[staticautomatic]

As far as I can tell, Kan fundamentally misunderstood the nature and value of automation in the legal services industry.

Kan was quoted in 2018 as saying "The goal with the tech side has always been...to help attorneys spend more of their time on meaningful work and less of their time on crank-turning work."

Time spent on "crank-turning work" constitutes a relatively negligible portion of billable time for any attorney billing at a reasonably high rate. They delegate as much of it as possible to people who bill at lower rates, like assistants, paralegals and junior associates. So you're not really automating much of the attorney's work at all. Even if you build an ergonomic software platform for routine tasks (like Atrium's glorified Dropbox), the amount of time/money it would save over the course of a large engagement is de minimis. And if you aren't dramatically saving time, you can't dramatically reduce client costs under any fee structure.

So they end up with this software group making tools that don't help the legal side make more money. And the tools don't contribute meaningfully to the legal side's pitching for work in part because they don't save the prospective client much money. Meanwhile, the software side can't sell the tools to other law firms because the software side is tied to a law firm. Ultimately, they end up with a bunch of lawyers and software developers who can't help each other. This outcome is so predictable that it's downright hilarious they ever thought it would be a money-making strategy, and apparently the investors didn't understand or think it through, either.

What Kan mostly got wrong was thinking that automation would be profitable for a law firm. There are lots of automation tools that would be extremely valuable to a law firm, but that usually means you should be selling them to a law firm, not from a law firm.

[dustingetz]

Kan tried to sell $36k/yr fixed price legal packages as "efficiency" to early stage startups. He generated leads with bait-n-switch tactics - by pretending to be a startup accelerator with a YC-style application - afaict the accelerator did not actually exist. I will never forget that he tried to pull that on me.

[pmichaud]

I wrote about this years ago, I think on HN. I guess I wasn't cynical enough at the time because even as an outsider what you're saying seemed obvious to me, and I assumed the founders knew that. I thought maybe this pitch was useful at the beginning to get market penetration or something, but the real thing was to phase lawyers out almost entirely.

Maybe they really poured years and millions of dollars into a stupid idea, or maybe they just failed in a planned pivot?

[kitsune_]

Yeah, selling TO law firms is very lucrative, I know a story (second-hand) where some lawyers had learned word / excel macro programming to organize their own case work (esp. with regard to appeals, deadlines and reference management etc.) and then started to sell it to their peers.