Katon
Luaces

Six minutes at a time

Every lawyer in America keeps a private ledger of their own day, sliced into tenths of an hour. Katon Luaces looked at that ritual - the sticky notes, the end-of-week guesswork, the hours quietly lost - and built a machine to make it vanish.

PointOne, the company he co-founded in 2023 and runs as CEO, is an AI time platform for law firms. It sits quietly behind a lawyer's email, calendar, calls, and documents, watches what actually happened, and writes the time entries itself - already classified, already checked against the firm's billing rules. The pitch is almost subversive in its modesty: stop asking brilliant, expensive people to be their own stopwatch.

The number that animates the whole thing is brutal. The average attorney bills roughly 2.6 of an 8-hour day - about a third of the clock - and the rest evaporates into reconstruction and rounding. PointOne's customers, the company says, recover 6 to 11 percent more billable time per day. For a partnership, that is not a productivity tweak. It is found money, every single day.

That sentence is the tell. A lot of legal AI chases the glamorous work - drafting briefs, summarizing discovery. Luaces went the other direction, straight into the unglamorous plumbing of how firms actually make money. His investors at 8VC framed it as the missing layer: not a tool for practicing law, but the operating system for running the business of one. Beyond time entry, PointOne has built intelligent bill review, outside-counsel-guidelines compliance, and pricing intelligence. Timekeeping is just the wedge.

From self-driving cars to billable hours

Before he was auditing law firms, Luaces was auditing autonomy. At Applied Intuition he worked on a platform for the verification and validation of autonomous vehicles - the deeply unsexy, deeply hard question of how you prove a machine's judgment is trustworthy. Earlier, at Google, he did a software engineering stint and worked on a legal technology product, an early brush with the industry he would later try to rebuild.

The throughline is not legal expertise. It is a comfort with letting software make calls that used to require a human, and then proving those calls are right. At Columbia, he was a head teaching assistant for graduate-level introductory machine learning and computational linear algebra - the person standing at the whiteboard making the math make sense to a room of newcomers. The instinct to translate dense technical work into something a skeptic will trust shows up again in PointOne's core problem: convincing a managing partner that an algorithm can be trusted with the firm's invoices.

He pitched it young. At 25, Luaces stood in front of a packed room of investors, customers, and industry leaders at a legal-tech conference and made the case for a company most of the audience had never heard of. The room was full of people who had spent careers inside the six-minute increment. He was there to tell them it didn't have to exist.

The case, quantified

The chart below is the entire business model in three bars: how much of a lawyer's day is actually billed today, and the slice PointOne claims to win back.

In March 2026 the company raised a $16 million Series A led by 8VC, with Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator joining - the same names that had backed a $3.5M seed in 2024, when the West Coast firm Cooley's investment fund also came in. Total funding sits around $20 million. Luaces was plain about where it goes: deepening existing partnerships through new product development, not chasing logos for the sake of it.

The proof points are arriving. PointOne partnered with SurePoint to push AI timekeeping into mid-market firms, and the Minnesota Attorney General's Office adopted the platform in what the company describes as the first statewide deployment of AI timekeeping. A government legal office - precisely the kind of institution that does not adopt unproven software on a whim - signing on is a louder endorsement than any pitch deck.

Bigger than law

Luaces does not talk about PointOne as a timesheet killer, even though that is the part people feel. He talks about rebuilding the business operations of professional-services firms wholesale - billing, compliance, pricing, staffing, the intelligence a firm should have about itself but rarely does. Law is the beachhead because law is the worst offender. The longer game points at accounting firms, consultancies, and anyone else who still sells their hours and loses track of them.

It is a contrarian place to plant a flag. Timekeeping is the chore nobody wants to think about, which is exactly why it has stayed broken for decades and exactly why the data buried inside it is so valuable. Luaces's bet is that whoever cleans up the most boring data in the building ends up owning the most important questions about how the building runs.

He is still early, and the unglamorous nature of the work is the whole point. There is no viral demo in a perfectly captured billable hour. There is just a lawyer who got to go home without a stack of sticky notes, and a firm that quietly billed for the work it actually did. If Katon Luaces is right, the most radical thing software can do for a profession built on time is to give people their time back.