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Startup wants to build tools for lawyers to speed up legal services

234 points by thelock85 9y ago

Bretts89 9y ago
The legal industry is ripe for innovation. Just look at the amount of value Clerky has managed to provide with just incorporation and formation.
rbanffy 9y ago
Sadly, they can't obey the Threw Laws...
- dogruck 9y ago
  What are Threw Laws?
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Sorry. Lack of context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
neilwilson 9y ago
How will you tell the difference?
- marcelogranja 9y ago
  I was wondering the same
- rajeck 9y ago
  I would have been much more interested if it were the other way around.
rhizome 9y ago
If this is an example of scratching one's own itch, Justin Kan needs new hobbies. Consider how much you have to interact with lawyers in order to want to automate them. "I’ve raised money. I’ve done a merger. I’ve been sued. And yet every time, bills would pile up and I had no clear idea what I was paying for. In Silicon Valley, we want everything to be transparent." From the sound of the story, their competition is not the Bar, but DoNotPay (mentioned in article), which tells me they're not automating lawyering so much as mechanizing Nolo Press.
- thucydides 9y ago
  What is Nolo Press?
  - rmason 9y ago
    Nolo Press is a publisher who specializes in books that help you do things without using a lawyer, such as writing your own will.
thelock85 9y ago
In a world where AI actually replaces or augments white collar professions, how does liability play out? Will the ability to sue for or defend against malfeasance depend upon an opaque box of algorithmic litigation?
- _e 9y ago
  This is a really important question. I wonder how insurance companies would price this as well. If the machines have access to all written legal data then are they allowed to pick and choose which information they include in their legal good or legal service? Will machines ultimately be depended on to develop laws which could then benefit the machines over the humans?
maxxxxx 9y ago
I hope that automating a lot of routine legal tasks will feed back into writing laws in way that makes them more consistent and easier to automate. Most people's legal needs are very similar and should be possible to automate.
_e 9y ago
There is a very big difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer. I hope Atrium has the good lawyers on their side while the machines are initially getting trained.
bradleyjg 9y ago
There's a big unanswered question in the article. It says that the company is a law firm, that only two of the four co-founders are lawyers, and that it raised $10.5 million dollars, presumably on an equity basis. However, law firms are not permitted to have non-lawyers as owners. It is considered unethical as it would mean decisions would be made by people that aren't obligated to follow the cannons of legal ethics or subject to bar discipline. The only U.S. jurisdiction I'm aware of that doesn't follow this rule is the District of Columbia, but Atrium is based in California.
- lettergram 9y ago
  Just because something is considered "unethical" doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal. My guess, is that by building software no one is really going to question the ethics... In one sense the legal system should be devoid of anything but facts. So as along as a machine doesn't intentionally falsify information (which idk how it could), then it's not unethical.
  - pdabbadabba 9y ago
    > Just because something is considered "unethical" doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal. In the legal profession it sort of does. Lawyers are regularly fined or disbarred for violating ethics rules, and the ethics rules are typically enforced by the courts.
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    I was using a term of art without being clear that's what I was doing. "Unethical" as I was using it means in violation of the state bar Rules of Professional Conduct. Such violations aren't just a matter of being discourteous or something, they subject lawyers to professional sanctions up to and including being disbarred. As for non-lawyers, practicing law without a license is a crime in most states. This is much more an issue of illegal than unethical in the colloquial sense of the word. My apologies for the confusion.
  - torstenvl 9y ago
    Please don't assert something as fact when you don't know what you're talking about.
pascalxus 9y ago
I hope this leads to a reduction in legal costs, especially for start ups that have been sued for frivolous patent law suits, by patent trolls.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  I hope it goes beyond just reduced costs. Increase supply enough so that it outweighs the demand. Until that happens, the legal system will remain mostly a place where the deeper pockets win.
vthallam 9y ago
Startup wants to replace lawyers Startup wants to replace doctors Startup wants to replace gym instructors etc etc I think any kind of job which involves referring to established practices/information can be automated in the near future.
sulam 9y ago
I like the fee structure! However, I'm curious how they measure and ensure quality in their work. It seems like the fee structure (fixed bids) will incent them to reduce the time spent on work, which could be good or could be bad, depending on the answer to that question.
supernumerary 9y ago
Talking to the title for a second - (what they are actually doing seems quite different.) This is funny, I think we might be underestimating the recalcitrance of human beings, and negentropic characteristics of life itself. (to say nothing of lawyers). After all there are still people operating the barriers at parking structures where I park in the morning, and they certainly cost more than a robot... It seems that behind the recurrent question of automation and the anticipate crisis of salaried employment is a question of entropy and negentropy, not of autonomy and automaticity. Law is distinctly negentropic and so is not the best candidate. Avoiding legal recourse would be a different matter ...
- posterboy 9y ago
  > Law is distinctly negentropic Meaning? In a closed system of your choice, law decreases entropy, i.e. increases complexity? Your comment is quite cryptic to me. However, negentropy seems to be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, so you are really saying that the law can't be described as a closed system. Is that right?
justin 9y ago
Headline is a little misleading. We started LTS, our legal tech company, with the goal of helping lawyers provide legal services to startups in a more speedy, transparent and price predicable way. To us, that means building tools that lawyers use, and not creating the Uber of lawyers or a master AI that replaces lawyers (I don't think the latter is possible right now). Atrium, the law firm founded by two of my LTS cofounders, is putting that software to use to help startups now. We are hiring engineers (http://atriumlts.com http://atriumlts.com). Some reasons to join: learn from experienced founders who have done it before, and you can build on short iterations for a customer that's very thankful and you can just walk over and talk to.
- aswanson 9y ago
  Headlines are almost guaranteed to be misleading. That's why I click on the comments before the article. Sensationalism should not be rewarded.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    I've complained about some BBC headlines before. I was essentially told that there's a kind of headline exemption. So long as the article at some point contradicts the headline then it doesn't matter, apparently.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I'm finding that the top few comments here are often more informative and better supported than at least half of the actual posted articles. To be clear, I see that as an endorsement of HN more than anything else.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > Headline is a little misleading I guess you can't say "Your article hits a factual error before it even begins" to the Washington Post, huh.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
foobaw 9y ago
I'm wondering what kind of legal tasks they cover for poor startups. Incorporation and whatnot is mostly automated , trivial and inexpensive but if they can help out with lawsuits, patent, trademarks, and general legal inquiries in an innovative way, it'd be awesome, as those cost a fortune.
tannhauser23 9y ago
Good luck to you Justin, and to your team. I left law and became an engineer because I didn't see how the legal industry could keep up its bloated and inefficient structure. Shake it up!
- spencer_54 9y ago
  Hello - I work at Atrium LTS and we noticed your comment here. If you have any interest in applying, we currently have two engineering roles we're looking to fill: https://www.atriumlts.com/ https://www.atriumlts.com/.
rayiner 9y ago
> As anyone who has racked up legal fees due to lawyers’ mounting billable hours can attest, law firms remain almost surprisingly low-tech operations. That’s like saying programming remains surprisingly low tech because you walk into a tech company and everyone is hunched over an emacs window. Even at the fanciest Wall Street law firms, 10-20% of billed time is written off. The largest clients who get sued a lot are demanding things like flat retainers (e.g. we pay a flat $5 million per month and you hanldle all our products liability work). There is a lot of pressure to get things done within certain budget targets, but time is routinely written off because those targets cannot be met. Plus, competition is high. Even at the top of the market there are dozens of firms in direct competition. If there was a magic way to do more with less firms would do it.
- wil421 9y ago
  Rayiner, Whenever someone on HN talks about bringing tech to law firms I inevitably hear they are opposed to improving their process. It would lead to less billable hours for the firm. Is this true? Not specifically talking about the top firms but firms in general.
  - dingbat 9y ago
    even aside from the billable hours issue, there is the less obvious problem that in many cases, it is in the interest of the client that there be less transparency and more obfuscation of material that might be unfavorable. improving processes and making it easier to analyze data is not necessarily aligned with the incentives of large company who has been named as a defendant in a class action suit, for example.
  - gnopgnip 9y ago
    This was the same way with managed IT services 10 years ago. Most companies now are not billing based on time, but based on the value of the services they provide. Changes started with smaller companies first. Smaller law firms will handle some things on flat fee now, bankruptcy, DUI, and other transactional issues. It is going to continue to increase when appropriate.
  - 9y ago
abuteau 9y ago
Hey justin, good stuff, two questions for you. A- How is your approach different than Axiom Law [1] B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky [2] [1] https://www.axiomlaw.com/ https://www.axiomlaw.com/ [2] https://www.clerky.com/ https://www.clerky.com/
- morgante 9y ago
  > B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky [2] They didn't. Atrium's customers are (currently) startups needing legal services, not other law firms.
markpapadakis 9y ago
I thoughts sales people would be the first to go. I mean, they are are often colloquially/affectiohally known as sales droids in the Valley :) Kissing aside, if you got laws and said laws can be interpreted to the letter I.e deterministically then maybe this is bound to happen sooner rather than later.
blackbear_ 9y ago
In the meantime..... https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328
aarondf 9y ago
First they came for the bodegas, and I did not speak out.
rasjani 9y ago
Turre Legal in Finland is doing something similar. Albeit, not sure if their aim is to help other lawyers, just their own clients.
Ascetik 9y ago
Build an application better than iManage or NetDocuments and you're a shoe in.
frenchman_in_ny 9y ago
Legitimately curious about this: "Throughout the day, the lawyers field questions from a roster of start-up clients looking to execute routine legal tasks, like fundraising from venture capitalists and issuing stock options to employees. Engineers watch the dealings closely, extracting bits of information from the conversations and the documents exchanged. So what happens to client-lawyer privilege, if engineers are watching / listening in / reading? Isn't that automatically waived, and isn't this a problem? (Edit: formatting)
speby 9y ago
Couple things regarding law firms and lawyers... based on my experience working at PageVault, a startup in Chicago that creates and runs an online evidence/webpage scraping and gathering service for case discovery for law firms: 1. Lawyers actually don't want tools that will necessarily reduce their billable time. This does not mean they won't ever utilize or accept new technology but it has to be built up over a fairly long period of time before a mass of lawyers all decides they need to adopt whatever the "latest" tool is. Even fax machines took quite awhile to get rooted and they've taken longer to get unrooted (yes, there are still plenty of lawyers who love send and receive faxes, amazingly). 2. For any tech that a law firm is expected to pay for, they want easy means of finding creative ways to bill it back to their client's accounts. This is why lawyers have the reputation they do for charging for things like 10 cents/page for making copies at the copy machine.
Gorbzel 9y ago
It’s interesting because the article correctly points out the existence of barriers to tech adoption in the law — but, as justin and others point out, the coverage of real innovation usually misses the devil in the details. A number of possible explanations, but the most prevalent I’ve encountered: • Differences between the variety of ways a given attorney goes about practicing create inherent barriers to a one size fits all B2B software solution. Attorney personas vary wildly based on factors such as practice area, firm size, region, jurisdiction, client demographics, the list goes on and on. This makes it very difficult to build out products that scale rapidly industry-wide. While this sort of end user diversity isn’t inherently unique to the legal industry, it’s probably where its most entrenched, dictated by regulation and long-standing custom, etc etc — all things very startup/entrepreneurial unfriendly. • Even accounting for legitimate industry-based reasons, there’s a second very real, risk-averse layer: both legal education and practice are very hierarchical, such that aspiring attorneys are being ranked and learning to guard their interests well before they ever begin practice. Once they do, protecting partnerships, colleagues (intra-firm / former pals), profits, rolodexes, business processes, etc is well entrenched in a given attorney’s MO. News writeups usually include a bit about how the Great Recession started to prompt innovation, which it did, but it also created a margins race that further drives attorneys to protect their book of business and profits, further entrenching mindsets which reject disruption, consciously or not. Regardless of whether you buy these reasons or have your own, the nuance quickly exceeds what captures readers in the mainstream or tech press. Yet the rise of automation in other industries does justify coverage of how those trends would be affecting the law, and the not-uncommon “Let’s kill all the lawyers!” Shakespearean mentality fuels the fire. The result? Every new startup aiming to disrupt the law gets some pretty gloating coverage…and then they need to start acquiring users and scaling. In fairness, that’s what real startups have to do, so not all sanity goes out the window. Post-2008, the real driver for innovation has been client demand, so Atrium’s approach makes sense there. Also, shoutouts to A2J nonprofits, they’re doing really meaningful work for clients that need it most (albeit with their own set of complexities that aren’t inherently tuned to startup culture) Obligatory 1: Attorney, but IANYL. Work in the industry, currently building software for firm/legal services ops and biz processes. Previously involved in A2J efforts. Views above are my own, not those of my employer or previous initiatives. Obligatory 2: If you’re the type with a respect for the industry, but a drive to use tech, product, and entrepreneurial methodologies to break through these types of barriers — we’re hiring! Engineers, product, QA, project, or attorneys that have some meaningful experience in both worlds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885
OliverJones 9y ago
My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company. Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently and cost-effectively. When she writes a sales contract she tries to write it so everybody can say, "that's fair" and sign it, rather than send it off to some slow and expensive review. Sales people love that. Same for smaller stuff like NDAs. She did that stuff for some of my entrepreneurial ventures. Big win. Litigation: she looks beyond the white-shoe gold-tie-clip downtown firms to handle that kind of stuff. Escrow for code: If some source code needs to be held in escrow, she says, "look, I'm an officer of the court, answerable to more than just my boss. Suppose you put the thumb drive or DVD-R in an sealed envelope. I'll put it in another sealed envelope and hold it in my locked file cabinet." Many parties say "good idea!" because escrow services aren't cheap. She has a rubber stamp that says, in some kind of legalese, "We don't pay unitemized bills. Please provide more detail and send this bill again." That can save a bundle of money. The concealed "bonuses" for partners sometimes evaporate from the bills. The "stamp" works well; the billing firm has no idea whether it's legal or A/P refusing the bill, so they just provide more detail. Financings: not much leverage there. They still have to hire outside counsel with expensive lawyers and paralegals who can bench-press massive tomes of dense legalese. I suspect a software service that inspected and tracked legal bills payable by tech companies might pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ingest pdfs? Look for keywords and numbers?)
Nuzzerino 9y ago
While a lawyer-replacing AI may not be possible yet, it has to be possible to use some ML techniques to aid in the search of relevant legal records, laws, regulations, and so on. I think the world may not be ready for "Uber for Lawyers" but it certainly needs "Google for Lawyers".
rb666 9y ago
The cool law startups are not all based in the valley guys and girls, we have https://www.clocktimizer.com/ https://www.clocktimizer.com/ from the Netherlands, for example.
kilon 9y ago
Truthfully as a lawyer , well I am pretty close to be an ex-lawyer cause I now code for living we really dont need software so much. In my office we had an old database running on DOS when I became a lawyer in 2008. I got rid of it and replaced it with Dropbox. Used extremely simple folder structure and that was pretty much it. I was even considering making specialised software for my father's law firm but I never saw the use for it. 99% of lawyer's work is not arragning meetings or organising documents. Even I who I was very new at the time I did a ton more photocopying documents and answering calls from clients than any form of organisation. This is why law orientated software fails to become popular for lawyers. What we need as lawyers , what would be really appealing is an AI that can look through case law and help us formulate lega arguments. Unfortunately the technology simply is not at that level. What makes it worse is that even though coding can be an extremely repetetive process law practices is not, you literraly dealing with diffirent problem each hour and you have to filter and combine various amount of information. You may think that organisation is the key here but because the main focus are legal arguments not so much evidence there is very little to do in that area other than having AI and feeding you ideas. Problem is that lawyers are using a lot of thinking power and because their is not technical in some cases it can be called even philosophical , it would be very difficult for an AI to be actually useful in this area, unless there is a large leap in technology I am not aware of. I am not a US lawyer , I am a Greek lawyer and yes we have plenty of legal software in my country as well, that almost none is using. DOS and a dual core at 2.0 GHZ is more than enough.

234 points by thelock85 9y ago

The legal industry is ripe for innovation. Just look at the amount of value Clerky has managed to provide with just incorporation and formation.

rbanffy 9y ago

Sadly, they can't obey the Threw Laws...

dogruck 9y ago
What are Threw Laws?
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Sorry. Lack of context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

neilwilson 9y ago

How will you tell the difference?

marcelogranja 9y ago
I was wondering the same
rajeck 9y ago
I would have been much more interested if it were the other way around.

rhizome 9y ago

If this is an example of scratching one's own itch, Justin Kan needs new hobbies. Consider how much you have to interact with lawyers in order to want to automate them. "I’ve raised money. I’ve done a merger. I’ve been sued. And yet every time, bills would pile up and I had no clear idea what I was paying for. In Silicon Valley, we want everything to be transparent." From the sound of the story, their competition is not the Bar, but DoNotPay (mentioned in article), which tells me they're not automating lawyering so much as mechanizing Nolo Press.

thucydides 9y ago
What is Nolo Press?
- rmason 9y ago
  Nolo Press is a publisher who specializes in books that help you do things without using a lawyer, such as writing your own will.

thelock85 9y ago

In a world where AI actually replaces or augments white collar professions, how does liability play out? Will the ability to sue for or defend against malfeasance depend upon an opaque box of algorithmic litigation?

_e 9y ago
This is a really important question. I wonder how insurance companies would price this as well. If the machines have access to all written legal data then are they allowed to pick and choose which information they include in their legal good or legal service? Will machines ultimately be depended on to develop laws which could then benefit the machines over the humans?

maxxxxx 9y ago

I hope that automating a lot of routine legal tasks will feed back into writing laws in way that makes them more consistent and easier to automate. Most people's legal needs are very similar and should be possible to automate.

_e 9y ago

There is a very big difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer. I hope Atrium has the good lawyers on their side while the machines are initially getting trained.

bradleyjg 9y ago

There's a big unanswered question in the article. It says that the company is a law firm, that only two of the four co-founders are lawyers, and that it raised $10.5 million dollars, presumably on an equity basis. However, law firms are not permitted to have non-lawyers as owners. It is considered unethical as it would mean decisions would be made by people that aren't obligated to follow the cannons of legal ethics or subject to bar discipline. The only U.S. jurisdiction I'm aware of that doesn't follow this rule is the District of Columbia, but Atrium is based in California.

lettergram 9y ago
Just because something is considered "unethical" doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal. My guess, is that by building software no one is really going to question the ethics... In one sense the legal system should be devoid of anything but facts. So as along as a machine doesn't intentionally falsify information (which idk how it could), then it's not unethical.
- pdabbadabba 9y ago
  > Just because something is considered "unethical" doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal. In the legal profession it sort of does. Lawyers are regularly fined or disbarred for violating ethics rules, and the ethics rules are typically enforced by the courts.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  I was using a term of art without being clear that's what I was doing. "Unethical" as I was using it means in violation of the state bar Rules of Professional Conduct. Such violations aren't just a matter of being discourteous or something, they subject lawyers to professional sanctions up to and including being disbarred. As for non-lawyers, practicing law without a license is a crime in most states. This is much more an issue of illegal than unethical in the colloquial sense of the word. My apologies for the confusion.
- torstenvl 9y ago
  Please don't assert something as fact when you don't know what you're talking about.

pascalxus 9y ago

I hope this leads to a reduction in legal costs, especially for start ups that have been sued for frivolous patent law suits, by patent trolls.

Nuzzerino 9y ago
I hope it goes beyond just reduced costs. Increase supply enough so that it outweighs the demand. Until that happens, the legal system will remain mostly a place where the deeper pockets win.

vthallam 9y ago

Startup wants to replace lawyers Startup wants to replace doctors Startup wants to replace gym instructors etc etc I think any kind of job which involves referring to established practices/information can be automated in the near future.

sulam 9y ago

I like the fee structure! However, I'm curious how they measure and ensure quality in their work. It seems like the fee structure (fixed bids) will incent them to reduce the time spent on work, which could be good or could be bad, depending on the answer to that question.

supernumerary 9y ago

Talking to the title for a second - (what they are actually doing seems quite different.) This is funny, I think we might be underestimating the recalcitrance of human beings, and negentropic characteristics of life itself. (to say nothing of lawyers). After all there are still people operating the barriers at parking structures where I park in the morning, and they certainly cost more than a robot... It seems that behind the recurrent question of automation and the anticipate crisis of salaried employment is a question of entropy and negentropy, not of autonomy and automaticity. Law is distinctly negentropic and so is not the best candidate. Avoiding legal recourse would be a different matter ...

posterboy 9y ago
> Law is distinctly negentropic Meaning? In a closed system of your choice, law decreases entropy, i.e. increases complexity? Your comment is quite cryptic to me. However, negentropy seems to be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, so you are really saying that the law can't be described as a closed system. Is that right?

justin 9y ago

Headline is a little misleading. We started LTS, our legal tech company, with the goal of helping lawyers provide legal services to startups in a more speedy, transparent and price predicable way. To us, that means building tools that lawyers use, and not creating the Uber of lawyers or a master AI that replaces lawyers (I don't think the latter is possible right now). Atrium, the law firm founded by two of my LTS cofounders, is putting that software to use to help startups now. We are hiring engineers (http://atriumlts.com http://atriumlts.com). Some reasons to join: learn from experienced founders who have done it before, and you can build on short iterations for a customer that's very thankful and you can just walk over and talk to.

aswanson 9y ago
Headlines are almost guaranteed to be misleading. That's why I click on the comments before the article. Sensationalism should not be rewarded.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  I've complained about some BBC headlines before. I was essentially told that there's a kind of headline exemption. So long as the article at some point contradicts the headline then it doesn't matter, apparently.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I'm finding that the top few comments here are often more informative and better supported than at least half of the actual posted articles. To be clear, I see that as an endorsement of HN more than anything else.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Headline is a little misleading I guess you can't say "Your article hits a factual error before it even begins" to the Washington Post, huh.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

foobaw 9y ago

I'm wondering what kind of legal tasks they cover for poor startups. Incorporation and whatnot is mostly automated , trivial and inexpensive but if they can help out with lawsuits, patent, trademarks, and general legal inquiries in an innovative way, it'd be awesome, as those cost a fortune.

tannhauser23 9y ago

Good luck to you Justin, and to your team. I left law and became an engineer because I didn't see how the legal industry could keep up its bloated and inefficient structure. Shake it up!

spencer_54 9y ago
Hello - I work at Atrium LTS and we noticed your comment here. If you have any interest in applying, we currently have two engineering roles we're looking to fill: https://www.atriumlts.com/ https://www.atriumlts.com/.

rayiner 9y ago

> As anyone who has racked up legal fees due to lawyers’ mounting billable hours can attest, law firms remain almost surprisingly low-tech operations. That’s like saying programming remains surprisingly low tech because you walk into a tech company and everyone is hunched over an emacs window. Even at the fanciest Wall Street law firms, 10-20% of billed time is written off. The largest clients who get sued a lot are demanding things like flat retainers (e.g. we pay a flat $5 million per month and you hanldle all our products liability work). There is a lot of pressure to get things done within certain budget targets, but time is routinely written off because those targets cannot be met. Plus, competition is high. Even at the top of the market there are dozens of firms in direct competition. If there was a magic way to do more with less firms would do it.

wil421 9y ago
Rayiner, Whenever someone on HN talks about bringing tech to law firms I inevitably hear they are opposed to improving their process. It would lead to less billable hours for the firm. Is this true? Not specifically talking about the top firms but firms in general.
- dingbat 9y ago
  even aside from the billable hours issue, there is the less obvious problem that in many cases, it is in the interest of the client that there be less transparency and more obfuscation of material that might be unfavorable. improving processes and making it easier to analyze data is not necessarily aligned with the incentives of large company who has been named as a defendant in a class action suit, for example.
- gnopgnip 9y ago
  This was the same way with managed IT services 10 years ago. Most companies now are not billing based on time, but based on the value of the services they provide. Changes started with smaller companies first. Smaller law firms will handle some things on flat fee now, bankruptcy, DUI, and other transactional issues. It is going to continue to increase when appropriate.
- 9y ago

abuteau 9y ago

Hey justin, good stuff, two questions for you. A- How is your approach different than Axiom Law [1] B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky [2] [1] https://www.axiomlaw.com/ https://www.axiomlaw.com/ [2] https://www.clerky.com/ https://www.clerky.com/

morgante 9y ago
> B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky [2] They didn't. Atrium's customers are (currently) startups needing legal services, not other law firms.

markpapadakis 9y ago

I thoughts sales people would be the first to go. I mean, they are are often colloquially/affectiohally known as sales droids in the Valley :) Kissing aside, if you got laws and said laws can be interpreted to the letter I.e deterministically then maybe this is bound to happen sooner rather than later.

blackbear_ 9y ago

In the meantime..... https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328

aarondf 9y ago

First they came for the bodegas, and I did not speak out.

rasjani 9y ago

Turre Legal in Finland is doing something similar. Albeit, not sure if their aim is to help other lawyers, just their own clients.

Ascetik 9y ago

Build an application better than iManage or NetDocuments and you're a shoe in.

frenchman_in_ny 9y ago

Legitimately curious about this: "Throughout the day, the lawyers field questions from a roster of start-up clients looking to execute routine legal tasks, like fundraising from venture capitalists and issuing stock options to employees. Engineers watch the dealings closely, extracting bits of information from the conversations and the documents exchanged. So what happens to client-lawyer privilege, if engineers are watching / listening in / reading? Isn't that automatically waived, and isn't this a problem? (Edit: formatting)

speby 9y ago

Couple things regarding law firms and lawyers... based on my experience working at PageVault, a startup in Chicago that creates and runs an online evidence/webpage scraping and gathering service for case discovery for law firms: 1. Lawyers actually don't want tools that will necessarily reduce their billable time. This does not mean they won't ever utilize or accept new technology but it has to be built up over a fairly long period of time before a mass of lawyers all decides they need to adopt whatever the "latest" tool is. Even fax machines took quite awhile to get rooted and they've taken longer to get unrooted (yes, there are still plenty of lawyers who love send and receive faxes, amazingly). 2. For any tech that a law firm is expected to pay for, they want easy means of finding creative ways to bill it back to their client's accounts. This is why lawyers have the reputation they do for charging for things like 10 cents/page for making copies at the copy machine.

Gorbzel 9y ago

It’s interesting because the article correctly points out the existence of barriers to tech adoption in the law — but, as justin and others point out, the coverage of real innovation usually misses the devil in the details. A number of possible explanations, but the most prevalent I’ve encountered: • Differences between the variety of ways a given attorney goes about practicing create inherent barriers to a one size fits all B2B software solution. Attorney personas vary wildly based on factors such as practice area, firm size, region, jurisdiction, client demographics, the list goes on and on. This makes it very difficult to build out products that scale rapidly industry-wide. While this sort of end user diversity isn’t inherently unique to the legal industry, it’s probably where its most entrenched, dictated by regulation and long-standing custom, etc etc — all things very startup/entrepreneurial unfriendly. • Even accounting for legitimate industry-based reasons, there’s a second very real, risk-averse layer: both legal education and practice are very hierarchical, such that aspiring attorneys are being ranked and learning to guard their interests well before they ever begin practice. Once they do, protecting partnerships, colleagues (intra-firm / former pals), profits, rolodexes, business processes, etc is well entrenched in a given attorney’s MO. News writeups usually include a bit about how the Great Recession started to prompt innovation, which it did, but it also created a margins race that further drives attorneys to protect their book of business and profits, further entrenching mindsets which reject disruption, consciously or not. Regardless of whether you buy these reasons or have your own, the nuance quickly exceeds what captures readers in the mainstream or tech press. Yet the rise of automation in other industries does justify coverage of how those trends would be affecting the law, and the not-uncommon “Let’s kill all the lawyers!” Shakespearean mentality fuels the fire. The result? Every new startup aiming to disrupt the law gets some pretty gloating coverage…and then they need to start acquiring users and scaling. In fairness, that’s what real startups have to do, so not all sanity goes out the window. Post-2008, the real driver for innovation has been client demand, so Atrium’s approach makes sense there. Also, shoutouts to A2J nonprofits, they’re doing really meaningful work for clients that need it most (albeit with their own set of complexities that aren’t inherently tuned to startup culture) Obligatory 1: Attorney, but IANYL. Work in the industry, currently building software for firm/legal services ops and biz processes. Previously involved in A2J efforts. Views above are my own, not those of my employer or previous initiatives. Obligatory 2: If you’re the type with a respect for the industry, but a drive to use tech, product, and entrepreneurial methodologies to break through these types of barriers — we’re hiring! Engineers, product, QA, project, or attorneys that have some meaningful experience in both worlds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885

OliverJones 9y ago

My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company. Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently and cost-effectively. When she writes a sales contract she tries to write it so everybody can say, "that's fair" and sign it, rather than send it off to some slow and expensive review. Sales people love that. Same for smaller stuff like NDAs. She did that stuff for some of my entrepreneurial ventures. Big win. Litigation: she looks beyond the white-shoe gold-tie-clip downtown firms to handle that kind of stuff. Escrow for code: If some source code needs to be held in escrow, she says, "look, I'm an officer of the court, answerable to more than just my boss. Suppose you put the thumb drive or DVD-R in an sealed envelope. I'll put it in another sealed envelope and hold it in my locked file cabinet." Many parties say "good idea!" because escrow services aren't cheap. She has a rubber stamp that says, in some kind of legalese, "We don't pay unitemized bills. Please provide more detail and send this bill again." That can save a bundle of money. The concealed "bonuses" for partners sometimes evaporate from the bills. The "stamp" works well; the billing firm has no idea whether it's legal or A/P refusing the bill, so they just provide more detail. Financings: not much leverage there. They still have to hire outside counsel with expensive lawyers and paralegals who can bench-press massive tomes of dense legalese. I suspect a software service that inspected and tracked legal bills payable by tech companies might pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ingest pdfs? Look for keywords and numbers?)

Nuzzerino 9y ago

While a lawyer-replacing AI may not be possible yet, it has to be possible to use some ML techniques to aid in the search of relevant legal records, laws, regulations, and so on. I think the world may not be ready for "Uber for Lawyers" but it certainly needs "Google for Lawyers".

rb666 9y ago

The cool law startups are not all based in the valley guys and girls, we have https://www.clocktimizer.com/ https://www.clocktimizer.com/ from the Netherlands, for example.

kilon 9y ago

Truthfully as a lawyer , well I am pretty close to be an ex-lawyer cause I now code for living we really dont need software so much. In my office we had an old database running on DOS when I became a lawyer in 2008. I got rid of it and replaced it with Dropbox. Used extremely simple folder structure and that was pretty much it. I was even considering making specialised software for my father's law firm but I never saw the use for it. 99% of lawyer's work is not arragning meetings or organising documents. Even I who I was very new at the time I did a ton more photocopying documents and answering calls from clients than any form of organisation. This is why law orientated software fails to become popular for lawyers. What we need as lawyers , what would be really appealing is an AI that can look through case law and help us formulate lega arguments. Unfortunately the technology simply is not at that level. What makes it worse is that even though coding can be an extremely repetetive process law practices is not, you literraly dealing with diffirent problem each hour and you have to filter and combine various amount of information. You may think that organisation is the key here but because the main focus are legal arguments not so much evidence there is very little to do in that area other than having AI and feeding you ideas. Problem is that lawyers are using a lot of thinking power and because their is not technical in some cases it can be called even philosophical , it would be very difficult for an AI to be actually useful in this area, unless there is a large leap in technology I am not aware of. I am not a US lawyer , I am a Greek lawyer and yes we have plenty of legal software in my country as well, that almost none is using. DOS and a dual core at 2.0 GHZ is more than enough.