Juro is a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform designed to make legal contracts frictionless, collaborative, and accessible. By offering an all-in-one, browser-native environment, Juro streamlines the entire contract process, from creation to renewal, enhancing efficiency and speeding up business transactions.

In our discussion, Richard Mabey, Juro’s Co-Founder & CEO, shared insights on the company's mission to simplify contract management, being more human, partnership trust, Intelligent Contract Automation, ‘intelligere’ and 40 million pages of paper.

1. What is Juro’s Mission? 

Juro's mission is to help the world agree more. We do that by making legal contracts frictionless, collaborative and accessible to everyone. Our platform is geared towards taking a contract from inception all the way through to its renewal across the whole lifecycle. Doing that in one neat, browser-native environment and in doing, so we can speed things up in the process and help to get more business done.

Contract Lifecycle Management is not a new category, we've seen evidence of CLM back in 1991. The question we had to address is not, why is the process of managing contracts painful? We know it is; but instead, why is it that more established and legacy players haven't succeeded? And it really came down to a couple of things.

First, is ease of use. I think that the expectations of modern software in any team, whether it's b2b, software or consumer, have risen and so our goal is to make sure that there is an incredibly intuitive platform that anyone can use. This also needs to integrate with the systems you're already living in and will give you a level of user experience which anyone can get around.

The second thing, is that Generative AI has been really significant in legal tech and procure tech. We've been able to bring in 'AI Assistant,' which now helps you to conduct your jobs with contracts faster. That might be drafting an addendum, it might be helping you to retrieve some data, but it's this AI native approach that in the last year or so has set us apart.

This AI native approach that in the last year or so has set us apart. 

  

2. What have been the most significant milestones in Juro’s journey so far?

For me, businesses are just collections of people. The most important thing for me was the relationships that I built on the way and that started with my Co-Founder, Pavel who I had known; we were educated together in Latvia. We got together and it was a great partnership. He brought highly complementary skills, and deep knowledge of technology and product. I simply couldn't have built a business without him. I think making that early decision to partner with the right kind of person, who you really trust, and who has complementary skills is pivotal.

That early decision to partner with the right kind of person, who you really trust, and who has complementary skills is pivotal.

 

I think that's true of quite a lot of the hires we've made. We’re bigger now, with a full executive team, but making those pivotal hires: Who's going to lead the revenue function? Who's going to lead on technology? That's been key for us and I've felt that we now have a group of smart, human-centric, low-ego, high-EQ folks. That’s ultimately what's made the biggest difference.

Outside of that, the last year or so has been pivotal to the company and I think we're going past the ‘AI could be interesting’ era into people who are actually using this technology every day in their workflows. We made an early choice there with 'AI Assistant' in mid 2023, at beginning of that wave; that was really significant, and a big accelerant.

3. What do you look for in the perfect customer?

There's a couple of things we look for. First, the fit of the company. We tend to work with companies who are roughly mid-market. We do work with large enterprises, but it's typically scaling businesses. It’s up to 2,000 or so employees where we really see a sweet spot, and we're fairly industry agnostic. In the early days, we had heavy exposure to marketplaces, SaaS companies, and technology, but increasingly we work with more traditional enterprises in healthcare, FMCGs, financial services, real estate and all kinds of industries.

Juro has fairly broad applicability. I think within those customers, the things I found to be important is crystal clarity of knowing what you want to solve.

I think there's a great temptation, especially now when there's so much hype around AI for folks to say, well, there's been an internal directive to do AI and so we’re going to do AI by buying a tool.

 

Much better would be the clarity of, ‘Well, at this stage of the Contract Lifecycle, we are missing key renewal dates, we have no system to track them, we can't easily surface the data and we want Juro to solve it.’

We love it when customers say, ‘We've explored solving this without tooling,’ and that's usually a good sign that there's been deep thought on: what jobs are to be done and how do we solve it? They then conclude that they do need a tool. So, a lot of it is around the behaviour of that customer.

4. What are the foundations of growing a great team?

A lot think that if you get enough smart people together and give them a mission, you can just say go, and they'll do it. I don’t necessarily agree, based on my experience. There's a lot of craft that must go into building the foundations of that team. For me, it starts really with the values and behaviours of the organisation, and this is something we did when we were only about 10 people. What we did was rather than project our own values as founders, we asked the team: ‘What's important to us? What are the behaviours we're exhibiting today that are really good? What are we doing that’s really bad?’

We codified that, and you can see it all within our public handbook on our website. Those values have stuck fairly true. Because we got that foundation right, we have core values, and the one that people tend to write about is our value called ‘Be more human.’ We try to celebrate the good examples of that. So, where we see great examples of human centricity and high levels of empathy with customers and prospects, and when we see bad examples of that, we also tried to call it out and correct those behaviours.

It’s a labour of love to have people work well together, and it all starts with values.

 

5. What’s the next major digital innovation from Juro?

We believe that the lifecycle of contracts won't change much. You still need to have paperwork, it needs to be approved by humans, it still needs to be signed, you still need somewhere to store it and track it. But the way in which that's done will change fundamentally. We took our first steps in building AI-assistant which was specifically focused on drafting contracts, summarisation of contracts, red lining and reviews.

We started there, but our strategy now is to bring Generative AI into every part of the platform. From the moment you receive that vendor contract, and it goes to procurement to have a first pass at, you should be experiencing AI solutions at all aspects. 

Our strategy now is to bring Generative AI into every part of the platform. 

 

It might be that you want to get a risk review, or you want to write a query to find out all of the relevant clauses you need across your contractual estate. In every part of that we expect that Generative AI will lead and that's where we are putting most of our investment today.

Most of our investment is going into the front end of the process, the ingestion of documents, and then also to the back end of the process, around search and insights. I love the insights one, because I remember distinctly one of our early customers telling us: ‘We have a contract with a large technology vendor on an auto renew clause; we missed the auto renew, which renewed for a million pounds.’ We had a business case to solve it, but today, you could now solve that with search queries and alerts; you can do amazing things now that make that problem totally disappear.

6. What’s the vision for Juro? What does great look like in three to five year’s time?

We call our vision, ‘Intelligent Contract Automation.' Contract automation is probably fairly understandable so it’s the intelligent bit that we're mostly focused on. So, what do we mean by intelligence? We’re geeky, and we were looking at the Latin root of intelligence, which is ‘intelligere’, which means ‘I understand.’ It's all about how do you understand your information? When you think about that in product terms, a lot of that comes in the post signature space. Over the next couple of years, certainly that post signature investment is going to be very important.

We feel good about predicting the next two years and we have a roadmap. However, five years, we want to maintain some options and we are monitoring very closely.

We partner with Open AI, and we’re not that far from Chat GPT five so, what will that look like? We don't know, so, we’re treading carefully and trying to be very agile here.

Juro is now firmly a scale up versus a startup. We're almost eight years in and scaling fast and well, and so that brings a new set of challenges and many of the customers we have are much larger. So being fully enterprise ready, being able to partner with banks, for example, and giving security that is hitting the best-in-class milestones or truly exceptional levels.

Then, of course, the team. I think in companies, some folks are great in the early days and not so good or don't want to play in the later stages. Our team continues to evolve and bringing in folks who have seen scale and big scale as we've done with most of our executives, that's been really important as well.

7. What are you doing that is good for the planet?

We don't pretend that we are doing that much that is good. One thing that has stuck with us is the digitalisation of paper. One of the things l am still so surprised about is how many organisations are still operating on paper. Our early clients were all in tech and they got it, but we have some real, more traditional clients who are still looking in file cabinets to find their contracts. So, digitalisation, we have processed around 2 million contracts so far. If each of those has on average 20 pages, you start getting up into kind of 40 million pages of paper being saved. So, certainly a small contribution, but we're proud of that, and it's important to us.

INSTANT INSPIRATION

1. Favourite book or blog?

One book that we used a lot in building Juro, is called Blue Ocean Strategy was written by two professors at my business school, and it's all really about how to compete in crowded spaces. And it's very actionable and very tangible and I think I'd certainly recommend to your readers to give it a look.

2. Favourite inspirational leader?

Maybe it’s a bit cliché, but I think Richard Branson. There's one thing that's I've found to be impressive about him, which is human centricity. Virgin's values and brand has been built on the premise of building a workplace where people want to come to work.

3. Favourite piece of technology?

Chat GPT – We partner with Open AI for our own AI assistant. 

4. Favourite cocktail or guilty pleasure?

 Negroni. 

5. How do you celebrate success? 

 I celebrate with my family – I spend every spare moment I can with my wife Lottie, and my two children.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Streamlined Contract Management: Digital platforms for contract lifecycle management (CLM) significantly enhance efficiency by providing end-to-end solutions from contract creation to renewal. This reduces friction and speeds up business processes, allowing for more streamlined and effective agreement management.

2. User-Friendly Software: Modern CLM tools must be intuitive and integrate seamlessly with existing systems to meet rising user expectations. Ease of use is a critical factor in the adoption and success of digital contract management solutions.

3. Clarity in Pain Points: For customers to fully optimise the use of digital tools like CLM platforms, they must come with a clear understanding of their pain points and objectives. This clarity ensures that the technology is applied effectively to solve specific problems and improve operational efficiency.

4. Data-Driven Insights: Investment in analytics and machine learning technologies within CLM systems enables organisations to gain deeper insights from their contract data. This can help identify trends, assess risks, and make more informed decisions, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

5. Agility Over Long-Term Vision: In rapidly evolving technological landscapes, maintaining agility can be more beneficial than adhering to a rigid five-year plan. Flexibility allows companies to adapt quickly to new developments and innovations, ensuring they remain competitive and responsive to changes.

6. The Importance of Strategic Partnerships: Building a strong team with complementary skills and with trust as core, is essential for growth. Strategic partnerships, both within the company (e.g., co-founders and key hires) and externally (e.g., technology partners like OpenAI), are fundamental to driving innovation and scaling the business.

7. Environmental Impact: The digitisation of contracts contributes to environmental sustainability by significantly reducing paper usage. As more organisations transition to digital contract management, the cumulative impact on paper conservation becomes increasingly substantial.

About Juro 

Juro is a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform designed to make legal contracts frictionless, collaborative, and accessible, Juro streamlines the entire contract process, from inception to renewal, within a single browser-native environment. 

One of Juro's standout features is its 'AI Assistant' software. This tool leverages generative AI to assist with various stages of contract management, including drafting, summarisation, redlining, and reviews. By integrating AI, Juro enables users to handle contracts faster and more accurately, reducing the administrative burden and allowing legal teams to focus on more strategic tasks. The AI Assistant can draft addendums, retrieve data, and provide insights, making contract management significantly more efficient.

Juro also emphasises ease of use and integration with existing systems. The platform is designed to be intuitive, ensuring that even users without a legal background can navigate and manage contracts effectively. It integrates seamlessly with other software, enhancing user experience and ensuring that all contract-related activities can be handled within one cohesive system.

About ProcureTechSTARS  

ProcureTechSTARS are the digital Procurement CEOs and Founders who are transforming Procurement and the enterprise.   
 
In an open conversation with these leaders, Lance Younger discusses the highs and lows of building the future, the challenges they’ve faced, their perspective on the latest developments, and what motivates them.