Welcome to the latest LegalTech Tapas podcast on Artificial Lawyer with Andrew Jardine. Today we speak to Richard Mabey, co-founder and CEO of contracting platform, Juro.
In this podcast Andrew explores with Richard what Juro does, how it helps inhouse legal teams and how it is changing the world of contracting.
If you can’t listen just now, check out a partial transcript below. To play the podcast, click on the player. (Time: approx 25 mins.)
Episode Transcript
What does Juro do?
So on the menu this week we have London-based Juro, an end to end contract management tool that combines flavours of contract generation, negotiation and ongoing contract management.
Later on we’ll also be joined by Richard Mabey, Juro CEO to get his perspective on where Juro sits in the market and where it is going.
Because Juro seems to straddle a few different categories of tool I want to give a quick summary of each of those so people know what we are talking about.
Firstly, Contract generation tools, typically these are workflow tools that enable business users to quickly generate tailored contracts within the constraints set by their legal or leadership teams, rather than having to get a contract from someone.
Secondly, Negotiation tools as we have covered on the show before are review tools that increase the speed at which a contract reviewer can negotiate a contract. Often they incorporate AI functionality to locate clauses, but not always.
And finally, contract management systems, these act as a repository of contract data, enabling management of contract obligations via alerts and also the generation of reports and visualisations for leadership decision making. Confusingly however there can be overlap as in order to get access to the data these systems often incorporating the first two tools mentioned as well.
Back to Juro now….in plain English what does it have?
Well, it has an interface for legal teams to create template contracts and then if you are a sales person or HR person in that business, a way to request them without having to go to legal. It has a word style document editor for doing contract redlines with the counter party, an e-signature tool and a nicely designed contract approval workflow.
None of this is particularly unique on its own, but Juro really stands out for packaging these features nicely in a consumer-like clear and appealing UI.
In terms of AI functionality Juro doesn’t have the same depth of AI that other tools do, only being able to auto-locate a few more basic data points in a contract.
The built-in reports and visualisations are also not as configurable as you might find in other products, but that might not matter to you as it has integrations with both Salesforce and Greenhouse (the HR tool), which you might prefer to use for reporting anyway.
I think at a high level I think it would be fair to summarise Juro as a Contract Management System light. One that has focused on user design rather than comprehensive feature coverage like some larger existing players.
Who should use Juro?
Now that we’ve heard the pitch and have a sense of where Juro sits, who do we think should use it?
The integrations, simplicity and well designed interface of Juro I think generally lend themselves for use by external facing business teams (e.g. Sales, HR, Customer Success), teams that traditionally have been frustrated with the lack of control, visibility and speed of the contracting process.
The design-centric collaborative document editor and approval flows, helps those non-legal teams to easily understand where they are in the contracting process as well as what they need to do to move things forward.
Juro’s design first approach would also be a good fit for organisations keen to improve their customer’s contract experience. A testament to this being that even though contracts can be downloaded from Juro and redlined in Word, 98% of counter-parties choose to remain in Juro throughout the negotiation process.
Juro however cannot be all things to all people, and as a result of its simplicity I could see larger Legal teams being disappointed with limited functionality in areas like reporting, ongoing obligation management or AI. Larger Legal teams might do well by using Juro as a secondary tool or in conjunction with other systems.
About Juro:
Juro is an end-to-end contract collaboration and management platform that helps businesses agree terms faster, while giving deep insight into contract data. The AI-enabled system offers contract creation, negotiation, e-signing and analytics, saving businesses like Deliveroo, Reach plc and Skyscanner up to 96% of time spent on contracts. Visit Juro to find out more about contract management.
About LegalTech Tapas:
LegalTech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/
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and,
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