The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

This Silicon Valley start-up wants to replace lawyers with robots

September 14, 2017 at 9:09 a.m. EDT
An Atrium work session between engineer Dan Rhodes and paralegal Julie Gleason. (Courtesy of Atrium)

Silicon Valley’s next hot start-up isn’t likely to be a video chat app. Nor is it likely to be an on-demand service, like Instacart or Uber.

But maybe it could be — and this isn’t a joke — a law firm.

That is, at least, the ambition of Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who knows a thing or two about hot start-ups. The 34-year-old Kan built the video game streaming Twitch, which he sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars in 2014. He then helped launch hundreds of companies as a partner at the prominent Silicon Valley start-up incubator, Y-Combinator.