Launch HN: PointOne (YC W24) – Automated time tracking for lawyers

Hi HN!

We’re Adrian, Katon, and Jeremy from PointOne (https://pointone.ai). We’re building an app that automatically figures out what lawyers are doing and generates timesheets for them. Here’s a quick demo: https://youtu.be/yrL3e1hgaNc, and here’s an even quicker one: https://youtu.be/giIaAxZp2M0.

If you’ve ever hired a lawyer, you know most of them bill by the hour—or more specifically, by the 0.1 of an hour (hence our name!). What most clients don’t realize is how painful it is for lawyers to track all their work in 6-minute increments. Lawyers hate time tracking, and many say it’s the worst part of their jobs.

Adrian started out his career as a corporate lawyer at Fenwick & West. The first thing he was taught was how to track and bill his time. Between the 70-hour work weeks and billing to 10-15+ clients per day, staying on top of timesheets is surprisingly hard. To make things worse, law firms are extremely particular about how narratives (that is, descriptions of tasks performed) are crafted—down to the punctuation and diction required. So, Adrian became chronically delinquent in submitting his timesheets, and the firm threatened to take away his bonus multiple times as a result.

Attorney time tracking is not a new problem, and companies have been promising to solve it for years. But pre-LLM attempts at automatic timekeeping never worked as advertised. We were inspired by products like Rewind, and felt that a narrower vertical application could finally solve this problem for lawyers.

Our product is a desktop application that a lawyer turns on at the start of their work day. It runs passively in the background and captures logs from everywhere they work: the OS itself, Word, Excel, calendar, emails, web browser, Slack/Teams, etc. We then clean, pre-process, and interpret the logs. Modern LLMs enable a bunch of cool features. For example, we can pull subtle context from an attorney’s browser activity to associate that work with a client. And for each client and project, we use these models to generate a time entry with a narrative description that matches both the firm’s and the client’s style preferences.

Besides the fact that lawyers hate timekeeping, using PointOne lets them be sure that they’re not letting time slip through the cracks, and frees up hours per week they can spend on other things. It also helps firm leadership by getting more consistent narratives, and faster timesheet submission.

Given the sensitivity of the data captured, privacy and security are massively important. As such, we have customizable data retention periods, we do not use firm data to update models, and we encrypt all data (in addition to employing other standard practices for processing confidential data).

Since our app primarily works for legal workflows, it might not be super useful for most people here (maybe some though!). We would love it if you could check out our demo video, leave your thoughts in the comments, and introduce us to any lawyers you know.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39842617

Points: 40

# Comments: 27

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39842617