Promising Legal Startup Atrium Closes

Hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium has closed following a failure to deliver the delivery services it aimed to handle.

LawFuel reported last month on layoffs, but the legal startup has now laid off all employees, over 100, and will return over $75 million start-up funding to investors.

“I’m really grateful to the customers and the team members who came along with me and our investors. It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t the outcome that we wanted but we’re thankful to everyone that came with us on the journey,” said founder Justin Kan.

He’d previously founded Justin.tv, which pivoted to become Twitch and later sold to Amazon for $970 million. “We decided to call it and wind down the startup operations. There will be some capital returned to investors post wind-down,” Kan said.

Atrium was founded in 2017 and built software for startups to navigate fundraising, hiring, acquisition deals and collaboration with lawyers.

The startups also offered in-house lawyers that could provide counsel and best practices in these matters. The idea was that the collaboration software would make its lawyers more efficient than a traditional law firm so they could get work done faster, translating to savings for clients and Atrium.

Atrium had attempted to pull back from its law services to become a pure startup operation, with a separate law operation as a standalone business. However despite the better margins promised by the tech business it was not something that was able to provide the efficiencies sought.