After 11 years practising property and commercial law, Roy Kim had spent enough time doing work that didn’t require a law degree.

Re-entering the same info into two systems. Scrambling through tabs to find where a matter was up to. Tracking what he owed, and what everyone owed him.

So he founded Atto, a legal tech startup with a simple proposition: legal software should be designed by people who’ve actually done the work.

Kim wasn’t interested in rushing a prototype to market. He wanted a complete product and a founding team who understood the problems lawyers face firsthand.

And he’s assembled one with some familiar names on their CVs, from Mallesons and Wotton Kearney to Actionstep and TikTok.

Each of them brings Atto’s founding idea to a different part of the business.

Lee brings it to product. He spent eight years in personal injury and litigation before joining Atto. And he’s not a fan of the one-size-fits-all model.

“Most legal software is general: one product pointed at every practice area”, which is “not particularly useful.”

So Atto builds one product per practice area, inside firms and next to the lawyers who use it.

“I do personal injury because I did personal injury,” Lee said.

Having done the job, he knows which parts of it are a waste of a law degree. For him, it was medical chronologies. Forty-odd documents from a dozen providers, with every date typed into a table and cross-checked against the source.

“I’ve lost entire months to it. The actual legal thinking at the end took forty minutes.”

He also knows which parts should never be automated: quantum and settlement.

“Two clients can present with the identical injury and the identical scan, and be owed completely different amounts, because one is a 25-year-old concreter and the other is 55 and already at a desk.”

“The same goes for the advice to accept an offer. That’s never a calculation. It’s a read on your client’s appetite for two more years of uncertainty.”

Chan applies it to the tech. He oversees the architecture, security and reliability of every Atto product. For him, the hard part was never the code.

“AI writes code fast. It doesn’t yet know your product, your users or where the edges are. That’s still on us.”

Kenna takes it to market. He spent 10+ years selling software, including Salesforce and Oracle, and most recently practice management software to Aussie firms at Actionstep.

Firms wanted to run everything on one system. Most couldn’t get there, so they ended up juggling several. “The compromise was the same everywhere I went, a legal professional sitting there with more screens open than a Harvey Norman shopfront,” Kenna said.

Now heading up Atto’s go-to-market, he’s making sure the people who actually do the work are in the room when the product gets shown.

Chaudhary builds it into the brand. She studied law and commerce, worked in a Big 4 legal and tax team, then moved to TikTok, running advertising campaigns across Australia and NZ. Now she’s holding Atto’s marketing to the same standard as its products.

“Legal tech marketing is usually written by people who have never had to do a lawyer’s week, and it shows.”

Five founding members, all backing the same idea.

And Kim says they all came in sure of one thing: “Atto was going to be a rocket ship.”

Atto launches on the 22nd of October, register here if you’d like to be a part of it: https://www.atto.legal/events/AttoLaunchEvent

Sponsored by Atto