The original concept, as a reminder: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/10/atrium-legal/
Now it's easy to say that this should've been obvious in hindsight. (Should've been obvious to me, anyway; I cold-mailed Justin and Nick years ago looking to build a specific function within Atrium to address concerns I'd heard on background about the service offering; I never did hear anything back about that.) But that said, I can't help but think the original pitch by Atrium was just too bitter a pill for the most conservative industry in the United States to swallow. Shoot, lawyers are bizarrely resistant to moving to e.g. Signal to preserve attorney-client privilege; given this, I have a hard time thinking of many who would trust ML models with understanding case-law.
As a result, they've often been early, broad adopters of general-purpose office and productivity technology. Sometimes to their eventual detriment overall, by standardizing on an early generation at the expense of later incremental improvements. But at the same time, I think US lawyers as a class are remarkably resistant to whiz-bang pitches of especially law-specific solutions. It's easy to sell a lawyer some technology that their counterparts are using to run circles around them. It's hard to sell a lawyer some technology with a change-the-world, techno-solutionist pep talk.
Anecdotally, I can't say how many times I've attended or watched pitches by tech-focused people, business managers, or technophile lawyers with very little practice experience hocking half-baked solutions held up as replacing or supplanting lawyers in some way. My reliable takeaway from those pitches is that the founders don't know what lawyers do. When I ask about tablet ownership, cloud service adoption, security standards, terms of use for professional ethics requirements, or Lexis terminals in the 60s and 70s, it's usually a big, blank stare.
Whoever can build tooling to help lawyers decipher a 100 page credit agreement in half the time, reliably all the time... will do way better than someone replacing those lawyers with AI-outsource hybrids that can do it in 1/10 the time, but only succeed half the time.
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.
Such an interesting statement! What do you mean by it?
Say a new technology allows lawyers to do the same tasks in half the time it used to take them. That sounds like it rhymes with "half the pay for the same work" to me, which might account for some of the new-tech skepticism.
That's my take anyway. I suppose it's similar to the knee-jerk reflex to automation, where you're liable to 'automate yourself our of a job.'
Obviously the legal field is very diverse. I'm sure there are 80 year old lawyers out there still using teletype terminals to do their work because that's what they know. But my experience with larger law firms is that they see technological innovation as a key to their success.
In my experience, there is some correlation between technology and age. But keep in mind that 55 year old lawyers were born in 1965, started coming out of law schools in the late 1980s, and became established in the early Internet era, before the bubble burst.
Part of what you're getting at might be down to how the role of older lawyers tends to change, especially in firms. I would say most older lawyers in transactional fields do far more advisory and strategic work, akin to consulting or even lobbying, than issue research, contract review, or routine drafting. If the senior partner's working pretty old school, but all the junior partners, associates, secretaries, and paralegals under them use their own tools, that's still a pretty newfangled picture, overall.
Part of it may also be certain specialties that deal routinely with government bodies, like court systems and regulators, with their own adoption curves. But don't jump to conclusions there based on standards for consumer technology. The websites may look clunky, and the interfaces may be pretty retro. But the databases involved are often functionally complete, resilient, and workable for the severely outnumbered public servants that use them most.
I think one area that we need to improve on is handling of PDFs. It's clearly the standard for documents of record. However, the fact it can be scanned images or text data is inconvenient.
Well known clients include msft/uber. Bitcoin/cryptocurrency practice is well regarded.
I think being close to a lot of tech clients helps. We get some flack for shunning slack/teams/gchat4business/stride/chime or wtf amazon uses/workplace by fb/etc and relying on “antiquated” email. We definitely prefer to work more in thoughtfully composed emails compared to a fluid team chat. It’s also easier to organize and manage.
However, I’ve been pleased with my colleagues ability to ask relatively smart questions about ML. For example, people are pretty good at responding to ML hand wavey bullshit with specific questions about training data, labeling, features, model architecture, etc.
IMO, we have some younger, eg 40-50, people in leadership positions in my practice group.
Just be advised that if the prospect's head actually explodes, you may face capacity challenges to your engagement letter when you bill.
I actually used to work in their Palo Alto office — back when it belonged to MWE in 2007-2009. The new lobby that Perkins built is much nicer!
I feel like the latter model could have worked as a law firm doing the latter. Like, an actual, ordinary, perfectly milquetoast, law firm, hourly billing and all, except with an R&D division that tries to build workflow efficiencies and uses them to compete on hourly rate. Which, come to think of it, isn't that just what Dentons is doing? So maybe it's just American lawyers that are hopelessly hidebound.
I suspect this was really a tribal play. The real plan wasn't automation, it was to pitch the company as a specialised law firm for techpreneurs that had recognisable tribal tech features - less of the "them" that tech people feel around lawyers, and more of the "us."
The problem with law is that you need the "them" parts to be at least competitive with the rest of the industry, on its own terms.
Not only did that not happen, but the "us" parts made no real difference.
I submit that law firms are actually far more progressive about technology than the tech world assumes, but are also a lot better at sniffing out bullshit software that doesn't provide a real-world benefit.
From talking with lawyer friends, I got the sense my experience was not uncommon.
The problem is that there's a limit to the automation. Human lawyers can't be replaced. Interpretation, strategy, communication, court dates, etc. all require the human factor. No amount of software is going to make the human go any faster here.
I think the much more plausible explanation is that a lot of these alleged 'productivity tools' don't add that much productivity.
As a factual matter, you are quite wrong. Law firms rarely get reprimanded for over-billing, and in fact, the opposite can be true.
When a lawyer bills 2X more than a competitor, they can say that they just did a 2X better job, were more thorough, etc. Lawsuits are rarely repetitive, as the facts and legal principles applied vary widely, so it's very difficult to determine what's the correct amount of time to spend on something. Worse, firms that develop reputations for big bills, can even attract big bet-the-company cases where clients can justify paying top-dollar.
The economic principal behind this is that legal services are not a typical "commodity", so standard market principles are not as effective. If you can turn a legal service into a commodity (such as LegalZoom has some parts of the law), you can be much more effective.
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.
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.
I don't think you're really talking about "efficiency" here. On slow days, you may want to spend more time to do a more thorough job, but you still wouldn't want to be less efficient.
Simple automation example: renaming files into a new format. If there was a tool that could rename a large number of files for you quickly, you would use it on slow days and busy days. There is nothing to be gained to doing it manually.
I think you're referring to tools that speed you up but sacrifice quality. That isn't a pure efficiency tool, it's tool that allows you to adjust balance your time and quality of work.
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.
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.
I am telling you --from experience, not theory-- that many lawyers are resistant to time-saving tools. Not all of them, but many of them. They rarely voice out-loud that their concern is about reduced billables, and will instead make absurd arguments that the time-saving tools decrease quality.
Simple real life example: we were selling a very simple bulk download tool to a law firm. Instead of clicking a link and downloading a document many times, this tool would download many in batch and put them in a zip folder. They raised the objection saying "how do we know it downloaded everything", even though the zip file also had an excel listing all the documents that were downloaded, the source of where they came from, and any errors in downloading them.
Law firm prestige is measured in part by billing rates, which firms almost never (except 2008) lower. If a firm lowered rates for any reason, associates would start getting worried/jumping ship. I'm not saying it's rational, just that the field is prestige-based, and associates would freak if they saw their billing rate drop. It would be seen as a harbinger of lower salaries or lousy bonuses on the horizon, no matter how the firm spun it.
Kinda difficult to effectively pay lawyers to shoot their own feet.
That's how radiologists could analyze x-rays and such remotely: they were actual US-trained radiologists with licenses in US states who preferred to go home to India.
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.
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.
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).
I asked if all of their lawyers are based in the US, and they couldn't give me a straight answer. Eventually, when I said "well, of course they must all be US-licensed lawyers, right?" they said "oh, yeah, they must all be in the US then."
It was not a confidence-inspiring conversation, and I can't say I'm surprised that they're shutting down.