PointOne

What it is

PointOne is AI timekeeping for law firms. A desktop app (plus an iOS app) runs in the background and records what an attorney works on across documents, email, calendar, calls, and the web. It assigns each activity to a client and matter and drafts the narrative time entry, already written to the firm’s and the client’s billing rules. The attorney reviews and approves the entries, and they sync to the billing system of record. Aderant, Elite 3E, SurePoint, Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Actionstep, LeanLaw, and QuickBooks are on the published integration list.

Timekeeping is the entry point. PointOne sells three modules: Time (passive capture, AI timers, retroactive entries), Review (pre-bill review with AI markup, comments, and routing), and Intelligence (time analysis, staffing visibility, and pricing data for alternative fee arrangements). It also checks entries against Outside Counsel Guidelines before they reach an e-billing portal.

Katon Luaces (CEO) and Jeremy Ben-Meir (CTO) founded the company in San Francisco. It went through Y Combinator. A third co-founder, Adrian Parlow, left in October 2025 to join Legora. On March 23, 2026 PointOne announced a $16M Series A led by 8VC, with Bessemer, General Catalyst, and YC participating, for $20M raised in total. At that point it reported 10x revenue growth in six months and a team of about 20. Its site now claims 200+ firms, from boutiques to Scarinci Hollenbeck, plus the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. It lists SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certification.

Why legal ops teams look at it

• The time is lost before anyone bills it. 8VC’s investment memo cites the pattern every managing partner knows: entries written at the end of the day lose about 10% of billable time, and entries reconstructed the next day lose about 25%. Passive capture removes the reconstruction step. PointOne says its firms capture 6-11% more billable time per day. Chalumeau Law Group, one of its customers, reports weekly billables up 20% per user.
• Guideline rejections get fixed at entry, not at invoice. Block billing, vague narratives, and banned task codes are what drive e-billing rejections and write-downs. PointOne writes the narrative to the client’s rules the first time, and Review flags what slipped through before the pre-bill goes to the partner.
• Partner review time comes down. Pre-bill review is 10+ hours a month for a busy billing partner, by 8VC’s figures. One PointOne customer reports halving billing prep time.

Pricing reality

PointOne does not publish prices. Every deal is a quote, and third-party directories list it as custom. Read any per-seat figure you find on an aggregator site with suspicion: the $39-99 band that some search summaries attach to PointOne belongs to a different product.

The useful anchors are the published prices in the same category. Billables AI lists $47, $109, and $169 per user per month, and only the $169 tier includes pre-bill review and compliance checks. PointOne bundles capture, review, and guideline compliance, and positions itself above self-serve tools. Our planning estimate is $100-200 per timekeeper per month, or $1,200-2,400 a year. That is an estimate, not a quote. Ask for Time and Review as separate line items, since firms that already run pre-bill review in Aderant or Intapp only need Time.

The ROI test is simple arithmetic. A lawyer billing 1,500 hours a year at $350/hour who captures 6% more time adds 90 hours, or $31,500 of billable value. That clears any plausible seat price by more than 10x. The number that matters is how much of it you collect, which is the first watch-out below.

Best for

Managing partners, firm administrators, and legal ops or billing leads at firms of 10-300 lawyers that bill hourly, run Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Aderant, or Elite 3E, and have a realization or unbilled-time problem they can measure. It fits best where the firm also fights client guideline rejections, because the capture and the compliance check happen in one step.

For a solo who writes time entries the same day, the gain is smaller. Billables AI at $47/user/month or the time features already in Clio cover that case.

Alternatives and when to pick them

• Intapp Time — the large-firm incumbent, inside the platform 96 of the Am Law 100 already run for conflicts and intake. Pick it when the firm is on Intapp and wants one vendor for time, terms, and walls.
• Aderant iTimekeep — the time-entry app for Aderant firms, with 100,000+ monthly active users by Aderant’s count, and a live Harvey-to-iTimekeep integration since August 17, 2026. Pick it when you are on Aderant and most drafting already happens in Harvey.
• Laurel (formerly Time by Ping) — the best-funded AI-native rival, with a $100M Series C in June 2025, a SurePoint integration in January 2026, and a Thomson Reuters partnership announced August 5, 2026. Pick it for Am Law 100 firms and accounting firms that want enterprise procurement and a vendor with deeper reserves.
• Billables AI — published pricing, no minimum contract, and API-based capture from Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Zoom rather than a desktop agent. Pick it for 1-10 lawyer firms that want to buy without a sales cycle.
• Clio Duo — AI inside Clio Manage, sold as an add-on. Pick it when the firm is all-in on Clio and wants help writing entries rather than passive capture.
• BigHand SmartTime — timers plus passive capture from an established vendor. Pick it for large firms whose IT and risk teams will not approve a three-year-old startup.

If none fit, the interim is a policy, not a tool: entries by 6pm the same day, a weekly unbilled-time report per timekeeper, and a partner check of the ten largest pre-bills against each client’s guidelines.

Watch-outs

• Captured time is not collected time. 6-11% more captured hours means nothing if partners write the extra entries down. Guard: run a 60-day pilot on one practice group and measure billed and collected hours against the same months last year, not captured hours.
• Passive capture looks like monitoring to attorneys. PointOne positions capture as the attorney’s own record, not a surveillance tool, but associates will still ask who sees the raw activity log. Guard: publish an internal policy before rollout that names what is captured, which apps are excluded, who can see raw activity versus approved entries, and how long raw data is retained. Get the retention terms in the contract.
• There is no public API and no MCP server. Integrations are pre-built connectors to billing systems. Guard: confirm that approved entries land in your billing system as the system of record, and get written terms for bulk export of entries and activity data at exit. Background: MCP server explained.
• Desktop setup is the reported friction point. Directory listings flag initial installation as hard. Guard: have IT deploy it on your standard Windows and Mac images for five pilot users before firm-wide rollout, and check it against your endpoint security tooling.
• Small vendor, one founder already gone. About 20 employees, and a co-founder left for a competitor-adjacent company in 2025. Guard: ask for two reference calls at your firm size and billing system, a copy of the SOC 2 Type 2 report, and a contract clause covering data return if the company is acquired.

For the pricing side of this problem, see billable hour vs AFA. For the client side of the same guidelines, see outside counsel management.