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Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

170 点作者 janeshmane超过 5 年前

16 条评论

tempsy超过 5 年前
I think anyone considering a job at a company founded by a serial entrepreneur should heed this as a warning.<p>These founder raise pre product market fit because they can, and often raise too much money. Having too much money when you don’t really have a viable product that people want can easily turn your company into a zombie, where people are just sort of going through the motions because there’s nothing else to do but chug along.<p>I’ve seen it many times. Some end up eventually finding the market after a few pivots but it’s really not a fun place to be as an employee with little decision making power. And the founders are usually wealthy enough at that point independent of the success of this current company that it isn’t “do or die” for them which creates another layer of zombie-esque behavior.
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anotherfounder超过 5 年前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atrium.co&#x2F;inside-atrium&#x2F;the-future-of-atrium&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atrium.co&#x2F;inside-atrium&#x2F;the-future-of-atrium&#x2F;</a><p>For someone who has spent so much telling founders to cut buzzwords and speak in plain and simple English, this blog post by Justin Kan is something special. Case in point:<p>&gt; Similarly, at Atrium, we’ve made the tough decision to restructure the company to accommodate growth into new business services through our existing professional services network.<p>Simple facts hidden in positive-sounding buzzwords, as if, they believe that the reader doesn&#x27;t know better. It seems like a variation of &#x27;Our incredible journey..&#x27; template<p>Honest question, why do companies do this? It seems disrespectful to everyone - employees (both fired and current), customers, and any adult for that matter.
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woah超过 5 年前
My company used Atrium to help us think through some very complicated niche legal issues. We were on a flat rate plan, and it was nice to be able to brainstorm without watching the clock. We were pretty happy with their service, but it all came from one attorney, who also was the one who found us and brought us in. Whenever we dealt with anyone else there, it was disorganized and low quality. When our main attorney left, of course we followed them.<p>I had bought into their philosophy at first but the experience showed me why law firms have the partner-oriented structure they do. Legal work is built around trust in the lawyer in most cases and that&#x27;s hard to automate.
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rayiner超过 5 年前
&gt; Even lawyers aren&#x27;t immune to the unpredictability of working for a startup—and the appeal of generating high margins from selling software instead of human services.<p>Companies tend to do the opposite, though, right? Apple could increase its margins by selling iOS and the Ax processor IP. But it makes more “boatloads of money” selling hardware, even at lower margins. Instead of selling IP, Apple uses its superior IP to dominate the market for phones.<p>Its likely the issue isn’t margins, but scalability. Scaling a law firm is difficult to impossible due to conflict of interest rules. That’s why the largest international law firms have 4,000 lawyers while PWC has 230,000 accountants and advisors. That puts a low ceiling on how much you can scale while doing actual legal work.
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staticautomatic超过 5 年前
As far as I can tell, Kan fundamentally misunderstood the nature and value of automation in the legal services industry.<p>Kan was quoted in 2018 as saying &quot;The goal with the tech side has always been...to help attorneys spend more of their time on meaningful work and less of their time on crank-turning work.&quot;<p>Time spent on &quot;crank-turning work&quot; constitutes a relatively negligible portion of billable time for any attorney billing at a reasonably high rate. They delegate as much of it as possible to people who bill at lower rates, like assistants, paralegals and junior associates. So you&#x27;re not really automating much of the attorney&#x27;s work at all. Even if you build an ergonomic software platform for routine tasks (like Atrium&#x27;s glorified Dropbox), the amount of time&#x2F;money it would save over the course of a large engagement is de minimis. And if you aren&#x27;t dramatically saving time, you can&#x27;t dramatically reduce client costs under any fee structure.<p>So they end up with this software group making tools that don&#x27;t help the legal side make more money. And the tools don&#x27;t contribute meaningfully to the legal side&#x27;s pitching for work in part because they don&#x27;t save the prospective client much money. Meanwhile, the software side can&#x27;t sell the tools to other law firms because the software side is tied to a law firm. Ultimately, they end up with a bunch of lawyers and software developers who can&#x27;t help each other. This outcome is so predictable that it&#x27;s downright hilarious they ever thought it would be a money-making strategy, and apparently the investors didn&#x27;t understand or think it through, either.<p>What Kan mostly got wrong was thinking that automation would be <i>profitable</i> for a law firm. There are lots of automation tools that would be extremely <i>valuable</i> to a law firm, but that usually means you should be selling them <i>to</i> a law firm, not <i>from</i> a law firm.
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santojleo超过 5 年前
FWIW - This was my product hunt review 3 months ago, after using them for about 4 months. Reads like a post mortem now.<p>All in all, I actually feel I overpaid for subpar legal services.<p>I will credit them with a smooth and enlightening (albeit overpriced) corporation formation, and maybe they are pearing down the product to just that - because that was the only thing that worked, IMO.<p>I felt as if they were taking advantage of early stage startups preparing to raise capital. You can’t bill their rates and then ghost them, those are precious dollars and precious time.<p>“I have been trying to cancel for over a week, and more of the same. NO ONE RESPONDS FOR WEEKS! These are ATTORNEYS! Waste of money.<p>I’ve dealt with many lawyers coming from my last startup which was in a highly regulated space.<p>Atrium is like an expensive legal zoom, but overpriced. Understand it’s cheaper to use a lawyer at any other law firm because your retainer is a deposit on future services.<p>With Atrium your paying $6k a year in subscription fees for “legal advice” which is otherwise baked into any other law firm, and they don’t provide much advice.<p>They really specialize in financing, using ycombinator docs. These docs are publicly available templates. All other services are limited to their “al la crate menu”... again all templates. It takes days to get a email back from them. It takes a week to get a call setup, if they have the time, and if they will even discuss the matter.<p>Litigation? Find someone else<p>Overseas? Find someone else<p>Doing something outside of California like an asset purchase? Find someone else<p>So you basically need other lawyers anyways if you use atrium, The rest of their menu is boiler employment agreements, NDAs, and terminations - all of which are 2x local rates.<p>They custom quote TOS and privacy policies - and again it’s all template based - and 2x local rates.<p>I asked them about the impact of California’s new AB5 and yep, ask someone else! Save your money - don’t buy the hype.<p>All your doing is helping VCs cover their recurring legal expenses by paying Atrium to overcharge you and build valuation based on their “tech” which is just a drop box and bad customer service, and no legal support.”
seibelj超过 5 年前
I worked at a company that experimented with them. We had a lot of legal spend to white shoe firms (multiple) and wanted to give Atrium a try.<p>They had a flat monthly rate, and then a la carte billing if you needed extra things, IIRC. The real problem was, when we needed something reviewed or worked on, they couldn&#x27;t deliver on time or promise any guaranteed deadline. My CEO was very frustrated.
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petesmithy超过 5 年前
I get that this shit is hard but who thinks that saying &quot;[o]ur in-house attorneys <i>will shift to have the option to become</i> preferred providers in our professional services network&quot; is ok?<p>This is such a gross way of putting it.<p>This isn&#x27;t a publicly listed company ffs, just say what everyone knows it means: &quot;our startup&#x27;s Plan A performed unexpectedly so some of our great colleagues, who believed in us and worked hard for up to 2.5 years, are losing their jobs, and this sucks, but based on what we all learned, including thanks to the valuable work the in-house guys did, we&#x27;re kicking off Plan B today&quot;.
jelling超过 5 年前
I will always remember them for their outreach emails that pretended to be from Justin and included “Sent from my iPhone” to deepen the illusion. After talking to them - and already having competent counsel - it was clear they wanted to turn legal services into a predictable cash flow SaaS business more than they were actually solving anything.
dboreham超过 5 年前
It&#x27;s not looking good for self-driving cars if we can&#x27;t make a self-driving lawyer.
orliesaurus超过 5 年前
so what exactly is Atrium now? A dev shop?<p><pre><code> tech tools it developed for lawyers and law firm clients, and for new areas it will expand into. </code></pre> This press-release feels was very shallow to me, can anyone explain?
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KaoruAoiShiho超过 5 年前
Did they prove or felt like they proved product market fit before they hired loads of lawyers? I wonder how that worked. (Serious question, not trying to be critical).
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duxup超过 5 年前
&gt;Its goal was to improve on the traditional law firm model, by developing software to improve efficiency for both its attorneys and clients.<p>Any word on what they actually were doing to gain these efficiencies?
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Felz超过 5 年前
Last I heard part of the idea behind the lawyering was that it&#x27;d give valuable in-house experience to develop the tools. What changed there? Did they get a big contract with Orrick to replace the in-house lawyers?
eganist超过 5 年前
&quot;Startup Straight Talk&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EONrLRRUYAATmAp?format=png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EONrLRRUYAATmAp?format=png</a>
ryanmccullagh超过 5 年前
So now they are competing with Relativity? (Chicago based)