Eudia, a Palo Alto-based AI startup, is offering something entirely new: the world\u2019s 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. \u201cMost legal departments have lost control of their budgets and their knowledge,\u201d Haroun said in a press release announcing the launch of Eudia Counsel, which he called \u201cthe first AI-native law firm.\u201d He said it was built to help companies regain control of their knowledge.<\/p>\n
The company has fought hard behind the scenes to bring this law firm to light, Haroun said in an interview with Fortune at the company\u2019s 2025 Augmented Intelligence Summit<\/a> in New York. Arizona is the only state in the country where a law firm is not required to be owned by lawyers, he said. Even still, there are technicalities. Eudia is not technically set up as a law firm. Under Arizona\u2019s Alternative Business Structure (ABS) program, it\u2019s set up as a company that is a \u201cprovider of a law firm.\u201d <\/p>\n The company is also expanding its access-to-justice initiative, AI for Good, with Haroun telling Fortune that the economics of AI can transform pro bono work, which he sees as \u201cthe reason people like me went to law school\u201d in the first place. Haroun acquired a law degree at Columbia Law School before a career in consulting, tech and AI that saw him sell another company, Text IQ, to Relativity in 2021.<\/a><\/p>\n Deep bench of clients<\/p>\n Haroun\u2019s career in AI stretches back over 10 years and allowed him to acquire several Fortune 500 clients as soon as he launched Eudia as co-founder in 2023. Mark Smolik<\/a>, the general counsel for Fortune Global 500 firm DHL<\/a>, told Fortune at the event that he has known Haroun for many years and fell into using AI \u201cby accident.\u201d<\/p>\n The spark for him? \u201cOur data was all over the place,\u201d 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 \u201cconsiderable savings,\u201d he said, declining to discuss specific numbers. <\/p>\n Gary Hood<\/a>, general counsel for Berkshire Hathaway-owned Duracell, said his firm has been a client of Eudia since day one, adding that using it has been a \u201cno-brainer\u201d for use cases such as contracts and due diligence during M&A. Similar attendees at the event included Cargill<\/a>, Coherent<\/a>, Graybar, and Intuit<\/a>, which is piloting a relationship with Eudia.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been heads down for the last two years,\u201d 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\u2019s reading last rites for the billable hour, have the Eudia crowd \u201cbracing\u201d for a reaction from Big Law. The truth is, he said, many of Eudia\u2019s clients have been \u201cfrustrated\u201d over the last several years. Haroun says he hears from Eudia\u2019s customers that outside law firms say they\u2019re using AI but the bills keep going up, not down. <\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2024 that major corporate clients were growing \u201cindignant<\/a>\u201d at the stickiness of the billable hour. Rankings site Best Law Firms surveyed thousands of firms in November 2024 and found that \u201calternative\u201d billing structures were on the rise, but the billable hour was alive and well,<\/a> with a significant number of firms offering it exclusively. <\/p>\n Haroun declined to discuss specific cost structures, but said some clients were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on outside counsel, and that\u2019s where Eudia steps in. He emphasized that litigation won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Transforming legal labor?<\/p>\n Eudia and Haroun used the Summit to announce a major expansion of their AI for Good\u00a0initiative, investing resources to remove systemic barriers and foster economic mobility and opportunity, especially for Arizona\u2019s underserved communities. The company said Eudia Counsel will help more people resolve legal issues affordably while supporting small businesses and new entrepreneurs. Benefits include removing practical and financial barriers to legal services, enabling economic and social mobility through accessible legal support, and empowering small business formation and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n Eudia\u2019s Series A funding round<\/a> in February 2025 raised up to $105 million with backing led by General Catalyst and joined by Sierra Ventures, Floodgate, and others. The company hopes that its Arizona-led expansion\u2014advised by former top corporate lawyers\u2014signals the arrival of AI-native law firms and new paradigms for budget, execution, and justice in enterprise legal.<\/p>\n On the subject of whether AI will take away jobs, Haroun said that for his part, he\u2019s learned that Eudia won\u2019t be successful just selling AI tools. To that end, in July Eudia acquired Johnson Hana<\/a>, a European legal services firm, adding over 300 lawyers to its offering. The press release announcing the deal called it a \u201cnew category of company that fuses humans and technology to fundamentally reinvent labor.\u201d In conversation with Fortune, Haroun reiterated that he doesn\u2019t see AI\u2019s main value relating to software, but rather to labor. <\/p>\n Eudia co-founder Ashish Agrawal<\/a> told Fortune that he\u2019s worked in AI for 30 years at firms including IBM<\/a>, Apple<\/a> and Google<\/a>, and he hasn\u2019t been surprised to see AI take off the way it has since 2022. \u201cIt\u2019s been a very organic process,\u201d said Agrawal, the company CTO. Still, he said the human inputs are essential to AI working properly to get results for clients like DHL and Duracell, likening AI tools to a brand new employee that every company has to be patient with and incorporate \u201corganically.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a problem when [an AI platform] doesn\u2019t have citations,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t know where it\u2019s drawing from.\u201d In other words, the human element is essential.\n<\/p>\n