(L to R) Joe Bowman, Hilary Bowman and Eugène De Villiers standing in front of the Querious booth at ABA Techshow 2025 startup alley. (Courtesy of Querious)
Querious can tune into client calls on Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, identify potential legal issues in real time, provide relevant legal content and suggest questions for attorneys to ask their clients, according to its website.
Hilary Bowman, co-founder and CEO at Querious, recently told Law360 Pulse that she came up with the idea for her company about two years ago when she was working as in-house counsel for venture builder Redesign Health.
She said that during that time, she had experiences where a healthcare company would ask her a privacy-related question she didn't know the answer to, and she wouldn't know what to say.
"I thought, 'Surely there's a way that I could leverage technology, in this case AI, to help navigate those conversations. What if I had a tool to help me brainstorm in the meeting, especially when the conversation takes an unexpected turn?' And that's what became Querious," she said.
Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Bowman came to the legal profession with an interest in working in the healthcare space.
She doesn't have any lawyers in her family, but her mom works in dentistry, her sister is a physician, and her dad was a medical records software engineer for 20 years.
While Bowman was interested in the healthcare field, she added she didn't see herself being a nurse or doctor.
Bowman earned a bachelor of arts in human biology from Stanford University, where she took healthcare policy classes that guided her toward the law school route.
She received a law degree with a focus in health law from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 2012.
Bowman noted that while law school was intellectually challenging and a place where she made lifelong friends, the curriculum was heavily focused on litigation, even though she didn't want to be a litigator.
"If you step back, there was just still a lot of focus on litigation, which I think is overemphasized in law school compared to the amount of people who actually become litigators in practice," she said.
Bowman's first job out of law school was clerking for an administrative law judge at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency for about a year.
In 2013, she joined Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice LLP's healthcare practice as an associate in North Carolina. Three years later, she moved to K&L Gates LLP's healthcare practice.
Bowman said she strengthened her legal research prowess working long hours at law firms.
"The biggest skill that I got out of working at a law firm is the critical thinking of how to get to an answer, even if I didn't know it off the top of my head," she said.
In 2019, Bowman moved in-house to work at Watson Health, which was a part of IBM at the time.
Even though she never planned on working in-house, Bowman said, she couldn't pass up the opportunity to join Watson Health, a healthcare data and analytics company.
She added that working at Watson Health, she learned more about legal issues related to technology, which laid the groundwork for her to found her own tech company.
In 2022, private equity firm Francisco Partners bought Watson Health from IBM and renamed the company Merative. Bowman briefly worked at Merative before joining Redesign Health.
After Bowman came up with the idea for Querious, a friend who's a chief technology officer introduced her to Eugène De Villiers, a software engineer who later became her co-founder.
Bowman said she told De Villiers her idea for Querious, and he built a prototype of the product.
She recalled that the prototype was a black window and a generative AI model produced outputs, which appeared in green front, from a recorded conversation.
"It proved that, in real time, we could flag legal issues and suggest clarifying questions," Bowman said about the prototype.
In August, Bowman raised $1 million from friends, family and angel investors, and three months later, she and her co-founder officially launched Querious.
Querious currently has three full-time software employees and several advisers, according to Bowman.
The tool is being used by corporate, healthcare and intellectual property attorneys from small and mid-size law firms and some in-house counsel, Bowman noted.
She added that the company is talking with a couple of large law firms that are interested in using Querious to tap into their internal data sources.
The company is also looking into integrations with other software for document management and timekeeping, Bowman said.
"This is just a really special moment in technology where there's a lot of white space, there's a lot of opportunity to do something that hasn't been done before," she said. "It's a really special time to just see what we can do, what we can do in terms of functionality and value for the attorney, but then also who we can partner with and integrate this product to make it extremely valuable to attorneys."
--Editing by Lakshna Mehta.
Update: This article has been updated to include more details about Querious.
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