Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

One of the worst contracts I ever had was for a small company running a SaaS for divorce attorneys to help manage their cases.

The main selling point was that it would re-create state forms on the web and allow an attorney to fill them out, print them, and manage a case.

These forms would change many times a year and they were written using horrible PHP libraries that required every piece of the form to be drawn using coordinates. If one thing changed on the page (which happened often), all coordinates would shift and have to be re-written.

Aside from this, the owner had the first version written by developers overseas a few years earlier and I was hired as part of the 2.0 team that consisted of more inexperienced overseas developers and resulted in even more of a mess than version 1.

Some gems from the owner:

She once put on her Linkedin profile that one of her accomplishments was the ability to hire developers on a volunteer basis or well below marker value. It was taken down within a day.

I was finally let go and was told straight to my face that she was going to hire someone from India for 1/3 what she was paying me.

> Atrium had attempted a pivot back in January, laying off its in-house lawyers to become a more pure software startup with better margins. Some of its lawyers formed a separate standalone legal firm and took on former Atrium clients. But Kan tells me that it was tough to regain momentum coming out of that change, which some Atrium customers tell me felt chaotic and left them unsure of their legal representation.

It's hard to detect my own bias of course, but this seems like a really cynical move. I understand the need to improve margins but essentially trying the train our processes so we can fire you is off-putting and borderline offensive to workers. For positions closer to the furnace of automation and jobs that are generally dangerous that people don't take pride in it can be minimally destructive but law is not one of those professions.

It's preferable to get into businesses that don't screw over anyone, but if you're going to screw over someone maybe don't screw over smart highly paid professionals that are providing your core value proposition.

True, and I actually considered possibilities like this. But it would be pretty difficult/expensive/time-consuming for people to come to the US, go to law school, study for and pass the bar, and then go back to a low-cost-of-living place to practice law.

In most states, you have to go to an accredited law school in order to even sit for the bar, and all of such law schools are located in the US (and charge commensurately-priced tuition). I believe there are ways around this in medicine because you can go to medical school elsewhere and then sit for boards in the US. Even if you have a foreign law degree, you still have to get a 1-year LLM ($60k) in order to sit for the bar.