Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

Put another way, it was doomed (good riddance).

I've mentored aspiring entrepreneurs in the legal tech + services space for a number of years now and go out of my way to provide additional guidance (and some well intentioned ribbing) to those who pitch any sort of legal referral idea.

The concepts are (without fail) derivative and lack novelty, equivalent to pitching "Uber rideshare, but for [INDUSTRY]" without more to sophisticated VCs.

The problem is very real, but the margins are so thin that venture shouldn't be anywhere near it. Solutions should be non-profit and left to those heroes in the A2J space (whose funding should be significantly increased).

> Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?

As a lawyer, if you read and understand a document in 10 minutes and bill an hour of time for it, that's lying and you can lose your bar license over it. However, if you read that same document very slowly and carefully over a full hour, then you are considered a high quality detail-oriented attorney.

> Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?

Generally, if you want to sell technology to lawyers, telling them they will be more efficient will not work, they are simply not motivated to spend money for something makes something they are already doing take less time.

If you want to sell to lawyers, the best arguments you have are:

- Increase Quality / Reduce Errors: There are tons of mistakes that lawyers can make, and they are constantly terrified of making them. As a lawyer reputation is everything, and even silly inconsequential mistakes hurt.

- Get More Clients: Small-time lawyers spend up to 50% of their time trying to attract clients. At larger firms, it's less than that, but it's still a constant pressure that they are judged on. They may not be willing to pay for something that makes their work 10% faster, but they will pay for something that gets them 10% more clients.

- Capabilities That Change the Law Itself: Some technology really changes the rules itself. E-discovery allowed firms to look through millions of pages of documents, and to bury their opponents in the same. If you didn't have it, you were at a disadvantage and would lose your case.

Nice writeup. Too many startups and founders out there w/ no idea about the industry. Thus, excuses of the type you mention ("sluggish, tech-averse, etc") predominate over critical evaluation of the extremely sticky and complicated obstacles to new innovations in the legal tech space.

That said, as a fellow lawyer, coder, and legal toolmaker, I'd posit there's more of a middle ground than you laid out:

> It's easy to sell a lawyer some technology that their counterparts are using to run circles around them.

Of course – it should be easy to sell lawyers on established technologies! In fact, one could argue competence REQUIRES lawyers/firms to adopt said technologies. It's not wrong to be disappointed with what's being defined as tech adoption in this thread by industry defenders:

> security standards, word processing, LANs, spreadsheets, aggregating data & metrics, owning an iPad, ...

These are bare minimums and best practices in every other industry, and celebrating attorneys for meeting an extremely low bar is no better than technobabble.

> It's hard to sell a lawyer some technology with a change-the-world, techno-solutionist pep talk.

Stipulating there's a difference between snake oil and actually meaningful legal-specific technologies for practicing attorneys/firms, then yes, certain players in the industry will be more conservative about adopting new innovation. Conversely, a functioning market would also imply the opposite: those who responsibly bet on the next big thing, whether in an operational capacity, to drive costs down, or with the consent of their clients.

Sad to say, that's not the current state of the legal industry. Sure, I'm likely biased since I'm still on the vendor side irrespective of how much we aim to make well-built software with solid UIX focused on the practitioner. Nonetheless, firms remain extremely risk averse, hierarchical, obsessed with profits per partner above all else, and long live the billable hour.

Once again, it's complicated, and no one really has the nuance or all the answers, so we all fall back to a bit of a stereotype which makes that middle ground elusive. Ultimately, however, it's really the industry that suffers, and I wonder if/when it will ever change, what the impetus will be, and if it truly requires another global economic meltdown to shake things up.

It's a lawyer joke. They saying goes that if you win your case, it's worth every penny.