(This story is part of series introducing a new awards program by the Dayton Business Journal called Inno Under 25, about young entrepreneurs, innovators and business owners in the Dayton region.)
It was five years ago when Tom Herner first teamed up with some entrepreneurial-minded friends to develop a product.
Their first idea didn't pan out. The second one didn't, either.
The third was a hit: A user-friendly municipal database, called LawKeeper, that makes it easier for cities to store and share their codices.
"We realized that it's not uncommon for cities to have all of their ordinances in one PDF that gets updated once a year," Herner said. "We wanted to build something better than that."
Today, that database is the keystone product of Herner's legal tech startup: Barn Gang.
It's a name that pays homage to innovators Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering, who in the early 1900s recruited NCR Corp. engineers to tinker on weeknights in a carriage house at Deeds' property. That group, dubbed the "Barn Gang," helped Kettering design the first practical automobile self-starter — a landmark invention that helped underpin modern motoring.
"That was very inspirational to me," said Herner, who recently graduated from Wright State University. "A hundred years ago, some guys from Dayton laid around on the banks of the Miami River and created the modern world."
Herner's team began similarly more than a century later, working long nights and weekends to build LawKeeper. Herner prototyped the platform using Centerville's codebook, visiting the library between classes to transcribe thousands of pages from a PDF into an early version of the database.
"It probably took six months," he said. "We needed to build a program that could take the PDF and put it into our database, but we had to understand the structure of the codebook first."
Initially, the plan was to market LawKeeper to a legal publishing company that would contract with cities interested in uploading their ordinances. But that meant municipalities would have to pay for the service — a bold pitch considering the pandemic's impact on government budgets.
So, Herner reimagined the crux of his business model. Instead of asking municipalities to foot the bill, Barn Gang plans to index the codices of five large cities at no cost.
The company will then launch a campaign promoting the LawKeeper platform, with the goal of stimulating page view traffic to generate revenue.
"Once we can make it happen in five cities, we want to expand to 10, and then 20," Herner said. "We want to do that until we've covered every city in the U.S. that has more than 500,000 people."
LawKeeper is designed to serve a niche demographic — namely architects, students, lawyers and paralegals who routinely deal with municipal law.
As it scales, Herner wants to add more features to better tailor the LawKeeper platform to its users. That strategy aligns with Barn Gang's broader mission to build solutions that help others succeed.
"That's why entrepreneurship is so appealing to me," he said. "It's an opportunity to do something that you're interested in and help other people along the way."
Barn Gang
Founded: June 2017
Top executive: CEO Tom Herner, 24 years old
Description: Specializes in legal publishing software solutions for local governments.
Website: lawkeeper.org
