Haroun told Law360 Pulse during an interview Thursday that when in-house legal departments send work to law firms, they lose knowledge and become more reliant on law firms to handle their legal matters.
He said that when in-house legal departments send work to law firm Eudia Counsel, they can still access knowledge from that work through Eudia's online platform, reducing their need to use a law firm in the future.
"Now all of that knowledge that historically would be trapped in the heads of your outside counsel is actually made available through this platform to build this company brain, we call it, for the customer to be able to actually enable the in-house team to either take on that work entirely or significantly reduce the amount of time that any law firm needs to spend on it," Haroun said.
Haroun earned his law degree from Columbia Law School and previously co-founded AI company Text IQ, which was sold to Relativity in 2021.
Eudia's platform, launched in 2023, is designed to help in-house legal teams leverage their institutional knowledge and AI to help them get work done faster and remove repetitive tasks.
Some of Eudia's clients include Intuit, Airbnb, Duracell, Dropbox, Citi and the U.S. Air Force, according to its website.
In February, the startup exited stealth mode and announced it raised up to $105 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital firm General Catalyst.
In July, Eudia acquired European alternative legal services provider Johnson Hana for an undisclosed amount, marking the company's first acquisition.
Eudia Counsel received alternative business structure approval from the Arizona Supreme Court in June.
In August 2020, Arizona became the first state to allow nonlawyer ownership of law firms through the state supreme court's alternative business structure, or ABS, program, with a purported goal of improving access to justice.
Since then, the Arizona Supreme Court has approved more than 100 applications for ABS licenses from law firms and companies, including Rocket Lawyer and KPMG.
Eudia Counsel's basic offerings include AI-augmented mergers and acquisitions and contracting, according to the company.
Haroun said the law firm is a "missing piece" for his company to capture in-house legal department knowledge.
"Unless you have some ability to capture that knowledge and put it back into a platform, you're going to be very limited in your ability to really transform your department with AI," he said.
Haroun noted that new and existing clients can seek legal services from Eudia Counsel and the law firm doesn't charge by the hour.
Eudia is also planning to expand its AI for Good initiative in Arizona through its law firm and is looking for an organizational partner in the state to help underserved communities, according to the company.
"AI has the power to dramatically improve access to justice," David Van Reyk, co-founder and chief operating officer at Eudia, said in a statement Wednesday.
--Editing by Stephen Berg.
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