Announcing our $3.5M Seed Round

Today, we are announcing PointOne’s $3.5M seed round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, several of our customers, and other great investors.

Inception

The concept for PointOne began with a simple question: “What do you hate most about being a lawyer?” If you’ve spent time at a law firm, you can probably guess the most common answer: timekeeping.

From his time at Fenwick & West, Adrian knew the daily grind of tracking time by the “point one” of an hour. After working a long and intense day, spending another half hour to summarize that day into 6-minute chunks and craft coherent time entries seemed like torture. Instead, he’d spend his Friday nights catching up on time entry. Or more often, it would get backlogged, causing warnings from the firm and nearly losing him his bonus for time delinquency.

As it turns out, Adrian was not alone in this struggle. Over 80% of lawyers we talked to cited time tracking as painful. In-house lawyers often say the best thing about leaving private practice is freedom from tracking hours.

Pulling the thread

The more time we spent talking to lawyers, the more we found that time tracking is just the tip of the iceberg.

Law firm partners—firms’ most valuable and highly compensated human resource—often spend 5, 10, or even 15+ hours per month reviewing hundreds of pages of time entries to catch mistakes. Then, a billing admin spends hours more incorporating the partners’ hand markup and regenerating the bills.

We discovered that even firms pitching themselves as “high tech” often run internal processes on stacks of paper. The software available for this process was built in the early 2000s and produces even more work for the people tasked with using it.

What if instead, we could just make these processes go away?

Automated billing

We set out to reimagine timekeeping and billing from first principles.

If modern AI systems can pass the LSAT, why can’t they figure out what an attorney is doing and generate their time entries? Or compare hundreds of bills against firm and client billing guidelines and suggest edits? Jeremy and Katon already had experience with similar systems from their work at Google and Applied Intuition.

The result is two integrated products. PointOne Time captures data from all the applications attorneys use for work—documents, web, emails, calendar events, and more—and uses AI to interpret them and generate complete time entries. PointOne Pre-Bill brings bill review into 2024 with a smooth and modern UI, real-time insights, and an AI assistant that flags and suggests fixes for common billing issues.

The result is a radically different time and billing process that lets firms reduce cycle time, cut out admin work, and improve profitability.

Time as data

Through this process, we’ve come to another surprising realization: firms have a very limited understanding of the tasks and activities that make up client work.

Of course, they know what clients and matters attorneys are billing time to, and the narratives describing that work. But they have no effective way to process and interpret that data at scale to truly understand what’s going on.

Historically, the hourly billing model has let firms get away with a fairly simplistic view.

All that has changed. Clients have become much more exacting of bills, often demanding fixed fees, caps, or at least accurate budgets. The rise of AI is further accelerating this trend.

Firms are scrambling to adapt. To properly estimate projects, they have to hire a pricing team that manually punches in relevant variables. To work on fixed fees, they have to understand labor and margins for specific tasks.

Without high-quality time data, firms are flying blind through this transition.

The future of billing

There’s been much discussion of the predicted death of the billable hour. We don’t think that’s coming any time soon. But we do expect a shift from pure billable hours toward a mix of billable hours, fixed fees, caps, estimates, subscriptions, and more. AI will play a major role in reshaping the industry towards this future.

A few things are true in this new world.

Lawyers will focus on the highest-value parts of the practice—tasks like client counseling, strategic drafting, and negotiation. The lowest-value parts of the practice, like tracking hours and reviewing bills, are the best candidates for automation.
The billing process gets harder, not easier. Most lawyers will still track hours—whether to bill or simply understand labor inputs. But now, partners will have to juggle separate financial and incentive models from project to project and client to client.
Law firms will become data-driven organizations. In the same way that software companies track every login, page view, and button push, law firms will need a nuanced understanding of all work and activities done for clients. Without it, it will be impossible to accurately price work, understand margins, and adapt to shifting client demands.

Our mission is to support firms as they make this transition, by automating the things they don’t want to do and using data to enable more intelligent decision-making.

Our round

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $3.5M in seed financing, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. Other investors include a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, Soma Capital, Rebel Fund, Ritual Capital, Script Capital, Twenty Two Ventures, Harvest Ventures, Chris Golda, and more, including several of our customers.

We’re already helping law firms cut out billing admin and improve revenue and profitability. This funding will allow us to further invest in our core offering, expand our product suite with new capabilities, and bring our solutions to hundreds more firms around the world.

If you’re interested in using PointOne at your firm, you can get in touch here.

Today, we are announcing PointOne’s $3.5M seed round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, several of our customers, and other great investors.

Inception

The concept for PointOne began with a simple question: “What do you hate most about being a lawyer?” If you’ve spent time at a law firm, you can probably guess the most common answer: timekeeping.

From his time at Fenwick & West, Adrian knew the daily grind of tracking time by the “point one” of an hour. After working a long and intense day, spending another half hour to summarize that day into 6-minute chunks and craft coherent time entries seemed like torture. Instead, he’d spend his Friday nights catching up on time entry. Or more often, it would get backlogged, causing warnings from the firm and nearly losing him his bonus for time delinquency.

As it turns out, Adrian was not alone in this struggle. Over 80% of lawyers we talked to cited time tracking as painful. In-house lawyers often say the best thing about leaving private practice is freedom from tracking hours.

Pulling the thread

The more time we spent talking to lawyers, the more we found that time tracking is just the tip of the iceberg.

Law firm partners—firms’ most valuable and highly compensated human resource—often spend 5, 10, or even 15+ hours per month reviewing hundreds of pages of time entries to catch mistakes. Then, a billing admin spends hours more incorporating the partners’ hand markup and regenerating the bills.

We discovered that even firms pitching themselves as “high tech” often run internal processes on stacks of paper. The software available for this process was built in the early 2000s and produces even more work for the people tasked with using it.

What if instead, we could just make these processes go away?

Automated billing

We set out to reimagine timekeeping and billing from first principles.

If modern AI systems can pass the LSAT, why can’t they figure out what an attorney is doing and generate their time entries? Or compare hundreds of bills against firm and client billing guidelines and suggest edits? Jeremy and Katon already had experience with similar systems from their work at Google and Applied Intuition.

The result is two integrated products. PointOne Time captures data from all the applications attorneys use for work—documents, web, emails, calendar events, and more—and uses AI to interpret them and generate complete time entries. PointOne Pre-Bill brings bill review into 2024 with a smooth and modern UI, real-time insights, and an AI assistant that flags and suggests fixes for common billing issues.

The result is a radically different time and billing process that lets firms reduce cycle time, cut out admin work, and improve profitability.

Time as data

Through this process, we’ve come to another surprising realization: firms have a very limited understanding of the tasks and activities that make up client work.

Of course, they know what clients and matters attorneys are billing time to, and the narratives describing that work. But they have no effective way to process and interpret that data at scale to truly understand what’s going on.

Historically, the hourly billing model has let firms get away with a fairly simplistic view.

All that has changed. Clients have become much more exacting of bills, often demanding fixed fees, caps, or at least accurate budgets. The rise of AI is further accelerating this trend.

Firms are scrambling to adapt. To properly estimate projects, they have to hire a pricing team that manually punches in relevant variables. To work on fixed fees, they have to understand labor and margins for specific tasks.

Without high-quality time data, firms are flying blind through this transition.

The future of billing

There’s been much discussion of the predicted death of the billable hour. We don’t think that’s coming any time soon. But we do expect a shift from pure billable hours toward a mix of billable hours, fixed fees, caps, estimates, subscriptions, and more. AI will play a major role in reshaping the industry towards this future.

A few things are true in this new world.

Lawyers will focus on the highest-value parts of the practice—tasks like client counseling, strategic drafting, and negotiation. The lowest-value parts of the practice, like tracking hours and reviewing bills, are the best candidates for automation.
The billing process gets harder, not easier. Most lawyers will still track hours—whether to bill or simply understand labor inputs. But now, partners will have to juggle separate financial and incentive models from project to project and client to client.
Law firms will become data-driven organizations. In the same way that software companies track every login, page view, and button push, law firms will need a nuanced understanding of all work and activities done for clients. Without it, it will be impossible to accurately price work, understand margins, and adapt to shifting client demands.

Our mission is to support firms as they make this transition, by automating the things they don’t want to do and using data to enable more intelligent decision-making.

Our round

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $3.5M in seed financing, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. Other investors include a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, Soma Capital, Rebel Fund, Ritual Capital, Script Capital, Twenty Two Ventures, Harvest Ventures, Chris Golda, and more, including several of our customers.

We’re already helping law firms cut out billing admin and improve revenue and profitability. This funding will allow us to further invest in our core offering, expand our product suite with new capabilities, and bring our solutions to hundreds more firms around the world.

If you’re interested in using PointOne at your firm, you can get in touch here.

Today, we are announcing PointOne’s $3.5M seed round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, several of our customers, and other great investors.

Inception

The concept for PointOne began with a simple question: “What do you hate most about being a lawyer?” If you’ve spent time at a law firm, you can probably guess the most common answer: timekeeping.

From his time at Fenwick & West, Adrian knew the daily grind of tracking time by the “point one” of an hour. After working a long and intense day, spending another half hour to summarize that day into 6-minute chunks and craft coherent time entries seemed like torture. Instead, he’d spend his Friday nights catching up on time entry. Or more often, it would get backlogged, causing warnings from the firm and nearly losing him his bonus for time delinquency.

As it turns out, Adrian was not alone in this struggle. Over 80% of lawyers we talked to cited time tracking as painful. In-house lawyers often say the best thing about leaving private practice is freedom from tracking hours.

Pulling the thread

The more time we spent talking to lawyers, the more we found that time tracking is just the tip of the iceberg.

Law firm partners—firms’ most valuable and highly compensated human resource—often spend 5, 10, or even 15+ hours per month reviewing hundreds of pages of time entries to catch mistakes. Then, a billing admin spends hours more incorporating the partners’ hand markup and regenerating the bills.

We discovered that even firms pitching themselves as “high tech” often run internal processes on stacks of paper. The software available for this process was built in the early 2000s and produces even more work for the people tasked with using it.

What if instead, we could just make these processes go away?

Automated billing

We set out to reimagine timekeeping and billing from first principles.

If modern AI systems can pass the LSAT, why can’t they figure out what an attorney is doing and generate their time entries? Or compare hundreds of bills against firm and client billing guidelines and suggest edits? Jeremy and Katon already had experience with similar systems from their work at Google and Applied Intuition.

The result is two integrated products. PointOne Time captures data from all the applications attorneys use for work—documents, web, emails, calendar events, and more—and uses AI to interpret them and generate complete time entries. PointOne Pre-Bill brings bill review into 2024 with a smooth and modern UI, real-time insights, and an AI assistant that flags and suggests fixes for common billing issues.

The result is a radically different time and billing process that lets firms reduce cycle time, cut out admin work, and improve profitability.

Time as data

Through this process, we’ve come to another surprising realization: firms have a very limited understanding of the tasks and activities that make up client work.

Of course, they know what clients and matters attorneys are billing time to, and the narratives describing that work. But they have no effective way to process and interpret that data at scale to truly understand what’s going on.

Historically, the hourly billing model has let firms get away with a fairly simplistic view.

All that has changed. Clients have become much more exacting of bills, often demanding fixed fees, caps, or at least accurate budgets. The rise of AI is further accelerating this trend.

Firms are scrambling to adapt. To properly estimate projects, they have to hire a pricing team that manually punches in relevant variables. To work on fixed fees, they have to understand labor and margins for specific tasks.

Without high-quality time data, firms are flying blind through this transition.

The future of billing

There’s been much discussion of the predicted death of the billable hour. We don’t think that’s coming any time soon. But we do expect a shift from pure billable hours toward a mix of billable hours, fixed fees, caps, estimates, subscriptions, and more. AI will play a major role in reshaping the industry towards this future.

A few things are true in this new world.

Lawyers will focus on the highest-value parts of the practice—tasks like client counseling, strategic drafting, and negotiation. The lowest-value parts of the practice, like tracking hours and reviewing bills, are the best candidates for automation.
The billing process gets harder, not easier. Most lawyers will still track hours—whether to bill or simply understand labor inputs. But now, partners will have to juggle separate financial and incentive models from project to project and client to client.
Law firms will become data-driven organizations. In the same way that software companies track every login, page view, and button push, law firms will need a nuanced understanding of all work and activities done for clients. Without it, it will be impossible to accurately price work, understand margins, and adapt to shifting client demands.

Our mission is to support firms as they make this transition, by automating the things they don’t want to do and using data to enable more intelligent decision-making.

Our round

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $3.5M in seed financing, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. Other investors include a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, Soma Capital, Rebel Fund, Ritual Capital, Script Capital, Twenty Two Ventures, Harvest Ventures, Chris Golda, and more, including several of our customers.

We’re already helping law firms cut out billing admin and improve revenue and profitability. This funding will allow us to further invest in our core offering, expand our product suite with new capabilities, and bring our solutions to hundreds more firms around the world.

If you’re interested in using PointOne at your firm, you can get in touch here.

Today, we are announcing PointOne’s $3.5M seed round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, several of our customers, and other great investors.

Inception

The concept for PointOne began with a simple question: “What do you hate most about being a lawyer?” If you’ve spent time at a law firm, you can probably guess the most common answer: timekeeping.

From his time at Fenwick & West, Adrian knew the daily grind of tracking time by the “point one” of an hour. After working a long and intense day, spending another half hour to summarize that day into 6-minute chunks and craft coherent time entries seemed like torture. Instead, he’d spend his Friday nights catching up on time entry. Or more often, it would get backlogged, causing warnings from the firm and nearly losing him his bonus for time delinquency.

As it turns out, Adrian was not alone in this struggle. Over 80% of lawyers we talked to cited time tracking as painful. In-house lawyers often say the best thing about leaving private practice is freedom from tracking hours.

Pulling the thread

The more time we spent talking to lawyers, the more we found that time tracking is just the tip of the iceberg.

Law firm partners—firms’ most valuable and highly compensated human resource—often spend 5, 10, or even 15+ hours per month reviewing hundreds of pages of time entries to catch mistakes. Then, a billing admin spends hours more incorporating the partners’ hand markup and regenerating the bills.

We discovered that even firms pitching themselves as “high tech” often run internal processes on stacks of paper. The software available for this process was built in the early 2000s and produces even more work for the people tasked with using it.

What if instead, we could just make these processes go away?

Automated billing

We set out to reimagine timekeeping and billing from first principles.

If modern AI systems can pass the LSAT, why can’t they figure out what an attorney is doing and generate their time entries? Or compare hundreds of bills against firm and client billing guidelines and suggest edits? Jeremy and Katon already had experience with similar systems from their work at Google and Applied Intuition.

The result is two integrated products. PointOne Time captures data from all the applications attorneys use for work—documents, web, emails, calendar events, and more—and uses AI to interpret them and generate complete time entries. PointOne Pre-Bill brings bill review into 2024 with a smooth and modern UI, real-time insights, and an AI assistant that flags and suggests fixes for common billing issues.

The result is a radically different time and billing process that lets firms reduce cycle time, cut out admin work, and improve profitability.

Time as data

Through this process, we’ve come to another surprising realization: firms have a very limited understanding of the tasks and activities that make up client work.

Of course, they know what clients and matters attorneys are billing time to, and the narratives describing that work. But they have no effective way to process and interpret that data at scale to truly understand what’s going on.

Historically, the hourly billing model has let firms get away with a fairly simplistic view.

All that has changed. Clients have become much more exacting of bills, often demanding fixed fees, caps, or at least accurate budgets. The rise of AI is further accelerating this trend.

Firms are scrambling to adapt. To properly estimate projects, they have to hire a pricing team that manually punches in relevant variables. To work on fixed fees, they have to understand labor and margins for specific tasks.

Without high-quality time data, firms are flying blind through this transition.

The future of billing

There’s been much discussion of the predicted death of the billable hour. We don’t think that’s coming any time soon. But we do expect a shift from pure billable hours toward a mix of billable hours, fixed fees, caps, estimates, subscriptions, and more. AI will play a major role in reshaping the industry towards this future.

A few things are true in this new world.

Lawyers will focus on the highest-value parts of the practice—tasks like client counseling, strategic drafting, and negotiation. The lowest-value parts of the practice, like tracking hours and reviewing bills, are the best candidates for automation.
The billing process gets harder, not easier. Most lawyers will still track hours—whether to bill or simply understand labor inputs. But now, partners will have to juggle separate financial and incentive models from project to project and client to client.
Law firms will become data-driven organizations. In the same way that software companies track every login, page view, and button push, law firms will need a nuanced understanding of all work and activities done for clients. Without it, it will be impossible to accurately price work, understand margins, and adapt to shifting client demands.

Our mission is to support firms as they make this transition, by automating the things they don’t want to do and using data to enable more intelligent decision-making.

Our round

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $3.5M in seed financing, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. Other investors include a Cooley-affiliated investment fund, Soma Capital, Rebel Fund, Ritual Capital, Script Capital, Twenty Two Ventures, Harvest Ventures, Chris Golda, and more, including several of our customers.

We’re already helping law firms cut out billing admin and improve revenue and profitability. This funding will allow us to further invest in our core offering, expand our product suite with new capabilities, and bring our solutions to hundreds more firms around the world.

If you’re interested in using PointOne at your firm, you can get in touch here.

Announcing our $3.5M Seed Round