[HN Gopher] Launch HN: PointOne (YC W24) - Automated time tracki...
___________________________________________________________________
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.
Author : jeremybenmeir
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-03-27 18:10 UTC (4 hours ago)
| ned_at_codomain wrote:
| 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
| bdamm wrote:
| 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.
| reeeeee wrote:
| 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?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| 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.
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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).
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| 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.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I appreciate your candor. I have been tasked with this type
| of timekeeping for almost 30 years now and I still dread it.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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.
| blah-yeah wrote:
| Check out https://clockify.me/
|
| It's my go-to for hourly "clock your hours" work
| noodlesUK wrote:
| 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/
| Kenel wrote:
| Super cool! Interesting use of the accessibility features.
| hkhanna wrote:
| 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!
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Time and motion study for white collar workers. Gilbreth, the new
| generation.
|
| We've come so far since the slave driver with the bullwhip.
| benreesman wrote:
| 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
| JackTheRippa wrote:
| 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!
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| 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.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| 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.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| justinzollars wrote:
| We created and sold a company that did this, eventually it was
| sold to bighand.
|
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digitory-legal
| Lionga wrote:
| But this one has an .ai domain, so completely different.
| Kenel wrote:
| Oh that's interesting. Great to see other people working on
| this.
| Lionga wrote:
| Always surprised that most YC companies do not know the
| existing companies in a market.
| parkaboy wrote:
| 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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
| bsenftner wrote:
| Is there a way custom in-house software can integrate with
| PointOne? (I'm at a law firm, writing code, mostly legal
| project management.)
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| Definitely, works just as well for paralegals and support staff
| DEF14A wrote:
| 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!
| adrianparlow wrote:
| Thank you for this! Our site copy can definitely use a refresh
| elpakal wrote:
| 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!
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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?
| mcherm wrote:
| 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.
| adrianparlow wrote:
| 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
| Kenel wrote:
| 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.
| mctdev wrote:
| Personally, I think https://laurel.ai is the leader in this
| space. Very impressive though! It's a great space to be in.
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| Thank you! We've really enjoyed working on this problem.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Feel like this has been a popular startup idea for at least 15
| years
| adrianparlow wrote:
| It has, but it's been very hard to accomplish technically prior
| to modern LLMs
| psawaya wrote:
| Amazing founders working on an idea that AI can actually deliver
| value on _today_. This is one to watch for sure.
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| We sure hope so. Thank you!
| w10-1 wrote:
| 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...)
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| 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...
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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.
| pkilgore wrote:
| 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.
| Kenel wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| Demo shows billing 2 minutes work as 0.2 hours = 12 minutes.
|
| No wonder lawyers have such fancy suits and a reputation for
| overcharging :)
| intelVISA wrote:
| Wait til you hear about those 10x SWEs turning 2mins into 20...
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| Hahaha well said. It's a sped up workflow, so this would be
| very uncommon in the wild. But great observation ;)
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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.
| gajus wrote:
| Yay! A new joke. I've been collecting jokes for several years.
| Pretty rare to run into a new one after a while.
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| This is well done
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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?
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| Lmao it buckets it into a non-billable "personal" category.
| Doomscrollers can continue doomscrolling...
| uoaei wrote:
| 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.
| jeremybenmeir wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-27 23:00 UTC)