Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 175 posts

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#141

Post by terminalcommand »

adharmad wrote: post #132
speedplane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently. As a factual matter, you are quite wrong. Law firms rarely get reprimanded for over-billing, and in fact, the opposite…

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?

You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.

If you can and want to bill more to a client, you simply review the matter covering more depth or let the work be done by more senior lawyers who have a better hourly rate.

Big-law collects all the client is ready to spend on legal services. The more you spend, the better service you’ll get. If you suspect foulplay in billables, review the job narratives and raise a complaint.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#142

Post by terminalcommand »

speedplane wrote: post #135
adharmad wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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…

As a counterpoint, I’d like to state that being able to raise efficiency when you need it could be a huge selling point.

On slow days, I don’t want to raise my efficiency that much , I take my time and review more thorougly. But on busy days, where I bill 13+ billable hours for a week, I’d want as much efficiency as possible.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#143

Post by Ice_cream_suit »

"The legal team seemed like 2nd rate lawyers who constantly made typos on legal forms"

And

"My experience with this was also negative - seemed like a good idea but post-sale often took weeks, even months to get results" https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#144

Post by gumby »

gdilla wrote: post #140
gumby wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing they’d be mainly those that attended the lowest tier of accredited law school on an H-1 and then couldn’t find gainful employment here. OTOH, after sept 11 my cousin (or, I think, his wife) decided they didn’t want to raise kids in NY so he moved back to Mumbai, but kept his job with a major ibank and salary, just working mostly remotely. I suspect though he’s an exception.

H-1 isn't a student visa.

You’re right; should have written F-1 but it’s now too late to edit my comment. But you get the idea.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#146

Post by mbesto »

gumby wrote: post #105
mbesto wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see business services companies build tools in their vertical industry and become successful all of the time. You just can't take venture funding.

The question is over a pivot from "I'm going to provide product/service X at a profit due to my tool T" to "Well, I couldn't sell X so I'll sell T to other people who want X". If you couldn't make a go of it, is it really likely others will, or if they can that they will want your tool T to do so? This is different from either providing a service and successfuly using your own software to do so or providing a service…

Fair. I guess it depends on what you determine as a success. 37signals was probably somewhat successful as a dev shop, but obviously not nearly as successful as a project management software one.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#147

Post by patentatt »

manigandham wrote: post #78

Legal industry is already tech-enabled. Templates, digital docs and signatures, OCR, AI/NLP/semantic processing, collaborative editing, and more are already used by modern law firms. There's no easy software-based efficiency left to find. The major work is still done by humans because of the liability, complexity and customization of every case. The next step requires a revolution in legal process, not just more soft…

Disagree. I am pretty close to the Biglaw tech scene. While you’re correct that most firms would say they use all of those things, the actual implementation and execution isn’t there. It’s not even a nuanced critique, I mean maybe 1% of amlaw 100 revenue is even touched by anything in your list. There is a lot of work to be done, and great opportunity in the legal industry.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#148

Post by itronitron »

nharada wrote: post #35
gumby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never really seen a "pivot to tools" work (after I tried it with one company, and it failed, I started noticing when others tried it too).

Why do you think it never pans out?

Using a tool often requires a lot more work than using (consuming) a service.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#150

Post by robhunter »

One lesson that I think is getting buried here - hiring 100+ people when you're not yet at product-market-fit makes it really hard to try and get to product-market-fit.

It's a lot easier to experiment, learn, and iterate when the team is small. Gets very difficult when you're 100+ so quickly.

Post reply on HN