Former Mallesons and Wotton Kearney lawyers have teamed up with technology and marketing hands to launch Atto, a Sydney startup betting that law firms want software that does one job properly rather than a platform that promises to do everything.
Roy Kim may not have set out to build a legal AI tool with a grand vision to take on the world, after all he remains a practising lawyer in Australia, but his hands-on work has meant he believes his tool may be more useful than the grand visionaries.
Atto, which launches in Sydney on Thursday 22 October, is pitching software built for individual practice areas, designed by people who have actually done the work.
Founder Roy Kim is a property and commercial lawyer who still runs a law firm, Baystone Legal where he set up Atto to automate his own firm’s legal work in their ‘technology-first’ approach to legal services which are focused on delivering big law services at a ‘small firm price and what they call ’boutique responsiveness’.
His team, as first reported by Point Blank, includes Seth Lee, formerly of Wotton Kearney, as head of product. Tony Chan, formerly of Mallesons, leads technology. Craig Kenna, from practice management provider Actionstep, runs go-to-market.
Former TikTok marketer Fizaa Chaudhary handles brand and partnerships, which is more marketing firepower than most law firms ever manage.
The Atto Argument
Atto’s argument is simple enough,namely that software designed to serve every practice area tends to serve none of them particularly well.
Lee, who spent eight years in personal injury and litigation, offers medical chronologies as Exhibit A. Lawyers can lose weeks sorting medical records, extracting dates and cross-checking evidence before they reach the legal analysis they are actually paid for. Atto wants to automate the drudgery and leave damages, settlement and client advice where they belong, with the lawyer.
Plenty of vendors talk about “augmenting” lawyers while quietly pitching headcount savings to the CFO. Atto, by its own account, sells automation, document generation, client portals and what it calls AI preparation, with all data hosted in Sydney. It’ a robot barrister. A much better filing clerk.
That puts it in a different lane from general-purpose AI platforms such as Harvey and Legora. Where it ends up competing will depend on what it actually ships.
The lawyer-turned-founder is now a Genre
Atto is hardly alone. Lawyers who spent years grumbling about broken processes are increasingly building businesses to fix them, presumably having concluded that complaining at partners’ drinks wasn’t working.
In London, former Latham & Watkins lawyer Nic Vetta (above) has launched VETTA, pairing lawyers with engineers to run commercial contracting for private equity-backed companies on a fixed monthly fee.
Former New Zealand lawyer Min-Kyu Jung co-founded Ivo, the contract intelligence company that started in New Zealand and now operates from San Francisco. It has raised about US$77 million and counts Uber, Shopify and Canva among its customers.
In England, Garfield.Law became the first AI-driven firm authorised by the SRA, helping small businesses pursue debts of up to £10,000 through the small claims court. Co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young (above) spent 25 years as a City lawyer handling commercial work before his ‘retirement’ lead to setting up Garfield with co-founder Daniel Long.
The legal tech tools are in different markets, but share the same instinct to redesign one legal service properly and efficiently for lawyers and, more importantly, their clients.
The LawFuel Take
The interesting thing about Atto is not the CVs. Legal tech has never been short of impressive CVs. It is the challenge to the assumption that one platform should run everything a law firm does.
That assumption looks shakier by the week. Last week Harvey and Legora launched the same product under the same name, a day apart. Both were called Intake, and both were pitched as a front door for in-house teams.
Wordsmith, which had been selling its own Intake since August, was no doubt delighted. When the two best-funded companies in legal AI converge on identical products, there is room for someone who knows a single workflow in a specific area of law in forensic detail.
Atto’s bet is that a former personal injury lawyer will build a better litigation tool than a generalist engineering team trying to please every department in a large firm. It is a reasonable bet. It is also, for now, only a bet. Atto has yet to show publicly that it delivers measurable productivity gains, integrates cleanly with existing systems or can win firms at scale.
The next breakthrough may not come from a multibillion-dollar AI company promising to remake the profession but may come from a lawyer who knows exactly which three hours of the working day should never have existed.
Editorial note: Point Blank’s original feature on Atto was marked as sponsored by Atto. LawFuel has independently checked and contextualised its claims.
