Augie Rakow 鈥07 launches Atrium in SF to support tech startups and investors.
Augie Rakow 鈥07 was a partner representing startups at Orrick when a Facebook post changed his career. In January 2017, he saw that Justin Kan, an entrepreneur who had sold his live-streaming video company Twitch.tv to Amazon for nearly $1 billion, had posted a poll about the cost of venture capital financing deals for startups.
Rakow reached out, and the two met a couple of days later. In the course of a four-hour conversation, they realized they shared a dream: attempting a radical new way to run a law firm.
In April 2017, Rakow cofounded Atrium, a San Francisco-based company and law firm that provides legal services to technology start- ups and their investors. Atrium is based on an innovative business structure, which combines a traditional law firm with a sister corporation that can raise capital, develop software to improve operations, and oversee functions such as marketing and finance. And instead of relying on billable hours, Atrium o ers multiple subscription options.
鈥淥ur ultimate goal is to let lawyers use their brains to focus on interesting problems and spend less time on operations and moving documents around,鈥 Rakow said.
Since it launched just over a year ago, Atrium has helped more than 150 clients and has closed around $500 million in venture cap- ital financing deals.
Rakow鈥檚 path to the law was circuitous. He studied history at UC Berkeley before enrolling at the Harvard Divinity School with plans to become an academic. During a summer in Japan, he came across a Japanese law textbook and 鈥渢otally fell in love with it,鈥 he said.
Instead of completing his divinity degree, Rakow moved to Tokyo in 1999 to study law. In 2004, he returned to the U.S. and enrolled at UC Law SF. He was inspired by courses on open source software and patent litigation, as well as an externship with Judge Ronald Whyte at the Federal District Court in San Jose.
鈥淯C Law SF showed me the di erent careers you can have and the di erent issues you can work on as an IP professional in a way that was intellectually exciting,鈥 Rakow said.
After graduation, Rakow worked at several patent litigation firms before joining the Emerging Companies Group at Orrick in 2010; he made partner six years later.
Rakow wasn鈥檛 planning on leaving Orrick, but he couldn鈥檛 pass up the opportunity to reimagine legal services from the ground up. 鈥淟aw firms are stuck in the past because evolution in the legal industry is left only to lawyers,鈥 he said. 鈥淟aw firms don鈥檛 invest in their own future like good businesses. A two-entity structure allows us to take bigger risks and innovate.鈥