This thesis presents a review of work on the performance of the reconstruction and identification of hadronic tau decays and studies of events reconstructed with a lepton-hadron final state with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The first cut-based tau identification used with ATLAS data and the first observations of Wtaunu and Ztautau ATLAS are described, as well as many of the issues concerning the calibration and systematic uncertainties of reconstructed taus. The first measurement of the Ztautau cross section at ATLAS with 2010 dataset is reviewed. Last, results are presented from the first search for high-mass resonances decaying to tau+tau- at ATLAS with the 2011 dataset.