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Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

161 点作者 imjk将近 8 年前

14 条评论

justin将近 8 年前
Hello HN!<p>We are excited to be building in the legal space. Raising money is a necessary step, but Atrium LTS&#x27; biggest accomplishment so far is the great team of experts we have assembled here. My cofounders are Augie Rakow (former partner at Orrick, where he worked on over 100 financings and represented Cruise through their acquisition to GM), BeBe Chueh (lawyer turned founder who sold her last company to LegalZoom) and Chris Smoak (Amazon AWS, multiple time YC founder, founder of early FB payments platform Gambit). I think our early team is doing a great job of moving quickly and we are looking for more talented people to join that team.<p>Read more here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atriumlts.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atriumlts.com</a>
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gnicholas将近 8 年前
Most startups are pitched with a problem statement: our users want X, and here&#x27;s how we&#x27;re going to give it to them. This article talks about how lawyers don&#x27;t do X and how Justin thinks they should — but not necessarily that they want to.<p>As someone who spent 7 years working in biglaw, I can attest that there are many technology-related things that would make lawyers more efficient. For example, the large law firm I worked for ran Windows XP until 2011. This lag is due to (1) the fact that senior lawyers are generally very resistant to new technologies; and (2) the fact that law firms run custom&#x2F;old software (to do things like format legal briefs to meet the standards of the relevant jurisdiction), which is mission-critical and may not be compatible with software updates.<p>I&#x27;m curious to see what Justin is building here, and hopefully some of the other news coverage with elucidate where the demand is going to come from for his new product&#x2F;services.<p>Perhaps they&#x27;re envisioning their &quot;user&quot; as corporate legal clients, who are going to pressure their law firm to use his project management software? An indirect model like this might make sense, but it sounds like a tough slog to me.<p>Anyone else know more?
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yannyu将近 8 年前
There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and firms want, but it seems to have hit a local maxima for one major reason: nearly all the software and tools are written around Microsoft Word and the Office suite.<p>Anyone wanting to disrupt the legal industry (in the US) is going to have to deal with MS Word in one way or another. There are hundreds of thousands of attorneys who have worked with nothing but Word and Word-related tools for decades, so someone entering the space will likely need to build project management, collaboration, and communication systems around the Word ecosystem. That or build a product so compelling and easy to migrate to that people are willing to walk away from Word.
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SmellTheGlove将近 8 年前
This is a good idea. I hope it gets traction (I&#x27;d love to work on this problem as well).<p>As for why some of this isn&#x27;t done yet: The legal profession is old school. If you want to know where your work is, you can ask for a status memo, and you&#x27;ll get billed for the time it takes to write it. Or the phone call. Either way. In industries where the product is the billable hour, you&#x27;ll find things get done the way they&#x27;ve always been done.<p>You&#x27;ll find small and mid size firms using more technology, but you&#x27;ll also find that the more highly a company thinks of itself, the more it thinks it needs a large firm (which will bring its legacy processes, because they do work, even if not entirely efficient). Nobody gets fired for hiring Skadden, but then you also don&#x27;t get to bitch when they do things the way they have for the last 50 years either. They didn&#x27;t bring in $2.5B last year by accident - they&#x27;re effective, and are going to be averse to process change if it risks outcomes.<p>If you&#x27;re working on tech in this space, you also need to be aware of that. It&#x27;s a tough sell to larger firms. They won&#x27;t sacrifice outcomes or billables because it&#x27;s all working really well for them, and they always have a glut of un&#x2F;underemployed contract attorneys if they just need to throw highly educated bodies at a problem.
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redm将近 8 年前
For any legal startup to work, Lawyers either A) have to really want what he&#x27;s building or, B) have to have it to be competitive against other firms.<p>I think both of these are pretty high bars, especially since Lawyers bill by the hour.<p>Finding a good efficient lawyer is much more about the Lawyers personality, knowledge, and ability and much less about the technology. A good lawyer can solve things very quickly at little cost. A bad lawyer can take the same matter, spend a ton of money researching it, working it, discussing it, etc, and still come out with a poor result.<p>I&#x27;m interested to see what he&#x27;s building, but I won&#x27;t be surprised if it doesn&#x27;t upend the legal world.
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joshuaheard将近 8 年前
I built a legal app years ago. One problem I had getting investors is that the legal market is so small. Microsoft dropped it as a vertical years ago. Corporate law is even a smaller segment of the legal industry. VC law is an even smaller segment of corporate law. How big is the market for this product?<p>Edit: I see from their website they claim it is a &quot;$96 billion industry&quot;. There are only 1.3 million active lawyers in the U.S. (ABA), so I am curious what this number represents.
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birken将近 8 年前
&gt; And while Kan is still loathe to go into all the details...<p>&gt; Kan promises more to come — including more details about the tech the company is building and how it will begin offering that technology to customers...<p>I like how the only specific details about the company is an alphabetical listing of every single person who invested in it, and then another couple paragraphs explaining to us why that list is somehow meaningful.<p>I wonder where people get the idea that &quot;funding isn&#x27;t a goal&quot;...
goeric将近 8 年前
As a startup founder who dealt with numerous legal things on the ops side, there&#x27;s clearly room for a lot of improvement. While Clerky seems to focus on the startup&#x27;s side of the problem, it seems like Justin is tackling the firm&#x27;s side of the problem (that allows company&#x27;s like Clerky to take their business). This is really interesting to me and I would definitely bet on anything Justin leads. Really excited to see where this goes.
philfrasty将近 8 年前
What happened to Justin&#x27;s Snapchat? Still kicking? Kinda stopped following when Insta-Stories launched. Miss Klaus though &lt;3
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neom将近 8 年前
This is awesome and I&#x27;m really happy to see venture dollars being spent on the legal industry. One of my gripes has always been that quality legal is traditionally expensive to obtain because the &quot;quality&quot; part in legal work tends to come from literally practicing law for a long time and knowledge about many things quite deeply. Over time law firms obviously grow in standing and therefore size, increasing costs. This can easily leave a huge part of society under-served. In theory, much of the cost is research by humans, and I presume research by humans garnering key insights could be done somewhat algorithmically by scanning case law for key points. I hope we see more and more automation and ML services applied to the industry of providing council around aspects of the law.
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frakkingcylons将近 8 年前
Is there a story behind the team photo on the home page where everyone is wearing white tops?
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jonbarker将近 8 年前
Will this be aimed at bootstrapped startups who are trying to get to ramen cash flow positive without the overhead of legal paperwork that still seems somewhat risky for folks who want to test ideas?
OoTheNigerian将近 8 年前
Hi Justin,<p>Welcome back to the game. What happens to the other products in your incubator?
seibelj将近 8 年前
I have no idea about the existing legal tech space, but this sounds like a really good idea if it doesn&#x27;t already exist. I hope it works out