Congrats @justin. I'm curious about culture, as the article mentioned that employees with different backgrounds have very different cultural expectations. Have y'all actively managed/shaped culture? Are you shoehorning non-tech employees into a tech culture, or is it more of a middleground?
Thank you! It hasn't been a linear journey - I have lots to say on creating a culture that joins multiple disciplines (where neither is dominant). I suspect companies like Compass (the real estate brokerage) and One Medical face similar issues.
One of the primary gaps we need to bridge at Atrium is simply educating different disciplines on what everyone else does. EPD (eng, product, design) and operations teams need to learn what it is like being a lawyer; lawyers and paralegals need to learn what product can help with (and what it can't). We've slowly added more and more cross functional education around these things (onboarding, shadowing, etc) -- and probably have a ways to go.
I'd say it's a middle ground between tech culture and legal. Certain things that are ok culturally in tech (for example, moving fast and worrying about IT security later in the game) are not ok for a venture like Atrium. At the same time, we are trying to innovate in an industry that doesn't get a lot of innovation, so we do want to re-think things from first principles as often as we can (in fact, it is one of our company values).
@justin, as a patent attorney, I've wondered if Atrium has considered exploring providing patent-related services to clients. Is this something that is on the horizon?
You mentioned the need to educate people about different disciplines. Patent attorneys seem like a great fit for a company with that need since most patent attorneys have previous careers as engineers. Also, patent attorneys could greatly benefit from the exposure to the transactional/corporate side of law, which appears to be Atrium's current focus.
The problem is that if you knowingly infringe on a patent, it's triple damages. So most companies that are big enough to have any budget aren't going to be allowed to use any product that involves them or anyone else searching through the patent database or using data from the patent database, since any record that they did so could result in massive legal liability.
There are about 15 companies in this space offering various services, but because of this issue the market has remained relatively small even though a lot of these companies have been around for a decade or more and have pretty mature offerings.
Thanks for the response! It's interesting to consider what drives the culture in these various domains (risk, incentives, leadership values, etc.) and how many of them can vary based on the environment.
For example, if making partner is no longer an incentive for the lawyers then that may alter culture automatically, whether or not they're working in tech; however, changing the environment may not have any bearing on legal risk, meaning the component of legal culture associated with risk is non-negotiable.
