‘Contract Automation – Start Small, Win Big’ – The New Juro eBook

Introducing the New eBook by Juro: ‘Contract automation – start small, win big‘, by Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of Juro.

There are tens of thousands of contracts in Juro and we’re always pleasantly surprised by the variety of documents customers choose to automate. There are contracts between farmers selling asparagus to supermarkets; conveyancing agreements selling people’s houses, and supplier contracts between soil merchants and garden centres. In our own workspace, you could even find the term sheet from our last investment round.

But even though there are quick wins and efficiencies to be gained with contract automation across almost every use case and industry you can think of, when we look at our customers as a whole and consider their main objectives, certain documents come up again and again.

They land in inboxes and are met with groans. They bury legal teams in huge volumes of low-value work. They clog up sales teams’ workflows and threaten their targets. They’re part of a legal process that end-users typically find painful, leading to bottlenecks, damaged relationships with colleagues and a lack of visibility once contracts are signed.

The value to be gained from automating even simple contracts – and the consequent pain if you don’t – seems to be so serious that across all the different types of organizations we work with, when it comes to automation, teams will land on these documents as the obvious place to start.

In this guide we take a deep dive into three of the most automated contracts: the Master Services Agreement, the Non-Disclosure Agreement and the Employment Offer Letter. We looked directly at the insights that customers provide us with when they join our community, to find out: what are these documents for? Who owns them? What’s painful about them? What problems do they cause, who is affected, and what are the benefits of automating them in the right way?

Starting small, with one or two documents, doesn’t exactly chime with the buzz phrases our industry loves to chase – ‘digital transformation’, ‘innovation’, or whatever it is we’re hyping this week. Those phrases are seductive – and why not? Who wouldn’t want to turn around an oil tanker, change an entire system from top to bottom, win some innovation awards and end manual processes forever?

The problem arises when this good intention crashes into reality. With automation projects, a common mistake is to aim too high, start too big, fail to get (and keep) buy-in, see weak adoption, make little to no impact, and ultimately fail. No value is delivered from contract management and nobody wins.

But if big wins are what you’re chasing, then contract automation’s great secret is this: it’s OK to start small. Take one document, one workflow, one team, one objective, and see if you can improve it.

If you automate just one or two sales documents, and start closing deals 30 per cent faster as a result, while saving your sales team 75 per cent of time on paperwork, what do you think that might do to your revenue?

If you automate your NDA workflow and reduce it to 90 seconds end-to-end, saving half an hour per document at 20 NDAs a month, what might the business do with 120 extra hours of lawyer time a year?                                               

If you automate Offer Letters and reduce your end-to-end hiring process from 35 days to less than 14, how do you think that might impact your ability to secure the best talent? What might it do for your company’s growth and scaling?

If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel and tear down your whole process then the answer is simple. Don’t. Start small. Get a low-negotiation, high-volume document that causes problems for your business – if won’t be hard to find one – and see if you could benefit from solving that one problem with automation. We might even be able to help you do it. Take a look at this eBook and find out how businesses win big by starting small with MSAs, NDAs and Offer Letters.

Download the eBook – Contract automation: start small, win big

[ Artificial Lawyer is proud to bring you this sponsored article by Juro. ]