Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin | Hacker News Reader

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). 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.

View on HN

I just had an incredibly similar thing happen with a slightly misleading headline. My legal tech company[1] was in the WSJ[2] on Monday, and the byline was "A nonprofit has developed an online program designed to help people prepare a chapter 7 filing without a lawyer"... which isn't quite what we are doing. We are actually licensing a product to legal aid clinics that do bankruptcy. The process is actually: legal aid clinic directs people to our software, we guide them through an interview, then we populate a PDF bankruptcy petition that we send directly to the clinic for a final review. So, while we have largely removed lawyer time from the process, we deemed that final review essential. The article did explain this by the end, but the headline got some communities pretty alarmed.

[1] https://upsolve.org

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-struggling-consumers-a-chea...

Uber for lawyers reminds me of the street walking lawyer skit on Seattle's old Almost Live TV show (with a pre-famous Bill Nye not being a science guy): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B7QtRCGQmrc .

> 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.

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

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

Are you planning on building in house AI/ML or do you plan on licensing from existing players in the space?

I don't mean to pile on but I'd be interested as a lawyer dabbling in tech. In the last two years I co-founded startup with a patent pending legal pricing software called Statutory Litigation Automated Pricing, S.L.A.P. (acquired) and this past year I built a prototype "self-serve legal kiosk" and kiosk software Demoed at Walmart HQ for use in their stores with The Law Store (thelawstore.com)

I don't think that makes me an engineer but I am handy at applying existing technologies to the legal field to improve efficency.

Hi Will, I work at Atrium LTS. Please check out our careers page and let us know if there's something that might be a match!

https://www.atrium.co/careers/

How do you tend to compete with the likes of established players such as westlaw that have been around for so long? I can possibly imagine a startup which helps big company lawyers, as they tend to be more bullish on new tech, but when it comes to the legal industry I don't know.

It's not that I don't believe you guys have a fighting chance at having an impact in the legal technology space, the problem is that the legal industries is one of the slowest moving around, and silicon valley funding culture requires fast results.

>a master AI that replaces lawyers (I don't think the latter is possible right now)

We did this at Recommind (https://www.recommind.com/axcelerate-ediscovery-product-page...), but replacing low level lawyers for case management. A senior lawyer/case manager usually trained the system to identify relevant documents based on a few...

Ok, we reworded the title above using language from your comment.

I'm a software developer (mostly focused on operations and marketing) on a small, two-person team at a large, national plaintiff's firm.

Thanks for clarifying -- the headline was very clickbait and disingenuous -- so much so that I had a strong reaction to it.

I think your plan is a good one because you have a small group of clients with similar needs to focus on and they have certain expectations about the tech they interact with. Good luck!

It'd probably be worthwhile to mention what your Errors & Omissions coverage limits are / will be / can be / etc to the buying public. It'd probably be worthwhile to ask what your D&O coverage might be by comparison. I mean, just apples to different colored apples being offered for sale.

If you're ever looking for PM's this is right up my ally. I was the co-founder and head of product at Naritiv (Techstars/Disney Accel S14, acquired by Hootsuite). I also ran ops as well and dealt with our law firms (corp and entertainment) every week. Would love to talk! Email in profile.

EDIT: HN title has been corrected.

So this needs a change from

"Startup wants to replace lawyers with robots"

"Startup wants to augment lawyers with automation"

There is a startup here in Austin that does seem to want to be the Uber of lawyers : csdisco

Both job links 404.

Headlines are almost guaranteed to be misleading. That's why I click on the comments before the article. Sensationalism should not be rewarded.

I'm finding that the top few comments here are often more informative and better supported than at least half of the actual posted articles. To be clear, I see that as an endorsement of HN more than anything else.

I've complained about some BBC headlines before. I was essentially told that there's a kind of headline exemption. So long as the article at some point contradicts the headline then it doesn't matter, apparently.

Justin – I reached out a couple times but had not heard back.

I'm an international lawyer and savvy developer (currently maintaining knockout.js) and have had a lean/quiet startup for several years now in the legal-augmentation tech space.

We're in the process of partnering with the world's largest law firms.

Feel free to drop me a line - brianmhunt at gmail.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com