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

washingtonpost.com

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

#71

Post by Digory »

gist wrote: post #44
rayiner wrote: post #32

> 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…

> (e.g. we pay a flat $5 million per month and you hanldle all our products liability work) Question. Is it standard when a client does that to then demand or ask to review time records? The purpose would be to be able to then use that to bid out the work to other firms. How would the law firm handle the request? Does this happen? If so I would think it would be an advantage to structure billing and time tracking in…

Yes, it always happens -- which is why large corporations are successfully reducing fees where litigation is routine. Refusing to give any account of the time spent on the matter would probably get the lawyer disbarred.

There's a legal duty to give the client an accounting of your fee, and the basis of that fee, so as to show the fee was "reasonable." And a key metric for reasonableness is the time spent. In failing to account for the time, you would be unable to prove the fee is reasonable -- and the lawyer has no right to keep a fee unless it is reasonable.

You might try to get the client to agree in advance that $5m is reasonable, and to waive any right to you supplying an accounting of your time spent. But I suspect the courts would refuse to enforce that agreement, and the relevant Bar would sanction the lawyer and/or his firm.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

zjaffee wrote: post #67
justin wrote: post #26

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 co…

How do you tend to compete with the likes of established players such as westlaw that have been around for so long? I can possibly imagine a startup which helps big company lawyers, as they tend to be more bullish on new tech, but when it comes to the legal industry I don't know. It's not that I don't believe you guys have a fighting chance at having an impact in the legal technology space, the problem is that the le…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by Digory »

ABCLAW wrote: post #36
justin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We raised $10.5M for our legal technology company, Legal Technology Services (LTS). My cofounders of LTS who are lawyers, Augie Rakow and BeBe Chueh, started a firm called Atrium LLP. Atrium LLP is LTS' first customer, and allows us to reduce our development cycle on building that software. I am not a partner at Atrium LLP (and am not a lawyer, nor do I give legal advice). It's a complex story that has been a little…

Justin, with respect, there are many organizations working within the structure that you've put together. All of them get by on the basis that they argue the scope of what software does is not the practice of law. My concern is that in order to secure regulator approval for this position most of these legal support contractors substantially misrepresent the scope and depth of the work they provide. Do you have any pl…

AtriumLTS appears to be working on tools for lawyers, however; wouldn't you agree that's a much easier sell for regulators? As opposed to a LegalZoom or even Clerky model?

Now, if they're trying to gin up some "big data" tools, and using Atrium-client data as inputs for those tools, that raises really sticky questions. There would need to be a whole lot of education and disclosure about to clients about AtriumLTS's access to, and use of, the client's information, and the profits generated from that. You just can't monetize lawyer-client relationships like you do in the finance field.

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

#74

Post by morgante »

abuteau wrote: post #35

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/ [2] https://www.clerky.com/

> 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.

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

#75

Post by pavel_lishin »

0xbear wrote: post #53
pavel_lishin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see why you can't. Most of their articles do that. Truth is often mundane, people wouldn't click through.

Sure, but my point was that justin probably doesn't want to antagonize a news outlet that's giving his project effectively free publicity.

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

#76

Post by seanmcdirmid »

justin wrote: post #26

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 co…

Uber for lawyers reminds me of the street walking lawyer skit on Seattle's old Almost Live TV show (with a pre-famous Bill Nye not being a science guy): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B7QtRCGQmrc .

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

#77

Post by ABCLAW »

Digory wrote: post #73
ABCLAW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justin, with respect, there are many organizations working within the structure that you've put together. All of them get by on the basis that they argue the scope of what software does is not the practice of law. My concern is that in order to secure regulator approval for this position most of these legal support contractors substantially misrepresent the scope and depth of the work they provide. Do you have any pl…

AtriumLTS appears to be working on tools for lawyers, however; wouldn't you agree that's a much easier sell for regulators? As opposed to a LegalZoom or even Clerky model? Now, if they're trying to gin up some "big data" tools, and using Atrium-client data as inputs for those tools, that raises really sticky questions. There would need to be a whole lot of education and disclosure about to clients about AtriumLTS's a…

In my experience, the regulators aren't really being sold in the first place. They don't have the resources or willingness to stir up a hornet's nest if they can get away with it.

Normally the key battle is in determining if the work in question falls within the definition of the practice of law. The more rote and mindless the work is (say, bates numbering a discovery compilation), the safer it is, but most of the low hanging stuff in this area is already done and most of the new entrants aren't trying to provide new tools in that area.

The big new wave is based on using ML and other tools to search, sort and classify documents for contract management, due diligence, discovery, etc. This is an area where support services already operate. As third parties, these support organizations allow firms to launder responsibility. They can claim that the primary firm is responsible for performing the legal work, which allows them to use non-lawyers to perform the work lawyers would, while simultaneously allowing the primary firm to claim that the searches they perform are defensible and therefore even if mistakes have been made that their efforts were sufficient to discharge their responsibilities.

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

#78

Post by frenchman_in_ny »

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)

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

#79

Post by speby »

bradleyjg wrote: post #9

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…

A law firm is typically an LLP structure. LLPs are common even outside law firms and there is nothing I'm aware of that says only accredited/bar member lawyers can be the owners of these LLPs. Where are you getting that info from?

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

#80

Post by speby »

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.

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