> a better strategy would have been supplying tools and software to lawfirms,

tools and software for patent law are abundant and low value. you can't just say "tools and software for [INDUSTRY]" and assume a business model exists there. you need some insight into how firms operate.

> aggregating data and knowhow

law firms are not going to give a startup access to client data. especially in any format that could be aggregated. 0% chance. confidentiality, privilege, and patentability, are essential. it goes against our business model and professional obligations.

> and then pivoting to an “automated” law firm as a service.

the portion that could be automated is 10% of the value. experience, both with the practice area and the client's industry, are 90% of the value.

think of stackoverflow, yes an applicable code snippet exists on there, but understanding how it works, what its going to do, and the larger implications is the valuable bit. you can't automate that.

Plenty of software companies make a lot of money selling to lawyers. Clio (https://www.clio.com/), for instance, is a SaaS that helps lawyers run their practices better. It doesn't try to replace lawyers; it just saves them time on the bullshit of running a firm. Kira (https://kirasystems.com/) automates due diligence, which is a labor-intensive (and hence costly) process that nobody loves doing, but which does generate a lot of billable hours for paralegals and support staff.

clio is a good example.

Indeed, Clio is absolutely crushing it. They closed a monster $250M round last September - and this is a company headquartered in Vancouver, not San Francisco, so the bar for raising that kind of money is truly up there.

The hybrid model made little sense in VC-land anyways. Gross margins were not as high as a full SaaS model. The transition to a full software model was never clearly laid out and seemed more wishful than anything.

I always wondered if the hybrid model was an experiment at ways around regulatory barriers to lawyers sharing fees/profits, a la a global multinational leasing the very expensive brand, logo, and internal software from tax-haven incorporated HQ... It's not sending away profits, it's just licensing some incredibly valuable IP, honest!

If the legal services arm was able to license the name and technology in a permitted way (like how a law firm can of course get their website and IT done by experts), it would seem to present an experiment at whether such a structure could act as a conduit to channel fees back into an investment vehicle.

I saw some reviews online here and there and it sounded like the biggest complaint was that it was expensive for what it was and it was never clear who would respond to a request and when (e.g. fungible lawyers taking random requests)

Most startups will want to build a relationship with an actual lawyer, and having something like a LegalZoom for startups didn’t make sense for most.

That's what their pivot was 2 months ago, linked in the article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/13/atrium-layoffs/

Legal industry already has plenty of good tooling though. There's not much more to do here outside of automating the lawyers, and that won't happen.

This. With every 'failure' of a company there come those who don't know the full picture and begin with 'guesses', 'maybe's' and other 'reasons' why it failed. The sensible thing to do is to wait for the details.

Because at the end of the war or a death of a startup, everyone is a field marshal analysing the failure afterwards.