Athennian team.

 

Legal collaboration platform Athennian was sort of borne of a legal mishap.

Adrian Camara, then a corporate finance and M&A attorney at Canadian firm McCarthy Tétrault, was working with a team of engineers who'd built an algorithm to predict potential energy output from wind farms.

The team was hard hit by a set of intellectual property conflicts that left them unable to sell the platform without inciting a major lawsuit. Camara decided to quit his job with the firm and work with the wind farm engineering team on a new project: correcting the legal inefficiencies that led to their legal trouble to begin with.

The company now known as Athennian launched initially as Paper in 2016 as a consumer-facing document automation platform. After picking up a few early adopters, building out the core infrastructure and a name change, Athennian pivoted to bring legal services professionals back into their equation. The platform is now a much broader collaboration tool, providing a shared workspace with e-sign capabilities and automation tools to help clients and attorneys work together.

“The goal has always been to do a lot of work around corporate services and entity management. In a lot of ways it's a very much forgotten category, and there's huge amount of opportunity around automation and leveraging the data,” Camara, now Athennian's CEO, told LTN.

Today, Athennian has raised about $750,000 in early seed startup funding and plans to close a Series A fundraising round later this year. The company also recently inked a deal with PwC Law, its first global-scale customer.

As an attorney, Camara watched his firm struggle to navigate the shifting demands of modern business practices with the vendors they'd historically worked with. “I watched my firm try to outsource the compliance work, the filing, and have the paralegals focus exclusively on transactional work, and the software just didn't support that,” he said.

That outsourcing to managed service is part of a trend Camara expects to see grow. Unfortunately, he doesn't see technology growing with it. “You see so much movement happening with shared services and managed services, and law firms starting to share the administrative work they shouldn't have been doing in the first place is starting to be consolidated into more places. You see it with document review and e-discovery,” he said.

“Our software is highly optimized to support a managed service around the compliance and the administration,” Camara added.

Even so, of the key things that Camara and his team have learned over the first few years at Athennian is that law firms aren't nearly as impressed by hot new technology buzzwords as they are by turning those trends into meaningful operational change. 

“The law firm market has matured in terms of technology purchasing, and they're not looking for flashy features to put in a press release, and they're not looking for a ten page feature list. They're looking for teams that understand the hardest part is deployment and adoption,” Camara said.