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Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

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Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#71

Post by arethuza »

gumby wrote: post #51
woah wrote: post #27

My company used Atrium to help us think through some very complicated niche legal issues. We were on a flat rate plan, and it was nice to be able to brainstorm without watching the clock. We were pretty happy with their service, but it all came from one attorney, who also was the one who found us and brought us in. Whenever we dealt with anyone else there, it was disorganized and low quality. When our main attorney l…

It’s always been weird to me when a law firm tells me about all the services and such they have. It’s not the firm, it’s the lawyer, and if they decamp, you follow. Likewise just because I am really happy with lawyer X at firm Y Doesn’t mean I’m interested in Y’s patent practice when I need patent assistance. For his reason I’ve always been puzzled why law firms merge. You ever pay multiples of revenue; it’s just lit…

Cross selling is often a major source of business for law firms and there may be rewards for successfully introducing an existing client to a new part of the firm.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#72

Post by petesmithy »

I get that this shit is hard but who thinks that saying "[o]ur in-house attorneys will shift to have the option to become preferred providers in our professional services network" is ok?

This is such a gross way of putting it.

This isn't a publicly listed company ffs, just say what everyone knows it means: "our startup's Plan A performed unexpectedly so some of our great colleagues, who believed in us and worked hard for up to 2.5 years, are losing their jobs, and this sucks, but based on what we all learned, including thanks to the valuable work the in-house guys did, we're kicking off Plan B today".

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#73

Post by nradov »

sjy wrote: post #56
staticautomatic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably now on the long list of law firms that tried and failed at alternative fee structures. Legal services consumers have shown time and again that they like regular old hourly billing.

Can you expand on this? It sounds plausible, but then so does the narrative being pushed by the “new law” firms – that clients want alternative fee structures because they don’t like the open-ended cost of time billing.

It's not really open ended. The client can stop any time they decide the legal fees are no longer worth the benefits. And even traditional law firms do often work on a fixed fee or contingency fee basis for certain types of cases.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#74

Post by nradov »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #28
CalChris wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a viable form of risk-taking but then it isn't contrarian risk-taking. However, has anyone ever actually ran the numbers on serial founders, the entirety of the cohort and not just the success stories?

I believe first round did a study that showed that companies founded by people who'd previously had a successful exit had better outcomes, but they also raised at higher valuations, and those effects canceled each other. So returns from investing in successful serial founders vs new founders are similar

Just as the efficient market hypothesis would predict.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#75

Post by dustingetz »

staticautomatic wrote: post #57

As far as I can tell, Kan fundamentally misunderstood the nature and value of automation in the legal services industry. Kan was quoted in 2018 as saying "The goal with the tech side has always been...to help attorneys spend more of their time on meaningful work and less of their time on crank-turning work." Time spent on "crank-turning work" constitutes a relatively negligible portion of billable time for any attorn…

Kan tried to sell $36k/yr fixed price legal packages as "efficiency" to early stage startups. He generated leads with bait-n-switch tactics - by pretending to be a startup accelerator with a YC-style application - afaict the accelerator did not actually exist. I will never forget that he tried to pull that on me.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#76

Post by Bobbleoxs »

meritt wrote: post #48
mdotk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could NEVER understand what the heck they do and how they got $75M. Just sounded like they were a law firm specialising in start ups. Big whoop.

> how they got $75M Justin Kan sold Twitch to Amazon for nearly $1B after 7 years, Socialcam for $60M in 18 months, and Exec for "under $10M" in 2 years. That's how he raised $75M. The company/product was completely irrelevant.

Same thoughts here on the downward trend. It feels like a good concept, luck and good timing re Twitch exit. A bit less about the product per se.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#77

Post by pkilgore »

sjy wrote: post #56
staticautomatic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably now on the long list of law firms that tried and failed at alternative fee structures. Legal services consumers have shown time and again that they like regular old hourly billing.

Can you expand on this? It sounds plausible, but then so does the narrative being pushed by the “new law” firms – that clients want alternative fee structures because they don’t like the open-ended cost of time billing.

Not OP but former litigator turned programmer here. This gets very complicated because saying "legal work" is a giant generalization for a broad field. But talking about this with my peers (still a slice of the market) we arrived at this:

There are three types of legal work (exceptions, yada yada, but mostly):

1. Normal people shit. Parking tickets and most criminal law, etc. Flat fees fine and usually nice so your clients understand (and understand their ability to actually pay your rate). Work itself can be pretty predictable, or taken on contingency for civil stuff.

2. Line of business legal work. If you fuck this up it sucks, but rarely is it a material risk to the value of the company. This work is usually brought in-house ASAP, to control costs. Before that point, you see both hourly and flat fee work, mostly based on client sophistication to negotiate such things.

3. Bet-the-company (and white collar/wealthy criminal) work. Here clients only care about one thing: WINNING. You win M/A by closing. You win regulatory work by clearing the way for profit making activity. You win bet the company litigation by....winning. The cost of legal services, even at hourly rates, are negligible compared to the profit making ability success unlocks (or unlocks the continued existence of the company, a guy not going to prison). Clients rarely give a shit what or how you charge as long as you win. They will pay whatever "winners" charge. They will only bitch about costs if they percieve themselves to not be winning.

You cant talk about this as if legal work is the same. That's probably why you percieve a disconnect as an outsider.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#78

Post by duxup »

jimmydddd wrote: post #52
duxup wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have some limited visibility to a very large law firm. Paperwork you can just script never comes up as a problem and it's not like these organizations would just duplicate effort like that if they could avoid it / save themselves money. Also I never got the impression that the really profitable customers are shopping for those kinds of efficiencies....

"... really profitable customers ... ." I agree. If an attorney can choose their customers, they are not going to choose the penny pinchers.

Yeah I've worked enough to see companies chase budget products, customers, etc .... to see them regret it often.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#79

Post by gumby »

arethuza wrote: post #71
gumby wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always been weird to me when a law firm tells me about all the services and such they have. It’s not the firm, it’s the lawyer, and if they decamp, you follow. Likewise just because I am really happy with lawyer X at firm Y Doesn’t mean I’m interested in Y’s patent practice when I need patent assistance. For his reason I’ve always been puzzled why law firms merge. You ever pay multiples of revenue; it’s just lit…

Cross selling is often a major source of business for law firms and there may be rewards for successfully introducing an existing client to a new part of the firm.

Those are dumb clients! It’s like assuming your developers are all the same.

Re: Atrium lays off lawyers, pivots to tools

#80

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #8

> Even lawyers aren't immune to the unpredictability of working for a startup—and the appeal of generating high margins from selling software instead of human services. Companies tend to do the opposite, though, right? Apple could increase its margins by selling iOS and the Ax processor IP. But it makes more “boatloads of money” selling hardware, even at lower margins. Instead of selling IP, Apple uses its superior I…

> Scaling a law firm is difficult to impossible due to conflict of interest rules.

That's why I've long thought the conflict disqualification rules should apply only to individual lawyers, with suitable ethical walls. I strongly suspect that the traditional disqualification rules evolved in a bygone era where sole practitioners and one- or two-man (yes, man) law firms served as trusted advisers to clients who weren't that sophisticated about legal matters. It's not at all clear that firmwide disqualification for conflicts is still appropriate in an era of (i) giant global law firms and (ii) in-house counsel who are the client's actual trusted advisers and who use law firms strictly on a project basis as hired help.

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