
Startup wants to build tools for lawyers to speed up legal services - thelock85
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/09/14/this-silicon-valley-startup-wants-to-replace-lawyers-with-robots/?utm_term=.06c53eb71732
======
justin
Headline is a little misleading. We started LTS, our legal tech company, with
the goal of helping lawyers provide legal services to startups in a more
speedy, transparent and price predicable way. To us, that means building tools
that lawyers use, and not creating the Uber of lawyers or a master AI that
replaces lawyers (I don't think the latter is possible right now).

Atrium, the law firm founded by two of my LTS cofounders, is putting that
software to use to help startups now.

We are hiring engineers ([http://atriumlts.com](http://atriumlts.com)). Some
reasons to join: learn from experienced founders who have done it before, and
you can build on short iterations for a customer that's very thankful and you
can just walk over and talk to.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Headline is a little misleading_

I guess you can't say "Your article hits a factual error before it even
begins" to the Washington Post, huh.

~~~
0xbear
I don't see why you can't. Most of their articles do that. Truth is often
mundane, people wouldn't click through.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Sure, but my point was that justin probably doesn't want to antagonize a news
outlet that's giving his project effectively free publicity.

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bradleyjg
There's a big unanswered question in the article.

It says that the company is a law firm, that only two of the four co-founders
are lawyers, and that it raised $10.5 million dollars, presumably on an equity
basis.

However, law firms are not permitted to have non-lawyers as owners. It is
considered unethical as it would mean decisions would be made by people that
aren't obligated to follow the cannons of legal ethics or subject to bar
discipline. The only U.S. jurisdiction I'm aware of that doesn't follow this
rule is the District of Columbia, but Atrium is based in California.

~~~
justin
We raised $10.5M for our legal technology company, Legal Technology Services
(LTS). My cofounders of LTS who are lawyers, Augie Rakow and BeBe Chueh,
started a firm called Atrium LLP. Atrium LLP is LTS' first customer, and
allows us to reduce our development cycle on building that software. I am not
a partner at Atrium LLP (and am not a lawyer, nor do I give legal advice).

It's a complex story that has been a little misinterpreted and simplified.

~~~
ABCLAW
Justin, with respect, there are many organizations working within the
structure that you've put together. All of them get by on the basis that they
argue the scope of what software does is not the practice of law.

My concern is that in order to secure regulator approval for this position
most of these legal support contractors substantially misrepresent the scope
and depth of the work they provide.

Do you have any plans in place to mitigate the risk of crossing the line, and
how will that inform your product development plans?

~~~
Digory
AtriumLTS appears to be working on tools for lawyers, however; wouldn't you
agree that's a much easier sell for regulators? As opposed to a LegalZoom or
even Clerky model?

Now, if they're trying to gin up some "big data" tools, and using Atrium-
client data as inputs for those tools, that raises really sticky questions.
There would need to be a whole lot of education and disclosure about to
clients about AtriumLTS's access to, and use of, the client's information, and
the profits generated from that. You just can't monetize lawyer-client
relationships like you do in the finance field.

~~~
ABCLAW
In my experience, the regulators aren't really being sold in the first place.
They don't have the resources or willingness to stir up a hornet's nest if
they can get away with it.

Normally the key battle is in determining if the work in question falls within
the definition of the practice of law. The more rote and mindless the work is
(say, bates numbering a discovery compilation), the safer it is, but most of
the low hanging stuff in this area is already done and most of the new
entrants aren't trying to provide new tools in that area.

The big new wave is based on using ML and other tools to search, sort and
classify documents for contract management, due diligence, discovery, etc.
This is an area where support services already operate. As third parties,
these support organizations allow firms to launder responsibility. They can
claim that the primary firm is responsible for performing the legal work,
which allows them to use non-lawyers to perform the work lawyers would, while
simultaneously allowing the primary firm to claim that the searches they
perform are defensible and therefore even if mistakes have been made that
their efforts were sufficient to discharge their responsibilities.

~~~
Digory
Agreed that this is happening; laundering is pejorative, but AFAICT, the Bar
has said it's all kosher so long a lawyer is ultimately responsible for the
advice and making the effort reasonable.

So, for our friends at Atrium, whether or not their systems 'practice law,' as
long as that product is 'given' by the client's attorney... doesn't that look
like it meets the UPL hurdle? (At least at this oversimplified level, IANYL)

~~~
ABCLAW
Depends on how the regulator interprets the bar on sharing billings with non-
lawyers. Westlaw and Lexis have massive offerings that do a ton to make work
easier, so there's obviously room to work with, but they aren't providing
products that practice law. They provide tools to practice law with.

With ML-driven autonomous determinations of relevance, however, you're
literally doing associate legal work 101, with a system applying skill and
judgement to the facts of the matter to make a determination of a legal
nature. That's a difference in kind. This becomes doubly interesting, because
most of these platforms are cloud hosted, so they're not 'given' by the
attorney in the way that a land registry look-up would be after being vetted
by a clerk. They're a stand-alone service that functionally makes choices for
you.

I have no clue if Atrium is going down that route, but that's where the
million dollar cost savings are. Maybe they're just making snazzier client-
focused billing software. I've asked before, but no one will tell me what
products they're actually working on.

------
rayiner
> As anyone who has racked up legal fees due to lawyers’ mounting billable
> hours can attest, law firms remain almost surprisingly low-tech operations.

That’s like saying programming remains surprisingly low tech because you walk
into a tech company and everyone is hunched over an emacs window.

Even at the fanciest Wall Street law firms, 10-20% of billed time is written
off. The largest clients who get sued a lot are demanding things like flat
retainers (e.g. we pay a flat $5 million per month and you hanldle all our
products liability work). There is a lot of pressure to get things done within
certain budget targets, but time is routinely written off because those
targets cannot be met. Plus, competition is high. Even at the top of the
market there are dozens of firms in direct competition. If there was a magic
way to do more with less firms would do it.

~~~
wil421
Rayiner,

Whenever someone on HN talks about bringing tech to law firms I inevitably
hear they are opposed to improving their process. It would lead to less
billable hours for the firm.

Is this true? Not specifically talking about the top firms but firms in
general.

~~~
rayiner
Clients are wise enough these days that they just care about the bottom line.
They want to know: how much will this case that’s in discovery cost me this
quarter (and can you help me justify it to my boss)? Often you give a
realistic number and the client pushes back, which is how you end up with
10-20% of time being written off. This is true at every level of firm.

Within this framework, lawyers have an incentive to be efficient. If you cut
your hours so you write off 10% instead of 20%, you’ve freed up hours you
could spend on new billable work. If you enter into a flat fee arrangement
(which in various permutations are very common), the only way you come out
ahead if by harnessing efficiencies. I think most law firm managers are
numerate enough to realize these things by now.

The challenges to adoption are risk. Law firms can’t push back the release
date because the software isn’t ready. That makes them very conservative about
changing their processes. Cost-benefit is also an issue. Even the largest law
firms are relatively small companies. All major business decisions are made by
lawyers, and not even the managing partner works more than part time on
administration. They don’t have the bandwidth to implement software X that
majorly improves some specific process Y. For the effort to be worth it
technology has to deliver cross-cutting improvements.

------
rhizome
If this is an example of scratching one's own itch, Justin Kan needs new
hobbies. Consider how much you have to interact with lawyers in order to want
to automate them.

 _" I’ve raised money. I’ve done a merger. I’ve been sued. And yet every time,
bills would pile up and I had no clear idea what I was paying for. In Silicon
Valley, we want everything to be transparent."_

From the sound of the story, their competition is not the Bar, but DoNotPay
(mentioned in article), which tells me they're not automating lawyering so
much as mechanizing Nolo Press.

~~~
thucydides
What is Nolo Press?

~~~
rmason
Nolo Press is a publisher who specializes in books that help you do things
without using a lawyer, such as writing your own will.

------
OliverJones
My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company.

Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently
and cost-effectively.

When she writes a sales contract she tries to write it so everybody can say,
"that's fair" and sign it, rather than send it off to some slow and expensive
review. Sales people love that.

Same for smaller stuff like NDAs.

She did that stuff for some of my entrepreneurial ventures. Big win.

Litigation: she looks beyond the white-shoe gold-tie-clip downtown firms to
handle that kind of stuff.

Escrow for code: If some source code needs to be held in escrow, she says,
"look, I'm an officer of the court, answerable to more than just my boss.
Suppose you put the thumb drive or DVD-R in an sealed envelope. I'll put it in
another sealed envelope and hold it in my locked file cabinet." Many parties
say "good idea!" because escrow services aren't cheap.

She has a rubber stamp that says, in some kind of legalese, "We don't pay
unitemized bills. Please provide more detail and send this bill again." That
can save a bundle of money. The concealed "bonuses" for partners sometimes
evaporate from the bills. The "stamp" works well; the billing firm has no idea
whether it's legal or A/P refusing the bill, so they just provide more detail.

Financings: not much leverage there. They still have to hire outside counsel
with expensive lawyers and paralegals who can bench-press massive tomes of
dense legalese.

I suspect a software service that inspected and tracked legal bills payable by
tech companies might pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ingest pdfs? Look for
keywords and numbers?)

------
Bretts89
The legal industry is ripe for innovation. Just look at the amount of value
Clerky has managed to provide with just incorporation and formation.

------
frenchman_in_ny
Legitimately curious about this:

 _" Throughout the day, the lawyers field questions from a roster of start-up
clients looking to execute routine legal tasks, like fundraising from venture
capitalists and issuing stock options to employees._ _Engineers watch the
dealings closely, extracting bits of information from the conversations and
the documents exchanged._

So what happens to client-lawyer privilege, if engineers are watching /
listening in / reading? Isn't that automatically waived, and isn't this a
problem?

(Edit: formatting)

------
kilon
Truthfully as a lawyer , well I am pretty close to be an ex-lawyer cause I now
code for living we really dont need software so much. In my office we had an
old database running on DOS when I became a lawyer in 2008. I got rid of it
and replaced it with Dropbox. Used extremely simple folder structure and that
was pretty much it.

I was even considering making specialised software for my father's law firm
but I never saw the use for it.

99% of lawyer's work is not arragning meetings or organising documents. Even I
who I was very new at the time I did a ton more photocopying documents and
answering calls from clients than any form of organisation.

This is why law orientated software fails to become popular for lawyers. What
we need as lawyers , what would be really appealing is an AI that can look
through case law and help us formulate lega arguments. Unfortunately the
technology simply is not at that level.

What makes it worse is that even though coding can be an extremely repetetive
process law practices is not, you literraly dealing with diffirent problem
each hour and you have to filter and combine various amount of information.
You may think that organisation is the key here but because the main focus are
legal arguments not so much evidence there is very little to do in that area
other than having AI and feeding you ideas.

Problem is that lawyers are using a lot of thinking power and because their is
not technical in some cases it can be called even philosophical , it would be
very difficult for an AI to be actually useful in this area, unless there is a
large leap in technology I am not aware of.

I am not a US lawyer , I am a Greek lawyer and yes we have plenty of legal
software in my country as well, that almost none is using. DOS and a dual core
at 2.0 GHZ is more than enough.

------
speby
Couple things regarding law firms and lawyers... based on my experience
working at PageVault, a startup in Chicago that creates and runs an online
evidence/webpage scraping and gathering service for case discovery for law
firms:

1\. Lawyers actually don't want tools that will necessarily reduce their
billable time. This does not mean they won't ever utilize or accept new
technology but it has to be built up over a fairly long period of time before
a mass of lawyers all decides they need to adopt whatever the "latest" tool
is. Even fax machines took quite awhile to get rooted and they've taken longer
to get unrooted (yes, there are still plenty of lawyers who love send and
receive faxes, amazingly).

2\. For any tech that a law firm is expected to pay for, they want easy means
of finding creative ways to bill it back to their client's accounts. This is
why lawyers have the reputation they do for charging for things like 10
cents/page for making copies at the copy machine.

------
abuteau
Hey justin, good stuff, two questions for you.

A- How is your approach different than Axiom Law [1]

B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky
[2]

[1] [https://www.axiomlaw.com/](https://www.axiomlaw.com/)

[2] [https://www.clerky.com/](https://www.clerky.com/)

~~~
morgante
> B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky
> [2]

They didn't. Atrium's customers are (currently) startups needing legal
services, not other law firms.

------
Nuzzerino
While a lawyer-replacing AI may not be possible yet, it has to be possible to
use some ML techniques to aid in the search of relevant legal records, laws,
regulations, and so on. I think the world may not be ready for "Uber for
Lawyers" but it certainly needs "Google for Lawyers".

------
supernumerary
Talking to the title for a second - (what they are actually doing seems quite
different.)

This is funny, I think we might be underestimating the recalcitrance of human
beings, and negentropic characteristics of life itself. (to say nothing of
lawyers). After all there are still people operating the barriers at parking
structures where I park in the morning, and they certainly cost more than a
robot...

It seems that behind the recurrent question of automation and the anticipate
crisis of salaried employment is a question of entropy and negentropy, not of
autonomy and automaticity.

Law is distinctly negentropic and so is not the best candidate. Avoiding legal
recourse would be a different matter ...

~~~
posterboy
> Law is distinctly negentropic

Meaning? In a closed system of your choice, law decreases entropy, i.e.
increases complexity? Your comment is quite cryptic to me.

However, negentropy seems to be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, so
you are really saying that the law can't be described as a closed system. Is
that right?

------
maxxxxx
I hope that automating a lot of routine legal tasks will feed back into
writing laws in way that makes them more consistent and easier to automate.
Most people's legal needs are very similar and should be possible to automate.

------
_e
There is a very big difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer. I hope
Atrium has the good lawyers on their side while the machines are initially
getting trained.

------
blackbear_
In the meantime.....
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328)

------
pascalxus
I hope this leads to a reduction in legal costs, especially for start ups that
have been sued for frivolous patent law suits, by patent trolls.

~~~
Nuzzerino
I hope it goes beyond just reduced costs. Increase supply enough so that it
outweighs the demand. Until that happens, the legal system will remain mostly
a place where the deeper pockets win.

------
foobaw
I'm wondering what kind of legal tasks they cover for poor startups.
Incorporation and whatnot is mostly automated , trivial and inexpensive but if
they can help out with lawsuits, patent, trademarks, and general legal
inquiries in an innovative way, it'd be awesome, as those cost a fortune.

------
markpapadakis
I thoughts sales people would be the first to go. I mean, they are are often
colloquially/affectiohally known as sales droids in the Valley :)

Kissing aside, if you got laws and said laws can be interpreted to the letter
I.e deterministically then maybe this is bound to happen sooner rather than
later.

------
sulam
I like the fee structure!

However, I'm curious how they measure and ensure quality in their work. It
seems like the fee structure (fixed bids) will incent them to reduce the time
spent on work, which could be good or could be bad, depending on the answer to
that question.

------
rb666
The cool law startups are not all based in the valley guys and girls, we have
[https://www.clocktimizer.com/](https://www.clocktimizer.com/) from the
Netherlands, for example.

------
thelock85
In a world where AI actually replaces or augments white collar professions,
how does liability play out? Will the ability to sue for or defend against
malfeasance depend upon an opaque box of algorithmic litigation?

~~~
_e
This is a really important question. I wonder how insurance companies would
price this as well. If the machines have access to all written legal data then
are they allowed to pick and choose which information they include in their
legal good or legal service? Will machines ultimately be depended on to
develop laws which could then benefit the machines over the humans?

------
tannhauser23
Good luck to you Justin, and to your team. I left law and became an engineer
because I didn't see how the legal industry could keep up its bloated and
inefficient structure. Shake it up!

~~~
spencer_54
Hello - I work at Atrium LTS and we noticed your comment here. If you have any
interest in applying, we currently have two engineering roles we're looking to
fill: [https://www.atriumlts.com/](https://www.atriumlts.com/).

------
aarondf
First they came for the bodegas, and I did not speak out.

------
rasjani
Turre Legal in Finland is doing something similar. Albeit, not sure if their
aim is to help other lawyers, just their own clients.

------
Ascetik
Build an application better than iManage or NetDocuments and you're a shoe in.

------
Gorbzel
It’s interesting because the article correctly points out the existence of
barriers to tech adoption in the law — but, as justin and others point out,
the coverage of real innovation usually misses the devil in the details.

A number of possible explanations, but the most prevalent I’ve encountered:

• Differences between the variety of ways a given attorney goes about
practicing create inherent barriers to a one size fits all B2B software
solution. Attorney personas vary wildly based on factors such as practice
area, firm size, region, jurisdiction, client demographics, the list goes on
and on. This makes it very difficult to build out products that scale rapidly
industry-wide. While this sort of end user diversity isn’t inherently unique
to the legal industry, it’s probably where its most entrenched, dictated by
regulation and long-standing custom, etc etc — all things very
startup/entrepreneurial unfriendly.

• Even accounting for legitimate industry-based reasons, there’s a second very
real, risk-averse layer: both legal education and practice are very
hierarchical, such that aspiring attorneys are being ranked and learning to
guard their interests well before they ever begin practice. Once they do,
protecting partnerships, colleagues (intra-firm / former pals), profits,
rolodexes, business processes, etc is well entrenched in a given attorney’s
MO. News writeups usually include a bit about how the Great Recession started
to prompt innovation, which it did, but it also created a margins race that
further drives attorneys to protect their book of business and profits,
further entrenching mindsets which reject disruption, consciously or not.

Regardless of whether you buy these reasons or have your own, the nuance
quickly exceeds what captures readers in the mainstream or tech press. Yet the
rise of automation in other industries does justify coverage of how those
trends would be affecting the law, and the not-uncommon “Let’s kill all the
lawyers!” Shakespearean mentality fuels the fire. The result? Every new
startup aiming to disrupt the law gets some pretty gloating coverage…and then
they need to start acquiring users and scaling. In fairness, that’s what real
startups have to do, so not all sanity goes out the window.

Post-2008, the real driver for innovation has been client demand, so Atrium’s
approach makes sense there. Also, shoutouts to A2J nonprofits, they’re doing
really meaningful work for clients that need it most (albeit with their own
set of complexities that aren’t inherently tuned to startup culture)

 _Obligatory 1_ : Attorney, but IANYL. Work in the industry, currently
building software for firm/legal services ops and biz processes. Previously
involved in A2J efforts. Views above are my own, not those of my employer or
previous initiatives.

 _Obligatory 2_ : If you’re the type with a respect for the industry, but a
drive to use tech, product, and entrepreneurial methodologies to break through
these types of barriers — we’re hiring! Engineers, product, QA, project, or
attorneys that have some meaningful experience in both worlds:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885)

------
vthallam
Startup wants to replace lawyers

Startup wants to replace doctors

Startup wants to replace gym instructors etc etc

I think any kind of job which involves referring to established
practices/information can be automated in the near future.

------
neilwilson
How will you tell the difference?

~~~
rajeck
I would have been much more interested if it were the other way around.

------
rbanffy
Sadly, they can't obey the Threw Laws...

~~~
dogruck
What are Threw Laws?

~~~
rbanffy
Sorry. Lack of context.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)

