7 ms·

Legal is a notoriously sluggish industry, one that's almost infuriatingly incapable of adopting change and technology. Atrium's original pitch was exactly the o

Legal is a notoriously sluggish industry, one that's almost infuriatingly incapable of adopting change and technology. Atrium's original pitch was exactly the opposite of what most legal teams are used to interacting with, and I can't think of a single biglaw attorney (sorry for the anecdote) who had faith in the idea or its execution. The original concept, as a reminder: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/10/atrium-legal/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/10/atrium-legal/ Now it's easy to say that this should've been obvious in hindsight. (Should've been obvious to me, anyway; I cold-mailed Justin and Nick years ago looking to build a specific function within Atrium to address concerns I'd heard on background about the service offering; I never did hear anything back about that.) But that said, I can't help but think the original pitch by Atrium was just too bitter a pill for the most conservative industry in the United States to swallow. Shoot, lawyers are bizarrely resistant to moving to e.g. Signal to preserve attorney-client privilege; given this, I have a hard time thinking of many who would trust ML models with understanding case-law.

paultopia 7y ago
The other thing about the original vision is that it isn't even remotely clear what the hell they're doing. Are we really talk about having ML models understand caselaw? (In which case, thompson reuters is going to be way ahead anyway always, and they suck, see, e.g., the horror that is the latest version of westlaw.) Or are they talking about building a bunch of efficiency tools? I feel like the latter model could have worked as a law firm doing the latter. Like, an actual, ordinary, perfectly milquetoast, law firm, hourly billing and all, except with an R&D division that tries to build workflow efficiencies and uses them to compete on hourly rate. Which, come to think of it, isn't that just what Dentons is doing? So maybe it's just American lawyers that are hopelessly hidebound.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  It sounds as it wasn't remotely clear to them what the hell they were doing. "Disrupt all the law things!" was always a very vague pitch. I suspect this was really a tribal play. The real plan wasn't automation, it was to pitch the company as a specialised law firm for techpreneurs that had recognisable tribal tech features - less of the "them" that tech people feel around lawyers, and more of the "us." The problem with law is that you need the "them" parts to be at least competitive with the rest of the industry, on its own terms. Not only did that not happen, but the "us" parts made no real difference.
gnicholas 7y ago
Part of the reason law firms are resistant to technological change is that they are paid hourly (for the most part) and therefore do not yearn for efficiencies. If it increases efficiency, they will literally lose money in hourly billings.
- eganist 7y ago
  Well if you think about it, the original concept behind Atrium was to kill a business model. Kinda difficult to effectively pay lawyers to shoot their own feet.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - freepor 7y ago
    Well if you can pay 1% of the lawyers 10x the lifetime earnings they would get in BigLaw, they will happily destroy the business model for yo.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently. I think the much more plausible explanation is that a lot of these alleged 'productivity tools' don't add that much productivity.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently. As a factual matter, you are quite wrong. Law firms rarely get reprimanded for over-billing, and in fact, the opposite can be true. When a lawyer bills 2X more than a competitor, they can say that they just did a 2X better job, were more thorough, etc. Lawsuits are rarely repetitive, as the facts and legal principles applied vary widely, so it's very difficult to determine what's the correct amount of time to spend on something. Worse, firms that develop reputations for big bills, can even attract big bet-the-company cases where clients can justify paying top-dollar. The economic principal behind this is that legal services are not a typical "commodity", so standard market principles are not as effective. If you can turn a legal service into a commodity (such as LegalZoom has some parts of the law), you can be much more effective.
kemitchell 7y ago
I believed that law was a sluggish, tech-averse industry when I signed up to join it. But I don't see it living up to its tech-resistant reputation. It's very easy to blame the customer that way, when you have something to sell. As a lawyer, a coder, and legal toolmaker, I've been there. But my lived and observed experience of practice is that lawyers adopt what makes them competitive. As a result, they've often been early, broad adopters of general-purpose office and productivity technology. Sometimes to their eventual detriment overall, by standardizing on an early generation at the expense of later incremental improvements. But at the same time, I think US lawyers as a class are remarkably resistant to whiz-bang pitches of especially law-specific solutions. It's easy to sell a lawyer some technology that their counterparts are using to run circles around them. It's hard to sell a lawyer some technology with a change-the-world, techno-solutionist pep talk. Anecdotally, I can't say how many times I've attended or watched pitches by tech-focused people, business managers, or technophile lawyers with very little practice experience hocking half-baked solutions held up as replacing or supplanting lawyers in some way. My reliable takeaway from those pitches is that the founders don't know what lawyers do. When I ask about tablet ownership, cloud service adoption, security standards, terms of use for professional ethics requirements, or Lexis terminals in the 60s and 70s, it's usually a big, blank stare.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  I’m curious to know what firms you’ve practiced at that weren’t tech-sluggish. Were they run by 55+ partners, or younger folks?
  - msword4ever 7y ago
    Perkins Coie. Well known clients include msft/uber. Bitcoin/cryptocurrency practice is well regarded. I think being close to a lot of tech clients helps. We get some flack for shunning slack/teams/gchat4business/stride/chime or wtf amazon uses/workplace by fb/etc and relying on “antiquated” email. We definitely prefer to work more in thoughtfully composed emails compared to a fluid team chat. It’s also easier to organize and manage. However, I’ve been pleased with my colleagues ability to ask relatively smart questions about ML. For example, people are pretty good at responding to ML hand wavey bullshit with specific questions about training data, labeling, features, model architecture, etc. IMO, we have some younger, eg 40-50, people in leadership positions in my practice group.
nradov 7y ago
Several decades ago law firms were among the first to adopt PCs for word processing and then LANs for file sharing. They will absolutely adopt new technology when it actually works.
- masonic 7y ago
  And word processing in general, clear back to the 1970s (e.g. Wang).
huac 7y ago
ML was not really a big part of their business (maybe the pitch decks)
gamblor956 7y ago
Law firms use cloud software extensively and, unlike FAANG or most tech startups, actually embrace remote work. I submit that law firms are actually far more progressive about technology than the tech world assumes, but are also a lot better at sniffing out bullshit software that doesn't provide a real-world benefit.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  I left biglaw in 2014, at which time my firm had barely transitioned from Windows XP. This was because we used certain Word plugins/macros for formatting briefs, and they had not yet been updated to run on newer versions of Windows. As a result, we were all on XP way past its prime. From talking with lawyer friends, I got the sense my experience was not uncommon.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Unless using Windows XP was somehow making them less money or costing more billable hours, why would they switch to Windows 7 or 10? I wouldn't even think about switching until an EOL notice went out. If it ain't broke...
- xnyan 7y ago
  I hear this a lot, but like others are commenting, I also hear a lot about Windows XP boxes with word 03 setup w/ the macros they need running to this very day. I'd love to see something other than anecdata.
manigandham 7y ago
It's not sluggish at all. Modern law firms use all kinds of tech including lots of software and even AI/semantic analysis systems. There's definitely a high bar before adoption due to regulations and security but that's for good reason. The problem is that there's a limit to the automation. Human lawyers can't be replaced. Interpretation, strategy, communication, court dates, etc. all require the human factor. No amount of software is going to make the human go any faster here.
- LanceH 7y ago
  And the humans don't care to change their interface with all these tools every 3 years even if it is theoretically sub-optimal.

paultopia 7y ago

The other thing about the original vision is that it isn't even remotely clear what the hell they're doing. Are we really talk about having ML models understand caselaw? (In which case, thompson reuters is going to be way ahead anyway always, and they suck, see, e.g., the horror that is the latest version of westlaw.) Or are they talking about building a bunch of efficiency tools? I feel like the latter model could have worked as a law firm doing the latter. Like, an actual, ordinary, perfectly milquetoast, law firm, hourly billing and all, except with an R&D division that tries to build workflow efficiencies and uses them to compete on hourly rate. Which, come to think of it, isn't that just what Dentons is doing? So maybe it's just American lawyers that are hopelessly hidebound.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
It sounds as it wasn't remotely clear to them what the hell they were doing. "Disrupt all the law things!" was always a very vague pitch. I suspect this was really a tribal play. The real plan wasn't automation, it was to pitch the company as a specialised law firm for techpreneurs that had recognisable tribal tech features - less of the "them" that tech people feel around lawyers, and more of the "us." The problem with law is that you need the "them" parts to be at least competitive with the rest of the industry, on its own terms. Not only did that not happen, but the "us" parts made no real difference.

gnicholas 7y ago

Part of the reason law firms are resistant to technological change is that they are paid hourly (for the most part) and therefore do not yearn for efficiencies. If it increases efficiency, they will literally lose money in hourly billings.

eganist 7y ago
Well if you think about it, the original concept behind Atrium was to kill a business model. Kinda difficult to effectively pay lawyers to shoot their own feet.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- freepor 7y ago
  Well if you can pay 1% of the lawyers 10x the lifetime earnings they would get in BigLaw, they will happily destroy the business model for yo.
Barrin92 7y ago
this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently. I think the much more plausible explanation is that a lot of these alleged 'productivity tools' don't add that much productivity.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently. As a factual matter, you are quite wrong. Law firms rarely get reprimanded for over-billing, and in fact, the opposite can be true. When a lawyer bills 2X more than a competitor, they can say that they just did a 2X better job, were more thorough, etc. Lawsuits are rarely repetitive, as the facts and legal principles applied vary widely, so it's very difficult to determine what's the correct amount of time to spend on something. Worse, firms that develop reputations for big bills, can even attract big bet-the-company cases where clients can justify paying top-dollar. The economic principal behind this is that legal services are not a typical "commodity", so standard market principles are not as effective. If you can turn a legal service into a commodity (such as LegalZoom has some parts of the law), you can be much more effective.

kemitchell 7y ago

I believed that law was a sluggish, tech-averse industry when I signed up to join it. But I don't see it living up to its tech-resistant reputation. It's very easy to blame the customer that way, when you have something to sell. As a lawyer, a coder, and legal toolmaker, I've been there. But my lived and observed experience of practice is that lawyers adopt what makes them competitive. As a result, they've often been early, broad adopters of general-purpose office and productivity technology. Sometimes to their eventual detriment overall, by standardizing on an early generation at the expense of later incremental improvements. But at the same time, I think US lawyers as a class are remarkably resistant to whiz-bang pitches of especially law-specific solutions. It's easy to sell a lawyer some technology that their counterparts are using to run circles around them. It's hard to sell a lawyer some technology with a change-the-world, techno-solutionist pep talk. Anecdotally, I can't say how many times I've attended or watched pitches by tech-focused people, business managers, or technophile lawyers with very little practice experience hocking half-baked solutions held up as replacing or supplanting lawyers in some way. My reliable takeaway from those pitches is that the founders don't know what lawyers do. When I ask about tablet ownership, cloud service adoption, security standards, terms of use for professional ethics requirements, or Lexis terminals in the 60s and 70s, it's usually a big, blank stare.

gnicholas 7y ago
I’m curious to know what firms you’ve practiced at that weren’t tech-sluggish. Were they run by 55+ partners, or younger folks?
- msword4ever 7y ago
  Perkins Coie. Well known clients include msft/uber. Bitcoin/cryptocurrency practice is well regarded. I think being close to a lot of tech clients helps. We get some flack for shunning slack/teams/gchat4business/stride/chime or wtf amazon uses/workplace by fb/etc and relying on “antiquated” email. We definitely prefer to work more in thoughtfully composed emails compared to a fluid team chat. It’s also easier to organize and manage. However, I’ve been pleased with my colleagues ability to ask relatively smart questions about ML. For example, people are pretty good at responding to ML hand wavey bullshit with specific questions about training data, labeling, features, model architecture, etc. IMO, we have some younger, eg 40-50, people in leadership positions in my practice group.

nradov 7y ago

Several decades ago law firms were among the first to adopt PCs for word processing and then LANs for file sharing. They will absolutely adopt new technology when it actually works.

masonic 7y ago
And word processing in general, clear back to the 1970s (e.g. Wang).

huac 7y ago

ML was not really a big part of their business (maybe the pitch decks)

gamblor956 7y ago

Law firms use cloud software extensively and, unlike FAANG or most tech startups, actually embrace remote work. I submit that law firms are actually far more progressive about technology than the tech world assumes, but are also a lot better at sniffing out bullshit software that doesn't provide a real-world benefit.

gnicholas 7y ago
I left biglaw in 2014, at which time my firm had barely transitioned from Windows XP. This was because we used certain Word plugins/macros for formatting briefs, and they had not yet been updated to run on newer versions of Windows. As a result, we were all on XP way past its prime. From talking with lawyer friends, I got the sense my experience was not uncommon.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Unless using Windows XP was somehow making them less money or costing more billable hours, why would they switch to Windows 7 or 10? I wouldn't even think about switching until an EOL notice went out. If it ain't broke...
xnyan 7y ago
I hear this a lot, but like others are commenting, I also hear a lot about Windows XP boxes with word 03 setup w/ the macros they need running to this very day. I'd love to see something other than anecdata.

manigandham 7y ago

It's not sluggish at all. Modern law firms use all kinds of tech including lots of software and even AI/semantic analysis systems. There's definitely a high bar before adoption due to regulations and security but that's for good reason. The problem is that there's a limit to the automation. Human lawyers can't be replaced. Interpretation, strategy, communication, court dates, etc. all require the human factor. No amount of software is going to make the human go any faster here.

LanceH 7y ago
And the humans don't care to change their interface with all these tools every 3 years even if it is theoretically sub-optimal.