I wrote a couple of detailed blog posts last year about the demise of Atrium (the Californian legal start-up that burned $75.5 million of VC funding in its short existence): (1) Is the Atrium ‘pivot’ really shades of Clearspire? and (2) Atrium: A Post-mortem. I also took an opposite view from Artificial Lawyer about his…
Lawyers and Twitter – 11 years later
Over the years, Twitter has brought me many connections and opportunities in a way that no other social media platform has. It is “networking on speed” and certainly can connect you faster and more easily with people that you want to connect with than conventional networking ever would. When I started tweeting, back in February…
Lawyers don’t need a ‘Second Life’ conference
In the time of lockdown, Nicole Black has pondered at ‘Above the Law‘ that:- Surely there’s a way to hold a virtual conference that’s more interactive and allows attendees to be more engaged with both vendors and other attendees. Nicole thinks we need something more than Zoom. Her suggestion is that we should have avatars…
Registers of Scotland scramble to find a ‘Digital Solution’ in the time of COVID-19
Registers of Scotland today announced that they were closing Meadowbank House, in Edinburgh and St Vincent Plaza, in Glasgow from today. As a consequence, the application record to register title to land in Scotland has been suspended until further notice as they will be unable to process any paper applications after today. This step was…
When you can combine venture capital with legal services
Artificial Lawyer this morning posted an article entitled: ‘It’s hard to combine venture capital with professional services’ – Atrium Co-Founder, Augie Rakow The premise taken by Artificial Lawyer from an interview with Augie Rakow was that Atrium didn’t work out because of this combination. Artificial Lawyer observes that:- scaling up a law firm from scratch…
Atrium: A Post-mortem
On Tuesday (3 March 2020) Tech Crunch broke the news that Atrium, the Californian based hybrid legal software and law firm, was shutting down. Tech Crunch said this was “after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm”. Atrium has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just…
What if… Lawyers aren’t Innovating?
Artificial Lawyer has asked the question What If…Big Law Pulled The Plug On Legal Innovation? This is perhaps a hypothetical question (I don’t think any Big Law firm will be willing to admit they are no longer innovating even if they are not) but it apparently arose because:- In the last few weeks we have…
Is it smart for lawyers to blockchain?
Hot on the heels of Gartner predicting that by 2023 “Lawbots” will handle a quarter of internal legal requests and referencing a Divorce Bot that actually (unbeknown to them) only ‘lived’ for 3 days, they have now recommended businesses move to test and adopt smart contracts and blockchain. They have stated:- The impact of blockchain smart…
Legal Jobs -v- LawBots : Gartner, McKinsey and the V&A
This past week reading a couple of articles on the internet and visiting a museum made me think a lot about the future of jobs in law and whether or not robots would be replacing us. I have, of course, previously visited this question and in particular the seven deadly sins that can be committed…
Is the Atrium ‘pivot’ really shades of Clearspire?
Last week Atrium, the Californian law firm / legal tech company dedicated to serving the needs of startups, announced it was pairing back its law firm operation by laying off an unspecified number of lawyers (although it would appear to be most of them) and pivoting to their next phase of growth. They will apparently:-…