Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It’s also the bane of the profession.
A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer’s job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer’s computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.
The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.
Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.
Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.
Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.
Luaces isn’t a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company’s researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.
He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)
When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.
PointOne’s platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.
Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.
When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.
For lawyers, “this is like magic beans,” Luaces said.
Time savings aren’t the point
Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.
PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers’ time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.
Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they’re still learning or because they’re embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.
A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. “I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work,” Luaces said. “Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work.”
He says the company’s software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.
PointOne isn’t the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It’s raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne’s $20 million total.
PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne’s data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post Lawyers hate timesheets. This startup wants to do them for you. appeared first on Business Insider.
