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Launch HN: PointOne (YC W24) – Automated time tracking for lawyers
137 points by jeremybenmeir 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 118 comments
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.




This is really cool. Though, as someone who has worked in GTM at SaaS company, your website is confusing - most of the copy is written about features and the Q&A is geared towards associates ("will this let my boss spy on me?") but the "book a demo" button seems designed to lead partners into a demo. If the end goal is to convert potential executive sponsors and decisionmakers into a demo, the messaging should be revamped to almost entirely emphasize business outcomes rather than features. If you're curious, check out the free resources on the Product Marketing Alliance website!


Thank you for this! Our site copy can definitely use a refresh


Time and motion study for white collar workers. Gilbreth, the new generation.

We've come so far since the slave driver with the bullwhip.


God I miss when comments like this that succinctly draw deep parallels to history, pose hard questions for the readership, and do so via a literacy that is too often snubbed as elitist were always the top comment.

If there’s anything wrong with this comment it’s that there should have been a link, so I’ll fill in the one and only gap: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study


The original comment did stick out to me, but yours made me go back and re-read it in a fresh light. I appreciate that - you've turned a comment I would've skimmed over into something I will spend the next week thinking about.

Appreciate the wiki link, as well.

Cheers!


I like how they mentioned Gilbreth instead of the arguably better-known Taylor - the one actually concerned with time -, lest the uneducated reader grasp the reference.


I had completely missed the reference! This is super interesting.


It seems like a good application of the technology to a real problem, it just sucks so much that the meta problem is so diabolical. Definitely a local optimisation far from the global.


Trend toward fixed-fee is interesting here. Something to keep an eye on.


I think it’s inevitable, but also not inevitably terrible

Firstly the slave driver thing. I understand there is evidence in Egyptian pyramids and chinese canal workers where the whip was a rota based position. If you are a group of canal workers you can get paid well to rope to a boat and drag it along the canal to get to market quicker.

And as it takes say a dozen fit young men to drag the boat, any one of them can shirk and still get paid. The whip was used by the workers themselves to punish shirkers, and ensure everyone was “pulling their weight”. Importantly you would need to be a skilled “puller” to work out who was shirking and who not.

(Please note I am not saying chattel slavery did not exist, that brutal punishments were made and violence used to keep slaves and workers under control. Just that in some cases the whip was a communal decision)

Me I hate timesheets. And I even have gone so far as to use my git commit logs as my own timesheets. I just see this as an extension of that.

We leave digital footprints everywhere. I expect a computer can pick up those footprints and provide me with a clear accurate description of my whole day.

I don’t think that is a bad thing. I can even imagine it being useful epidemiologically

But there is case for misuse. And that’s a different class of problem. It’s not ok to have delivery drivers think they need to pee in a bottle else they won’t hit their targets. But the measurement of a delivery driver around town is not the problem.

It’s who holds the whip - that’s the problem


Interesting, and definitely something I might have paid for when practicing. Too many 1am nights cleaning up my billing...

But are you sending data outside my machine for processing? Some asshole is going to argue I waived privilege. We all know that's bullshit but convincing my firm to pay for this without very specific words in the contract around your access rights to the data would make this a non-starter. And that seems to vary state to state.

Good luck! Great use of an LLM.


Haha sounds like you've really felt the pain of timekeeping. This is definitely one of the first questions firms ask. The system is cloud-based so our agreements look very similar to those of other cloud-based practice management solutions which many firms currently have in place.


Sounds like you're trying to dodge the question a bit here, but this is a real yes or no question, that I will rephrase: Is my data sent to any unidentified partner that is not listed explicitly on the contract ? I understand that, as a cloud based solution, it is sent outside my network, but can you guarantee (and write down) that no other third party will have any access to it, even partially ?

If you can not answer with a firm YES here, and have to lawyer wriggle out your answer, then this is a non starter.

Edit: formatting


Given the magnitude of the question though — they ought to be granted at least a few hours to think about an answer before responding.


I'll allow it


Why? Do they not know where the data in their own system, that they built, is being sent?


I see, apologies for the misunderstanding. There is no unidentified partner.


Practice management software doesn't analyze the content of communications. You should really talk to a lawyer. ;)


Haha true. Of course, our agreements are a bit different but practice management systems often index and process client materials.


A lawyer dies and demands audience with the Lord right away.

- Lord, why did I have to die so young at 45, in the prime of my life?!

- Hmm, let me check our records, what's your name, John Smith? ... John Smith ... here it is! You say you are only 45? According to your billable hours you are past 112.


Yay! A new joke. I've been collecting jokes for several years. Pretty rare to run into a new one after a while.


This is well done


I work at a law firm. Great idea. My initial gut reaction is that to gain traction you’ll need to do ALOT to convince them of the data privacy.

A few suggestions: can they install it on prem? (The LLM “server”) Can they install it in their Azure or AWS tenant? Can it gather data from popular DMS and PMS? On prem and cloud? What about geolocation? Data likely needs to reside in the country of the entity if that country has sophisticated data laws What about things like information barriers - if anything sensitive is going where your teams eyeballs are / permissions allow, how do you deal with that?

Finally as I’m not overly familiar with LLMs I wonder how reliable it is - lawyers will expect perfection and all I hear about LLMs is hallucinations


You top AmLaws. I wouldn't start there. It is very tedious and hard to crack.

There is a beach head of smaller law firms who do not have to go through stringent data security practices. That would be a GTM I'll consider.


Good point, you’re probably right.


These are really great points, and data privacy/security is probably the top concern from big firms. Hosting locally is definitely where this is headed for all the reasons you mentioned


This problem space is so interesting. You have the 'always on' approaches like yours, or you have things like Toggl and Clockify etc. There will always be tension in "always on at my desk" vs. "on the go" time tracking.

I'm always on the road, so very few of these 'track my screen for billing' tools appeal to me. Tenths, though, has been a good fit for my lifestyle. It's honestly helped me with my ADHD, too.

Good luck on your endeavors!

Tenths is only on iOS, the website doesn't have much other info: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tenths-billing-time-keeper/id1...


I am very surprised there isn't a dedicated square keyboard for this problem that uses the toggle on/off idea.

Keys are labeled with the organizations logo or name. Hitting it once starts the clock, hitting it again stops the click. Time is added to an overall total for each button/org.

The keyboard comes with a simple software that allows programming the keyboard and logging time.

Keys change colors when on/off. Multiple keys can be on at once.

I must be missing some key domain knowledge to not understand why the above isn't used. It's very similar in essence to an old school hole puncher clockin out machine.

I've seen lab techs count different cells using a specialized counter where each button increments a different value while looking down a microscope.

The issue is when you're deep in work you might forget to toggle the switches. Maybe this is the biggest issue.


There's a couple of options in this space for "timer gadgets" - smart physical objects that link to an app and use their physical orientation to count against a particular timer.

https://timeflip.io/

https://timeular.com/tracker/


Exactly right - they end up forgetting to toggle the switches. And this is one of the big problems with most timekeeping systems today. Easy as it might be to click these buttons, it is easily forgotten and messed up.


Oh yeah I forget all the time to even start the first one :’D


Tenths is interesting! And you're totally right. "On the go" time tracking can be quite tough. On mobile, we're currently focused on legal workflows, but other applications are compelling.


Use an LLM to hallucinate plausible billing narratives so you can charge customers 10-15% more.


This looks really similar (in concept, your design is way better and you have more features) to something I built with my lawyer/legaltech business partner a few years ago. We even applied to YC and didn’t get in.

I’m curious, though, how accurate is your llm for things like trying to “pull subtle context from an attorney’s browser activity to associate that work with a client”? I suspect this needs to be damn near bullet proof, otherwise attorneys will tear it apart. We stuck purely to file tracking, comparing diffs and syncing activity in real time on a an app with GitHub like heatmap that could also flag suspicious time entries. It worked great but we had a hard time getting adoption because people did not want to force their attorneys to use it. Interesting to see the times change dynamics, good luck!


Really cool that you've seen this space up close! It's definitely a hard problem. With recent improvements to these large models, we're able to get solid accuracy (which, as you alluded to, is very important). Often, users will minimally revise the narrative descriptions before submitting.


Although you guys are (correctly) focused on lawyers, I would have loved something like this in my prior career as a consultant.

I don't think I ever submitted my timesheet on time


Timing.app is really good for this purpose. I use it every day, but I am not affiliated with the company in any way.

Essentially it uses the accessibility features on MacOS to see what you are doing and generate time entries for you.

https://timingapp.com/


Super cool! Interesting use of the accessibility features.


I left the consultant career track for precisely this reason. It is a damned hard problem, maybe even impossible, and is an endless source of guilt and shame because inevitably there will be time where I'm daydreaming - it turns out I am not physiologically able to maintain 100% focus for my entire day. So it ends up being just creative lying, which I felt bad about.


I don't understand. When you work for a company, don't you also spend some time of your workday daydreaming, or getting a coffee, or doing some other thing that does not earn the company money?


Yes but you’re not asked to make it a line item and choose which client it will be billed to.


Why feel guilty? Set a reasonable hourly rate, estimate how long something ought to take, and if it takes 20% longer and you know that's because of "internal factors", i.e. you've spent some time daydreaming, just bill for a smaller number of hours.


The problem is that some folks in this situation will under-bill. And it's somewhat common for an associate to have a billable-hour target that they must hit (or else they lose their bonus, for example).


Yes this, but I wouldn’t call it “under billing” per se. In my case, you have time budgets for specific types of tasks for specific clients, and you are encouraged not to go overbudget on those tasks. But inevitably you do go over because you didn’t happen to figure out the best solution immediately and you want to do a good job.

So now you’re over budget on this task. You can write down the actual amount of time the task took this time, if you want, because no one will be upset if you took extra time on only one task. But you also know that you’re likely to go over on several more tasks this week/month because you’re not only time-constrained, you’re also competing to be one of the better people at your firm in order to get noticed. (Or, alternatively, you’re just trying not to appear incompetent). So you decide to write down the “appropriate” amount of time for the task instead of how long it actually took.

So then the problem becomes that you not only have time budgets for individual tasks, you also have monthly/yearly minimum billed hours requirements to meet. So you’ve just worked 16 hours on a task you said you only worked on for 12 hours. You’ve lost 4 hours that you will have to make up somewhere by working extra hours unreported.

This becomes a pattern very quickly, especially for people who want to prove themselves by delivering a high quality work product. You’re squeezed from all directions.

In fact, my timesheet often has almost nothing to do with how I actually spent my week. Rather it’s just me attempting to fill it in in a way where no one is angry- clients, bosses, colleagues, etc. It’s not a software problem. It’s a systemic/incentives problem.


My perspective is that of a completely independent contractor, so I didn't even consider the complexities of being part of a larger organization and having competing incentives/priorities.


I appreciate your candor. I have been tasked with this type of timekeeping for almost 30 years now and I still dread it.


It's definitely something we're thinking about. From what we've seen lawyers have some of the most nitty and granular time entries (= highest pain) but it's a problem in any industry that bills hourly.


Check out https://clockify.me/

It's my go-to for hourly "clock your hours" work


This is a really hard problem, and kudos to you for trying to tackle it. Time tracking narratives can be so different from practice area to practice area and also as a function of the size of the firm.

Often, it also comes down to the idiosyncrasies of the client and their org structure! I wonder if part of the solution will include using the actual invoices sent to a client to train how future invoices to that client should be prepared.

Good luck to you!


It's absolutely a tough problem. Right now we have a couple mechanisms to try and address these issues. When we onboard a firm we can ingest their historical billing data, which lets us pattern match the style of new entries. We can also ingest client guidelines for the same purpose.


While this seems like a great tool for the lawyers, as a client I would reject any invoice generated by this tool for lack of detail. (It's not an issue with the tool in principle, so much as the output it currently generates.)

Lawyers have to track their time in short increments and give detailed descriptions for what they did with that time because they charge obscenely high rates and many lawyers have a history of padding their bills. If their rates were lower, they could get away with generic descriptions and less granular timekeeping.

For example, accounting firms can, and frequently do, get away with stating "Preparation of [x] tax return" as the only work detail on an invoice, because they charge a fraction of what law firms charge. I recently approved a $75k invoice for "Preparation of FY tax provision" without any pushback because I know the firm spent hundreds of hours on it and probably swallowed a bit of billable time.


At this point, we've actually been generating narratives with a lot of detail (and the attorneys will frequently edit our narratives to pare them down). So long as we are smart about data collection, we have what we need to be sufficiently descriptive and accurate, which has been good to see.


Other prior art includes IDE monitoring.

Other tie-in's include task switching and context saving. Remember Eclipse Mylyn would save the state of the IDE associated with a task, and even associate that with a bug so another developer could pick up the world of the task.

Indeed, rather than integrating with other applications by snooping them (raising confidentiality and security issues), you might consider making a legal workspace that can publish out, producing word docs or pushing url's to browse, etc. That way, people accept that everything in context is monitored, and you can automate the crap out of any use case.

The Attorney-IDE is also how you can secure the environment, encrypting everything and even ensuring that information doesn't flow from one client to another. That could become a sales point for them to mention to their clients: that all client information is separately secured, with keys revocable at a moment's notice.

The key feature for usability of this information is seamless provenance for secure internal collaboration: all information should come with information about where it's been, who's seen it, etc. (Just don't say blockchain). If you want to add features for the managing partners to feel like gods, give them the ability to search all contexts without decrypting, so they can implement some policies while maintaining confidentiality for clients.

Business-wise, you can start with a few firms via high-touch custom integration with their policies and practices, and gradually productize through generalization and customization/assembly as you move to low-touch sales model. I suspect each use-case gets system/AI customization you can deploy out, so with luck you'll always have leading-edge high-touch feature development followed by broader deployment.

If you want the (monitored) attorneys themselves as stakeholders, layer in features for continuous tracking, to identify time-wasters (admin like time-tracking, new technology evaluation like research via Lexus vs. some new internal AI) and even negotiate or enforce ground rules (associates limited to 60 hours in exchange for lower salaries...)


This is very interesting. We have thought about a few of these ideas and will continue to mull over the others. At a high level, I could imagine provenance being less important but time savings through automation to be highly important.

Love all the detail here.


The legal industry has been trending toward fixed price / subscription for ages because everyone on both sides has been burnt out - exactly what Adrian experienced. The rank and file hate it, the partners hate it, the clients hate it. People who were worth hundreds of dollars an hour were pissing away their labor on account for every minute, and miserable at not being able to spend a minute that isn't billable at the office.

If you were shopping this around to firms and they loved it, you wouldn't need to be here - they'd be throwing money at you.


Yeah, there is definitely this trend toward fixed-fee work. We're interested to see how it evolves over the next 10 years (and how PointOne might be able to help with work that is not billed by the hour).


I doubt they are here to sell it, maybe to raise awareness for future investors or potential hires. Or just to show off :)


Is this MacOS? Seems like this needs to be multi-device & multi-OS: attorneys often collaborate using their phones, and laptops while not in the office and do billable work there. All the attorneys I know work in Windows too.


Yes! We support Windows, MacOS, and some actions on mobile. Trying to track time when you're running from place to place (ie. law firm partners) is super tough


Is there a way custom in-house software can integrate with PointOne? (I'm at a law firm, writing code, mostly legal project management.)


Awesome. That's definitely something we can explore. Could you shoot an email to jeremybenmeir@gmail.com? Interested to hear exactly what you're thinking wrt an integration.


I worked at a top US law firm as a corporate lawyer for almost 10 years (my first career). I'd say the brain starts to experience life in 6 minute increments. I think you'd need to accurately capture all the moments when an associate is in front of your computer but not working for this to work. I suppose your plan B would be to sell this to firm management as a timekeeping audit tool. it could be a valuable informative tool that they don't initially rely on but can use to test accuracy etc before they move on to actually using it.


My brain definitely started to experience life in 6 min increments as well, even after just the first few months at a firm!

We do have a couple different approaches to filter out non-work. As far as firm management, we think there's a lot of useful information in time data that firms can leverage, but at the same time we don't want this to turn into spyware so we're mindful of only exposing aggregated/anonymized data


Can you extend this to other legal staff who need to bill time? For example people in litigation support have the same time documentation overhead problems, and find it just as tedious and distracting.


Definitely, works just as well for paralegals and support staff


Looks like a useful tool, I know some other ones exist for lawyers so probably need to address why this is an upgrade over those old school ones. A bit of social proof/case study would help, but overall seems like you have a product with a clear market and a value prop that is easy to express. Best of luck! More thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtyXzCYmVVs


This is awesome! 7.6/10 -- we'll take it!


Personally, I think https://laurel.ai is the leader in this space. Very impressive though! It's a great space to be in.


Thank you! We've really enjoyed working on this problem.


Having a close family member working in BigLaw in the United States, I can confirm that lawyers absolutely HATE time tracking — so your market is definitely valid.

If you can make this work and get adopted, I know at least one person who would be very happy.

As to getting product-market fit, you will have a huge issue getting traction in big law firms unless you can run the app on-premises or on the local machine, or provide some serious (read: insane) security guarantees. There are simply too many information security issues that can be existential to firms and their clients to trust any startup with cloud solutions, whatever dept it is in, M&A, IP, Litigation, or even T&E. (I've tried to suggest solutions many times for many of their information mgt issues, and it is a hard NOT EVEN CONSIDER). Perhaps if you get bought by one of the major cloud firms, they might consider it; e.g., I know they are using MS products, but IDK if they are self-hosted or not). Small firms without those kinds of issues are your best bet right now, but even some of them have litigation issues with serious InfoSec issues. Perhaps (this is just speculation) dedicated and isolated server racks for each client firm and VPNs could work. In any case, put that up-front in your sales pitches.

The other thing you'll need is connections to the phone system and the lawyers' mobile phones to at least capture call logs and link them to clients. This should be easier as the firms install partitions with their own software on the phones.

The other thing that takes almost the most time, is composing the description for each time block for the client to read. These entries must essentially "sell" the time block to the client, informing them of the work that was done in a way that they agree that it delivered value. If this part isn't done well, the clients tend to challenge line items on the bill, consuming valuable time and getting write-offs. Presumably, you could train the LLM on all past bills to pre-generate good descriptions for each time slot, which would help as it's easier to edit than to write from scratch. Also, doing anti-training on past entries that were written off may be very helpful (at this point, they just have forbidden word lists).

You are definitely on to a hot market, and I hope you can get to market fit really soon — may the wind be at your backs!


Thank you so much for the support! We would always love intros to any lawyers who hate time tracking.

We completely agree about supporting large firms, either with on-prem or deployment within their cloud environment.


Excellent news - I'll ask abt an intro


To what degree do lawyers actually want to track their time accurately?

I used to work a timesheet intensive job (consulting). The quiet rule was log the minimum 45h/w if you like your engagement; log your actual hours if you hate it.

When my lawyer bills me 1 hour, I know it doesn’t actually take him 1 hour. That’s just his rate. This has been my general experience with small shops. Do bigger firms pay closer attention to detail?


Based on our conversations, yeah - many want to increase the accuracy of their timesheets. For some, this is the main driver of adoption. For many, it's the time savings from cutting out manual timekeeping.

Even for firms/attorneys that are not super detail-oriented, the software would offer a log of their work as a basis for their bills.


Amazing founders working on an idea that AI can actually deliver value on today. This is one to watch for sure.


We sure hope so. Thank you!


Time tracking sucks and I applaud efforts to free people from having to do it manually, so best wishes.

I'm also concerned that automated time tracking is extremely close to automated surveillance and not only "productivity monitoring", but also "productivity judging". What do you think about this?


For users who are already mandated to track what they are working on in 6-minute intervals, "productivity monitoring and "productivity judging" are not NEW issues that a tool like this would introduce. That is actually one of the advantages of targeting the population of lawyers, rather than a more general population.


I think privacy for the end user is really important here, which means letting the user review and edit the time entries generated before they submit to the billing system. Ultimately we view this is a tool to help the end-user


Yeah, this is a big concern for us as well. We avoid any sort of "big brother" use of the application. The user controls what is released and available to both the firm and clients.


Maybe the problem you're trying to solve shouldn't exist in the first place. It seems that people-y professions (as opposed to technical ones) such as law, sales etc. are really keen on setting unreasonable expectations. Most of the SW industry at least heard of the mythical man-month.


There's been a lot of talk about lawyers shifting off the billable hour model and towards value-based billing. We think fixed fee models will take many years to saturate the market, but things are definitely heading in that direction (esp. for simple / repeatable projects)


Having recently paid a lawyer a bunch of money for a divorce, I expect it's a bit of a double-edged sword. They benefit from clients not wanting to waste time and money peppering them with useless questions and updates, but at the same time a legal proceeding is kind of like a disease— the longer it goes on the worse it gets, and so there is benefit to everyone in being able to get questions reliably and conclusively answered early in the process. A model where you were paying for an end result could well provide better end results, assuming the service provider (lawyer) still retained some mechanism to protect themselves from becoming their client's emotional support system.


Super cool, I'd love to learn more about your tech stack and how you capture data from my computer and phone! Screenshots and OCR like Rewind? I have a good number of lawyer friends who might be interested in this.


Without getting into too much detail, our approach is more metadata-based as screenshots/OCR are pretty noisy and expensive to work with. Shoot me an email if you like, happy to chat! adrian@pointone.ai


If I was a lawyer I'd sign up just for the inevitable lawsuit pursuing damages when this software inevitably fails. You better have a rock solid legal team or you're wading into infested waters with pants full of chum.


Hahaha lawyers review the entries before they submit. This is like a time tracking "copilot." Also, "infested waters with pants full of chum" got a laugh on my end.


Do lawyers work in front of laptops always? I used to be in consulting so I know sizable time had to be spent while away from my laptop. Just curious how lawyers work.


It depends somewhat on the practice area (eg. are you going to court a lot) but we find the vast majority of work is either on the computer, phone/tablet, or listed in the lawyer's calendar


As an attorney I really hate the process of time tracking (I'm good with the actual time tracking).

I'll be looking at the demo wistfully.


Send us an email or book a call through our site - we would love to chat!


Does this software hide the 5.5 hours per day spent doomscrolling on reddit, or does the lawyer have to figure that out for themselves?


Lmao it buckets it into a non-billable "personal" category. Doomscrollers can continue doomscrolling...


Demo shows billing 2 minutes work as 0.2 hours = 12 minutes.

No wonder lawyers have such fancy suits and a reputation for overcharging :)


That's actually a pretty serious error. It's what we would generally call "billing fraud" and lawyers have lost their licenses and gone to prison for that sort of thing.

(It's also the basis for the book/movie "The Firm.")


Hahaha well said. It's a sped up workflow, so this would be very uncommon in the wild. But great observation ;)


Wait til you hear about those 10x SWEs turning 2mins into 20...


I'm not a laywer but your product pitch really made me think this is a very cool solution.


Thank you! We think it's a less obvious but very useful application for LLMs


This is why one should agree on and pay fixed pricing to lawyers. Most of it is just standard procedures which don't take much time and should be easy to estimate. Most of the work is done by the secretaries anyway. Lawyers even charge huge amounts for taking simple photo copies.


We're starting to see more and more of this actually! Some kinds of legal work fit flat fees well -- eg. immigration or company incorporations. Other kinds are highly variable and unpredictable (eg. litigation or anything involving external negotiations) and so will likely remain on the billable hour


> Your entire day captured, task by task.

Scary.


We created and sold a company that did this, eventually it was sold to bighand.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digitory-legal


But this one has an .ai domain, so completely different.


Oh that's interesting. Great to see other people working on this.


Always surprised that most YC companies do not know the existing companies in a market.


Not surprising. YC founders are blessed creatures who are (or will be) indoctrinated into the Thiel Zero to One philosophy of building a monopoly. If the monopoly doesn't exist, why should they care ;)

OK all jokes aside, honestly two things at play: (1) Impossible to keep tabs on the whole space all the time. No matter how hard you search, you always miss things. (2) Some amount of (proper) competitive research is really good (for obvious reasons), but at the end of the day--you gotta get on with doing your user research/building/testing testing.


Yep we worked on in from 2014-2021 when it sold.


Feel like this has been a popular startup idea for at least 15 years


It has, but it's been very hard to accomplish technically prior to modern LLMs


Is it actually more feasible now? Do LLMs actually make this problem easier to solve?

Because I have a hard time believing they can actually extract time increments and higher-level tasks from log data without a ton of pre/post-processing. But then the problem is just as much work as it was 5 years ago when you might have been using plain old BERT.


In our experience they do! The smarter the LLM, the less pre/post-processing you can get away with and still get a good output. So no, you can't just throw raw log data at it, but it doesn't require nearly as much work as it did 2-3 years ago


I agree with this


> Capture every 0.1. Stop letting time slip through the cracks. Capture and bill 5-10% more time.

Does this mean that historically, Lawyers have been leaving money on the table by billing less time than they spend? /s


Surprisingly, in some cases yes. The most important thing for us is accurately capturing time worked, and then we leave it up to the attorney how much they want to bill vs. write off


I'm glad someone is rectifying this situation :)

I wonder how LLM can be used to help less fortunate people while still allowing for a breaking-even or even profitable business.


One thing I personally find exciting is that by making attorneys more efficient we can increase the supply of available legal services, which hopefully allows underserved populations more access


More lawyerbell!




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