Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup
techcrunch.com

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.

As for why some of this isn'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'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'll find things get done the way they've always been done.

You'll find small and mid size firms using more technology, but you'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't get to bitch when they do things the way they have for the last 50 years either. They didn't bring in $2.5B last year by accident - they're effective, and are going to be averse to process change if it risks outcomes.

If you're working on tech in this space, you also need to be aware of that. It's a tough sell to larger firms. They won't sacrifice outcomes or billables because it's all working really well for them, and they always have a glut of un/underemployed contract attorneys if they just need to throw highly educated bodies at a problem.

We are excited to be building in the legal space. Raising money is a necessary step, but Atrium LTS' 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.

Read more here: http://www.atriumlts.com

When I was at YC, there was a defined schedule, so I had lots of free time to mess around on snapchat. Now that I'm back in the startup world, I spend most of my time thinking about and working on my company, and forget to snapchat.

Klaus says hi.