Why We Invested in PointOne
PointOne is taking a contrarian approach to the application of Generative AI in the legal profession: help attorneys bill even more.
We’re excited to announce our partnership and investment in PointOne: a vertically integrated legal technology platform that leverages generative artificial intelligence to automate legal time sheets, invoices, and predictive billing. Rather than strategically employing artificial intelligence to reduce our dependency on lawyers, PointOne is using this emerging technology to help attorneys automate time sheets and, as a result, bill their clients even more. Targeting a market worth over $10 Billion USD and growing at 12% CAGR, PointOne has raised over $3.2 Million USD in Seed financing. We joined this round alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, and General Catalyst.
A long list of emerging companies are seeking to replace attorneys with generative artificial intelligence. The paradox of this, of course, is that these same platforms have to sell their products to attorneys themselves! This threat to the legal profession, and fear amongst attorneys of a long and slow transformation cannot be understated. This is especially true when taken into context with how the lawyers become, well, lawyers.
When graduating law school and joining a practice, the single and most important metric that matters to making partner for a young attorney is their contribution of billable hours. Sorry, but that’s really it. Given the entrenched incentives of the legal profession itself, any potential disruption to this process is likely to be greeted with hesitation if not outright hostility.
Rather than seek to immediately disrupt this system, PointOne emphasizes the alignment of incentives by employing artificial intelligence to augment attorneys’ ability to bill more and save time. PointOne ingests all client communication(s) and information from their laptop and mobile device(s). Quite remarkably, PointOne interprets these time sheets on a customized basis, under the structure and billing format of each independent firm. PointOne saves attorneys up to 20% of their total work time that they normally spend on time sheets.
Critically, while we don’t believe that one strategy for the application of artificial intelligence to the legal profession is likely to win or lose, we do believe the question of market timing may more be in PointOne’s favor as generational shifts in legal practice often take just that: generations.
PointOne’s team is led by Founder and CEO Adrian Parlow, a former corporate lawyer at Fenwick & West and the fromer General Counsel of WeFunder. Mr. Parlow has supplemented his team with leaders across the legal and technology space as the Company is now rapidly scaling.
We are excited to take this journey with PointOne and watch as the team transforms and modernizes one of the world’s oldest professions.
