaaS ideas, and randomly choose law firm management.

I remember the office. I remember the paperwork. I remember my boss trying to manage his work. And I remember thinking there should be a better way.

Five years later, I finally have the skills, the experience, and the opportunity to attempt an answer.

I don't know yet how far Docavra will go. I don't know how many firms will eventually use it, or how long it will take to build the business I have in mind.

But I know why I started.

It began with a problem I couldn't solve in 2021, a conversation that brought it back in 2025, and a decision in 2026 to finally do something about it.

That's the story behind Docavra.