Duracell eliminates 40-hour precedent searches and shifts to fixed-fee contracting with Eudia AI

For Duracell's in-house legal team, decades of contract history had accumulated across PDFs, emails, and SharePoint folders — accessible by format, not by meaning. When counsel needed to establish the company's prior position on a clause like indemnity before entering a negotiation, the only path was a manual review of documents already paid to be reviewed multiple times before. That process consumed 40 billable hours per precedent search. The underlying law firm model compounded the problem: same Word templates, same review workflow, just a 10% cost increase annually with no improvement in delivery speed or comprehensiveness. As Chief Legal Officer Gary Hood put it, the result was "slower work product and typically a more expensive one… a compromise either on time or comprehensiveness."

Duracell deployed Eudia's AI-Augmented Contracting platform, combining two capabilities built on large language models and generative AI. The first was an embedded AI-augmented secondee handling day-to-day redlines, negotiation support, and progression to signature on a predictable fixed-fee basis — replacing the variable hourly model with outcome-based delivery. The second was a custom contract insights solution that extracted pricing, rebate, and margin-relevant clauses from the full legacy contract corpus and linked them to Sales and Finance data. Both solutions integrated with Duracell's existing document environment rather than requiring a migration. Critically, the program was funded by reallocating existing outside-counsel spend rather than requesting a new technology budget line — removing the typical procurement barrier to adoption.

The transformation eliminated the 40-hour precedent search entirely: legal can now retrieve clause history and prior positions in minutes rather than weeks. Key outcomes include:

• Precedent search time: reduced from ~40 billable hours to minutes
• Billing model: shifted from variable hourly spend to predictable fixed fees
• Headcount: scaling across business units with zero additions
• Budget: program self-funded through reallocation of outside-counsel spend

Beyond speed, the contract insights layer now enables pre-negotiation posture analysis — surfacing pricing, rebate, and margin data before discussions begin — giving Sales and Finance decision-ready signals without routing requests through outside counsel.

• Fund AI adoption from existing spend: routing outside-counsel dollars into AI programs avoids new budget approvals and creates immediate ROI accountability.
• Unlock institutional memory before replacing process: converting legacy contract history into a searchable insights layer is a prerequisite, not an afterthought — it's what makes AI-augmented delivery credible.
• Fixed-fee structures align incentives: billing by outcome rather than hours ties legal's performance to business speed, not document volume.
• Embed humans alongside AI for higher-stakes work: the secondee model keeps judgment where it matters while automating repetitive redline and progression tasks.
• Start narrow, then compound: beginning with contracts created a low-risk entry point; each new agreement now improves playbooks and sharpens future negotiation posture.