◼ TECHNOLOGY24
Climate Changed
Co-founders Pedro
Negri, Agustín Saez,
and Matias Viel
recently closed a
$3 million round
of seed funding
to expand their
operationslaw firm, but the differences between Atrium
and traditional firms are part of its pitch. Kan says
he first got the idea after noticing that law firms,
which still operate like high-end service businesses
with some partners billing at hourly rates of more
than $1,500, weren’t using the productivity soft-
ware that had taken off in other fields, such as Slack
and Trello. Then he started adding up how much
he’d spent on legal services at startups in his own
career—more than $2 million, much of it prepar-
ing financing documents. “To me, it was a black
box,” he says. “Why is it expensive? Why is it always
over budget? It just felt like an opportunity to make
things more efficient.”
Over the past two years, Atrium has landed
more than 400 clients, mostly small startups, plus
a number of midsize ones, such as the scooter-
sharing company Bird and the online pharmacy
Alto. Atrium has about 170 employees, including
legal assistants, engineers, and 30 lawyers, who get
stock in the company instead of a partner track.
They use software that automates some of the rou-
tine parts of the job, such as preparing financing
documents. Kan says Atrium can complete a start-
up’s financing paperwork in five fewer hours on
average than a conventional law firm would, sav-
ing a client thousands of dollars.
The company is “shrinking the amount of work,
so that the attorneys can focus on higher-value,
more personalized offerings,” says Andrew Chen, a
partner at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, who
led the most recent financing round. (Bloomberg
LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, has
invested in Andreessen.)
Chen, who’s known Kan since the Justin.TV days,
wasn’t put off by the CEO’s track record of live-
streaming from the bathroom. In fact, he consid-
ers it a positive. Kan’s career, which also includes
starting an on-demand assistant service, Exec, and
a stint as an investor with Y Combinator, has given
him “this really deep customer empathy,” Chen says.
Of course, law firms, especially those in Silicon
Valley, can’t survive on empathy during a recession.
They’re often among the first to feel the effects, as
venture capitalists need far fewer lawyers to draw up
term sheets. Kan acknowledges the risks a potential
economic downturn poses to his business model,
but he argues that broader trouble could make
Atrium all the more attractive to whoever is left rais-
ing money. “If you’re raising a billion-dollar round,
you don’t care that you have high legal fees,” he says.
“You start to care in a downturn.”�Max ChafkinTHE BOTTOM LINE With automation-assisted legal advice
starting at $500 a month, Atrium is betting that more startups will
begin paying closer attention to their costs.