Eudia, a Palo Alto-based AI startup, is offering something entirely new: the world’s first AI-augmented law firm. Its end goal is nothing less than the death of the billable hour that, according to CEO Omar Haroun, has run entirely out of control. “Most legal departments have lost control of their budgets and their knowledge,” Haroun said in a press release announcing the launch of Eudia Counsel, which he called “the first AI-native law firm.” He said it was built to help companies regain control of their knowledge.
The spark for him? “Our data was all over the place,” he said, explaining that DHL was doing business on multiple continents and there were too many different spreadsheets lying around. AI was just a tool to get organized at first, but years of work with Eudia have yielded “considerable savings,” he said, declining to discuss specific numbers.
“We have been heads down for the last two years,” Haroun told Fortune. He said the launch of their Arizona operations and some of the showy stunts at their Augmented Intelligence summit, including hiring an actor to play a priest who’s reading last rites for the billable hour, have the Eudia crowd “bracing” for a reaction from Big Law. The truth is, he said, many of Eudia’s clients have been “frustrated” over the last several years. Haroun says he hears from Eudia’s customers that outside law firms say they’re using AI but the bills keep going up, not down.
Haroun declined to discuss specific cost structures, but said some clients were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on outside counsel, and that’s where Eudia steps in. He emphasized that litigation won’t change in terms of the human lawyers reviewing the documents, but contract-review types of the kind described by Smolik and Hood are ideal for AI augmentation. And, he said, AI legal services should be seen as a force for good.
“It’s a problem when [an AI platform] doesn’t have citations,” he said. “You don’t know where it’s drawing from.” In other words, the human element is essential.
