• Cooley is joining a sudden rush of law firms creating their own AI technology, with help from Legora.
• Cooley Go Lab is an online portal built to help startups with routine contract review and drafting.
• The portal will be available exclusively to founders in Y Combinator's summer cohort to start.

Law firms know more clients are asking chatbots for advice before ever calling a lawyer. So legal giant Cooley is building technology that it hopes founders will use instead.

Cooley plans to give select startups access to Cooley Go Lab, an online portal where founders can upload files and ask questions about their documents, Matt Bartus, global cochair of Cooley's emerging companies and venture capital practice, told Business Insider.

To build it, Cooley teamed up with Legora, a fast-growing legal technology startup that sells to law firms and corporate legal departments. Last year, Legora entered a new line of business with what it calls "portals" — white-labeled workspaces where law firms and their clients can work together on legal matters.

Cooley Go Lab is aimed at catching a common startup problem early, Bartus said. Founders often handle routine contracts themselves to avoid outside counsel's hourly rates. That can leave startups with a trail of messy agreements that their first in-house lawyer has to unwind later.

Legora founder Max Junestrand knows the problem well. When he started the company at age 23, he said he used an early version of ChatGPT to rewrite contracts. Junestrand, a software engineer, not a lawyer, said he let some early contracts include an unlimited liability clause — a provision that can leave a company exposed to damages far beyond the value of the deal.

"When our general counsel started, she freaked out," he said.

Cooley is now trying to give the next crop of founders a way to use artificial intelligence to move faster, but with a law firm's guardrails around it.

Cooley Go Lab will have a limited rollout to start. It will be available first to startups in Y Combinator's summer cohort.

Much has changed for startups since Legora's turn in the famed startup accelerator. Teams can write code and release technology faster with coding agents. They are signing customers and growing revenue earlier, and the hottest companies seem to be raising funding nonstop. But moving faster also means legal work that once came later in a startup's life is being pulled closer to the beginning.

At Y Combinator, partner Gustaf Alströmer is seeing that shift play out in real time. In the last batch, a record 14 startups reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue — the amount of revenue a company expects to collect over a year. Alströmer said giving founders access to tools like Cooley Go Lab could help them keep that pace without creating contract-slop.

The portal includes features that review documents like nondisclosure and contractor agreements and flag issues for founders to consider. The tool also draws on Cooley Go, the firm's central hub of standard startup forms, templates, and guidance.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

Law firms like Cooley are facing a new reality. The better the frontier models get at legal work, the more founders and in-house lawyers may decide they can handle situations themselves rather than send them to outside counsel. Anthropic is trying to make that easier with new tools built for contract review and drafting.

Law firms are now figuring out how to stay relevant as more legal work becomes software-enabled. Some are building their own tech. Kirkland & Ellis has tapped Palantir to help it build tools to manage parts of the firm's private funds practice, while Freshfields is working with Anthropic on software that could eventually be sold to other law firms. Harvey, a leader in legal technology, says it's getting into training custom models for law firms.

Taken together, the moves point to a new attitude spreading across Big Law: If clients are going to use artificial intelligence anyway, law firms want to shape how they use it.

Bartus doesn't seem especially concerned about losing business to in-house legal departments. Cooley has been on a hot streak. Profits rose 6.7% to $922 million last fiscal year. The firm also scored a fair use win for Meta in a copyright case involving its model Llama last year, and it advised Jony Ive's hardware startup Io in a $6.5 billion sale to OpenAI.

Bartus is confident that companies will continue to depend on law firms for the important work. Cooley Go Lab, he said, is meant to help founders handle routine legal work more cleanly, not replace lawyers.

Cooley says the tool is not protected by attorney-client privilege, so founders will need to be careful about what they upload because those materials could be turned over in litigation.

"If you want actual legal advice," he said, "you need to talk to a lawyer."

• At law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. But timekeeping is a pain.
• The startup PointOne says it's using AI to help lawyers auto-complete timesheets and bill more time.
• PointOne raised $16 million in a funding round led by the venture capital firm 8VC.

Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It's also the bane of the profession.

A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer's job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer's computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.

The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.

Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.

Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.

Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.

Luaces isn't a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company's researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.

He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)

When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.

PointOne's platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.

Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.

When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.

For lawyers, "this is like magic beans," Luaces said.

Time savings aren't the point

Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.

PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers' time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.

Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they're still learning or because they're embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.

A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. "I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work," Luaces said. "Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work."

He says the company's software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.

PointOne isn't the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It's raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne's $20 million total.

PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne's data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.

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