Richard Mabey on how legaltech is enabling lawyers to do higher value impactful work

Co-founder and CEO of Juro Richard Mabey discusses the importance of developing and iterating product features as well as the driving factors for behavioural change in the legal sector.

Richard Mabey is co-founder, CEO at Juro - the all-in-one contract automation platform. 

Richard trained as a corporate lawyer with Freshfields before an MBA at INSEAD and a product role at LegalZoom. 

He's a Fellow of the RSA, an alum of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar and a Non-Executive Director of Bright Blue.

In this Transaction Management episode of Shieldcast, Richard and Geoff discuss:  

• Why engaging with customers is so important for continuous product improvement
• The art and science of developing a pricing strategy 
• How to find a content niche, deliver engaging pieces and build a community
• Why there is a clear distinction between designing a product for in-house versus private practice lawyers, and whether this is changing
• What is driving behavioural change and innovation in the legal sector

Listen to this Transaction Management edition of Shieldcast to find out more!

You can learn more about Juro and the services they provide on their website: www.juro.com

Richard contributed to our recent Transaction Management eBook. You can read his insights on how document formats will change in the future by downloading the book here. 

Find other episodes in the series on our website: Shieldcast library

Podcast brought to you by Shieldpay - learn more: shieldpay.com

Transcript

Geoff: On today's show, we welcome Richard Mabey, a former transactional lawyer, and now co-founder and CEO of Juro. Welcome Richard. 

Richard: Thank you for having me. 

Geoff: Richard started life as an M&A lawyer at Freshfields. He left to attend the prestigious business school INSEAD and completed his MBA then worked arguably for one of the leading tech companies at the time or legal tech companies, Legal Zoo, and co-founded Juro the all-in-one contract automation platform, which I'm pleased to say Shieldpay is a delighted customer. 

I'm very pleased to have you on the show today. And I really look forward to talking to you more officially about the business of Juro and more about your ideas and your thoughts around transaction management, that life cycle, contract management, and really your perspectives on where you think we will be in time.

But to begin with, please could you give us the elevator pitch of Juro and where it all came from? 

Richard: Awesome. Yeah, well, I'm very happy to be here. 

I was a transactional lawyer, so my founder story is a relatively standard one in that I've spent my entire life working on contracts in one way or another. I realised that there was a problem and I set out to build a solution.  For me, the primary problem felt like spending four hours a day in Microsoft Word navigating red lines. This didn't feel like the best use of my time. It felt inefficient. It felt like I was bogged down in a low value process work as opposed to the high value complex problem solving that I wanted to be doing.

At Juro, we have this opinion that the root cause of this issue is actually the file type itself. So, using static desktop technology invented in 1983, as MS Word is, you're using a technology which is desktop based, unstructured, and fundamentally it was never designed for legal contracts.

So, when we set out to build Juro, we found that in-house legal teams were processing generally high volumes of contracts, sometimes high complexity, sometimes low complexity, but universally in the language of Microsoft Word. And we found a universe of companies like Shieldpay, who were looking for a more collaborative documentation format.

We're now five years into the journey and we've gone away from being purely an in browser native editor for contracts to being an all-in-one contract automation platform. So that means we cover the process of generating, approving, electronically signing, tracking contracts, querying your data, and ultimately renewing them. And increasingly we're used as a system of record for legal data by in-house legal teams. 

Geoff: Oh, it's a, what a journey through all of those stages and fascinating development of the product. One of the things that I find that you do so well is your continuous improvements of the product. You’ve developed the product so much over these years, where does that come from? From your in-house teams internally, or where did you get inspiration for those changes? 

Richard: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think honestly, Pavel and I (Pavel is my co-founder), we are fairly obsessive people, so we're very into product design. We're very, very interested in building incredibly and deceptively simple products, which is of course much harder than building complex products. And it takes, I think just a certain mindset of obsession to keep iterating. 

Where does it come from? Well, I mean, we spend an awful lot of time talking to customers and we get the whole team to do that. So, engineers talk to customers, of course our customer success team talks to customers, salespeople, designers. We spend a lot of time trying to be absolutely clear on what problems our prospects and customers are trying to solve. So, what exactly is it with this Microsoft Word document that's troubling you? Is it that you have to save versions on your desktop? Is it you have to run red lines manually? Is it that you get annoyed by the functionality of tracked changes? These are all radically different problems and have radically different solutions. 

Once you're clear on the problem, and you validated that, I think that's where everything becomes a little bit easier. For us, we still consider ourselves early in the roadmap, even though we're a feature rich product, and iterating, I think, is just part of the Juro DNA now.

Geoff: And so how far from that initial, conceptual MVP that you had in your head are you at? And there must be so much more to come, but that first MVP, you know strip back all of that information to that first initial use case, is it where you expected it to have gone in this timeframe, or less or more? 

Richard: I guess every business pivots a little bit, sometimes the pivots are gentle, sometimes the pivots are very severe. We got fairly lucky in that our early customers are generally speaking people at tech businesses, like Shieldpay. So really early customers like, you know, Deliveroo and Babylon Health, we were led by them, right? We went to see these general councils and they said, we have a business critical bottleneck in contract workflow that is causing essentially real problems internally and we want to solve it. And we had the pilot customers when we had built basically nothing. We followed that and we developed real expertise in an absurdly narrow customer segment, which was two-sided marketplaces with one B2B side processing more than 20 contracts per month. This is a ridiculously narrow segmentation. We just became great at it. And we didn't know anything about building in contract products for anyone else. So that, that I think helped us to keep super, super focused. 

I think probably the changes to our product, not being in terms of the customer segment or the value we deliver, but actually in the breadth of the products. So, we've built now quite a lot of stuff - things like native e-signature is actually kind of product in itself. Things like being able to query and interrogate contracts from a contract management standpoint is a product in itself. The value proposition of being all-in-one, which is sort of undeniable value - you don't have to buy five tools, you can have one and there's various data advantages to that, also requires a hell of a lot of bills. And so, yes, we absolutely made mistakes that we had to iterate, we had to scrap. But it was never a severe pivot away from the kind of the core mission of what we were doing.

Geoff: That's really interesting. What you're describing is that ‘one tool rules them all’ kind of mentality, which I think is increasingly a requirement for any company trying to be a tech company, right. It's that you have to provide that platform kind of piece. 

You start with this problem that you're solving, then inevitably you then creep into lots of other areas.  But what's interesting on that side is how do you…if you're trying to replace Microsoft Word, that's on a license basis, you pay your licenses and et cetera, but that's the kind of product you get, you know? You've added so many features.  How do you go through that pricing arrangement with your clients and go through those iterations with it? 

Richard: I mean, I break that into two pieces. So I guess, one is what we're building is comparatively small in comparison to Microsoft Word. So, since it was invented in 1983, probably several billion dollars of spend for almost 40 years of dev. So, we'll will never match that tool feed feature. I think our advantage is that we are designed specifically for contracts and so that gives us a smaller subset of features from the core Word functionality that we need, some new features that Word doesn't have, and then better experience as part of that feature set for the rest. 

So, pricing. Our strategy is to become incrementally less wrong. I think definitely our early pricing bets were kind of going up to GCs and saying, how much would you be willing to pay for this? And this was probably just a little bit lower than, than they actually were. But, we experimented with different things, usage, thresholds, and you know, we currently have a per seat, transparent model which works kind of okay.

But again, we always price based on the value we thought we'd deliver. So in the early days, okay, well, if you can spend 75% less time on these manual contract tasks, which are eating around half of your team's tasks, your team's time, and if you can close a number of days faster in the sales cycle, what would be the value of that?

And once we assess the value, and it would give healthy return on investment. But you know, it's part art, part science. I'm sure you've been through it and you never get to perfection on it. But we hope we're getting incrementally less wrong every day. 

Geoff: It is an art more than anything else.  But it is interesting, your ability to measure tangible successes of your clients. And I think that's where you want to be considered as a value-add solution and to grow with your clients, which I think you guys do very well. And I think some of the things that you contribute, not just to your clients, but to the wider ecosystem are pretty great from your end. I love your public privacy notice, I think that's a really nice feature. 

It'd be great for the listeners to hear a little bit about that, and more generally about your approach to content, which I think is pretty unique. And it would be interesting to hear how that develops and all of those aspects. 

Richard: Yeah. I mean, the privacy notice was about as much fun as you can have with legal contracts. I remember in 2018, I'd done some work with LegalZoom on templates and become quite interested in this sort of fairly fundamental question of what actually needs to go into this weird document that has all the legal words? What's the essence of the contract and what are the vital things and what is the sort of lawyerly fluff that sometimes just gets added? I think one of the interesting things for lawyers is that you're actually making design decisions all the time in these contracts. So, it might be something really basic, like, do the definitions go up front or do they go on the end of the document? Do they go in line?  If you have complex information, maybe you go really like aggressive and put it in a table, but the table is like a classic design thing. And so I remember when I was working at Freshfields, I think about this all the time, you had this horrendously complex document, you're thinking, well, where's the information going to go? And that's the same really as information design, it's just, you know, at least back then I was doing it badly.

So, 2018 came along and GDPR came in and like every other SaaS business we started researching what are we actually going to have to do to comply? It seemed kind of scary. And one of the things that really caught my eye was there was a provision in recital 60, and well done to anyone for getting that far, but in recital 60 it talked about using clean design principles for having a privacy notice that was, I think, intelligible, plain English, accessible and transparent - something like this. And I remember reading that and thinking, I don't know of a single privacy notice in the world that would actually fulfil that now legal requirement. 

So, we got introduced to a legal information designer called Stefania Passera who is really the kind of world leader in this. And she and I basically collaborated to design a privacy notice that you could actually read - this was our goal. We did that by having a kind of one-page summary modal (you can see it at juro.com) and then a layered privacy notice where you had some clickable elements, some icons, some use of tables. And we put this thing out there and, you know, the internet went crazy.  For something that is a document that no one ever reads, I think we were having thousands of retweets of this thing, from, you know, GitHub and Google and all this kind of stuff. We started getting 20,000 views of our privacy notice and I was getting questions from the team on why we've got this traffic spike, are we under attack? And it was actually just people interested in it. 

So, you find these niches which no one else lives in and no one else is talking about, you get a bit interested and you just try stuff out and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And now with the privacy notice, we had so many people copy it that we actually decided to open-source it a few months ago. So you can get it on GitHub and you can just use it on or web flow implement a similar pattern in your website. 

So yeah, lots of projects like that. I mean, on other stuff, like our approach was generally random stuff that I knew about, some stuff I didn't really know about, but like read a lot about, and it just worked out after a while. There was like an audience, some kind of audience, someone, anyone to read this stuff.

I mean, Tom, who we hired just over three years ago to run our content operation is pretty exceptional when it comes to this stuff as well. So, we now have built a team around that and, you know, 25,000 subscribers or something, reading this content which is all about scaling legal process. It's pretty niche. It involves, I think, just trying stuff out, being a little bit bold. And now we have a dedicated community as well, our customers and some prospects as well of in-house legal counsel. I think we have 3 or 400 in the Slack group, who kind of consume that content as well.

So, it's been a bit of a journey there and yeah, it took some time, but it’s kind of fun. 

Geoff: Yeah, it is really fun. How'd you, because you guys are predominantly international, I assume, based on the fact that your contracts can be in whatever language but, have you got people using it in different languages and internationally? How does that and how has that been working? 

Richard: Yeah, that's one of the great things in that we're not jurisdictionally limited. So, we don't sort of supply people with legal contracts, they put their contracts into the platform and then have this way to agree them really fast and manage them. I think we're live in about 90 countries now. The editor, which is a big kind of part of our product, it can now accommodate, I think, Hebrew, Japanese characters as well and it's being used in Israel, in Japan, Kazakhstan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all over the world really. 

And you know, it turns out everyone's got the same problem. We may live in different countries, but contracts still suck, and people look for solutions. 

Geoff: Very true, contracts do suck. So, your product is predominantly for in-house legal teams, but do you see it moving at all to being used or what's the interaction with law firms and lawyers? Are lawyers, private practice lawyers, looking to adopt Juro in some way? What's been your experience on that?

Richard: I mean, yes, is the short answer. We're just starting to see quite a bit of a pull from law firms and we have a policy against serving them. I mean, no offense to law firms listening, but we've had this policy because we reckon at one point in time we can only really be great at one thing. We started out with in-house lawyers and they just have a completely different life to people in firms. 

In the case of contracts, in-house tend to deal with a higher volume of contracts, so you're feeling this pain of repetitive contract work quite a bit. Whereas if you're in a firm, you might deal with a handful of really complex contracts, maybe you're drafting like an NSPA or whatever it may be, and your pain points are a bit different, as a generalisation.

The thing we are starting to see, which is interesting, is people are starting to add their own external counsel into Juro - so they are sort of breaking the rules. And they're doing that by saying, well, look external law firm actually with the client and we operate now in Juro, so we need you to come in and mock-up contracts when we want you to in Juro. That's really interesting. That's something which we haven't gained or engineered it's happened organically. 

I think this is a bit of an example of behavioural change happening in the market - I think especially for law firms. My own hypothesis is that the firms will be driven by the clients, or they should be driven by the clients. And if the clients want them to work in a certain way, they should. We have tons of prospects who come to us and say, look, the whole business operates in Google Docs. We know Google Docs doesn't really work for contracts, not really, so we spend all of our time basically exporting from Google Docs into Word, emailing over to the law firm, getting the law firm to do this stuff cause they're like the Word people, and then we bring it back and we import it back into Google Docs because that's how the business works. 

We try and say, well, you know how the business works is quite important. So, if you're an in-house lawyer enabling the business, it's probably a primary part of your role. And if you're an external lawyer in a law firm, enabling the people who are enabling the business is also important. There's that sort of value chain. Right? And if the value chain is that effectively, you're going between different file formats to make life more convenient to you, you're probably doing something wrong as an external advisor. It's a very interesting dynamic and we're kind of early in this, and no one really knows where it's going to go. But definitely law firms are experiencing that change. 

I remember, you must've had the same thing, but in private practice, I remember there being a bank of 30 documents specialists whose sole role was to fix red lights. Well primary role was to fix red lights because it would of course break because Word is incredibly complex - we had all these macros and stuff. Now, that doesn't really seem to be a huge function in law firms. The question I have and I'm sure you have as an entrepreneur is, well, what's going to be the case in 10 years’ time or 20 years’ time? Is everyone going to be doing the same thing or will things change? 

Geoff: I think that's a really interesting one, particularly around the will Word survive this revolution? Because contract management or contract tools have been here for a while. Right? So, they've existed for 20, 30 years in some form or other. Yours is one iteration of that and highly specialized in one thing with great features. But, we're not yet at a point where, as you highlighted, an SPA is going to be negotiated on a contract management platform. 

Well, one, is there, from an entrepreneur's point of view, enough market to be able to develop something that deals with that complexity of a document? That is so much better than Word, that will be adopted by Word? One. Or, will someone like yourselves feel like there's enough market to then start looking at that?

And then you've got another side. You've got the law firms that are going well, we charge huge amounts of money on an hourly basis to be the expert on drafting these contracts and these precedents that we've developed. I don't know where the battle is, if it is even a battle, or are we just playing completely different games?

Richard: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think these things are converging. So, you know, we started with high volume, low complexity, low negotiation documents – so, employment contract, sales contracts, et cetera. The thing they have in common is that the negotiations relatively lightweight, usually. In a low value sales contract, maybe someone's going to strike out the indemnity clause, but that's going to be it. You're not going to have 10 parties and three month negotiation. That particular use case lent itself very well to software like Juro.  

I think as our product has developed and we've started to build features like import from Word, so you can basically convert a Word document into native Juro editor in browser, you can export, you can reconcile documents - so Juro now will say you've uploaded a document that this looks like feed two of that document, do you maybe want to upload it on the same record? These things are all technically quite hard to do and it's very incremental. But I think there's a huge gap still to actually people negotiating SPAs. 

Why I think ultimately that will change, and I think it's a question of when as opposed to if, is that actually the proprietary knowledge that law firms had, at least when I was a private practice lawyer, seemed to be a series of footnotes in MS Word documents. Right. So it seemed to say, okay, well, you know, you've got this clause, and indemnity is common in a private equity transaction or something like this. Right. And we know this because we had the, in a couple of anecdotal examples, we do private equity a lot. So this is like our knowledge, right? I think lawyers are going to need to become much more data-driven than that if the clients are going to pay. 

So I would definitely pay for the insight that said in 76% of the transactions we've acted on within the band of mid-market private equity funds based in the UK, this is common. Yes, please, I pay money for that insight. So I think moving away from anecdotal, unstructured, text-based stuff, which is often I think mislabelled as proprietary, I'm not sure it really is proprietary, to actually being data-driven. That is a change that I think the clients will want, and they'll want to because it's better insight and  better insight is very valuable, right? So there's high willingness to pay for that. 

And I think consequently, you know, that the top end lawyers are going to earn like a ton more money because there's going to be concentration of knowledge there. And ultimately they'll want better tools. They'll just want better tooling because it's really hard to get loads of insight if you're just messing around in paper all day, right. It's just, it just doesn't work like that. 

Geoff: I think it's it's you're you make a very good point there. It's like the clients will expect it, you know, ultimately, but you'll be able to give that data-driven analysis.  Often you'll get asked that what is market, but like, well market or not, you know, small segments of the PE deals that we're currently doing is that this is the right clause. But why, or why is it done like this? Why are the mechanics of the transaction done in this particular way? You know, going through the closing of any type of deals, well, why does the document have to be structured like this? Is that the way that they are all structured? Well, that's the precedent that we've had for 10 years that we've been working on. We haven't really been thinking about how that could change or how it could be done differently. 

So I think it is it's going to be, it's going to be fascinating how that goes. And I think lawyers are increasingly going to need to embrace that, adapt that technological process and structuring of that data because what Word isn't necessarily the best thing at is ingesting all of that data that's coming out of it. All of that insight won't come from running red lights one another. 

Richard: And you know, it's very interesting, I think, having now worked with basically tech GCs, so GCs working in very forward looking, very fast paced environments for five years, they operate in a way that I think some law firms would find surprising. 

If you take the example of Juro, if a lawyer is telling me some insight, which is based on something that they feel to be the case because they saw a couple of transactions last month, I would say, I'm not interested in your recency bias. I want data because otherwise I'm not going to pay. And I think this is a big thing. It comes into all kinds of things, education of lawyers as well, right. That being able to use data. So if I, you know, I ask a question of our Head of Demand Generation, he's going to come back to me with supporting data. And if he doesn't, I'm not going to listen to him because I know it will be a guess and we can't do guesses in 2021. If an external law firm comes to me with a guess and charges me by the hour for the guess, again, I'm not going to be super happy as the client. So, I think that this behavioural shift is going to be super interesting. 

The great thing, and the real positive of this is law firms are stuffed full of clever people, right? Clever people who want to do high value work. So it's not that the lawyers don't want to change. I'd actually think the good lawyers really do want to change. They don't want to be doing process work. They want to have better enablement and tooling, and they want to make the right decisions. I think this is ultimately what will drive the innovation in the law firm market.

Geoff: I think it's a very well, very well put. So we talked a lot about this, the barren land or where we're going to go. There's going to be better tooling for lawyers, and it's going to be data-driven and we're all going to be able to have perfect insight into what's going on. Are there any bits that we've missed? You know, we have contracts, we have AI, we have process automation, we have no code tools, we have your platform, we have obviously Shieldpay for the completion of things, we have e-signing and et cetera. What are your views on some of the areas that still haven't been looked at from a tech point of view?

Richard: Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a big question. I think there's two, I think one is living on your desktop anyway, which is Microsoft Excel. I think lawyers, I mean, I was awful at Excel so I made myself not awful. But just being able to use basic, you know, can you do a V look up? Do you hear the word V look up and you're a lawyer and you're like, what?  That was me like five years ago. Now, it would be embarrassing to my team if I couldn't actually use Excel. So, I think just becoming numerate and speaking the language of numbers. 

Definitely our in-house clients are constantly reporting on are they meeting that SLA on contract turnaround times? What's the internal net promoter score of the legal team? This is what the bleeding edge and the betas are doing. I think lawyers need to become more numerate in order to go and speak that language.

And the second, which I'm just an obsessive of list, is checklists. And again, like no technology required, but are we using basic process checklists like pilots do, like doctors do, like engineers do, like the people launching the space shuttle do, in order to reduce risk. And I'm not convinced that the legal profession as a whole is embracing these ways of working.

I think there's like a lot of stuff, which isn't really tech. It's not AI, it's not blockchain, it's not all this stuff. It's actually much more to do with process and human behaviour. And I think there's amazing stuff happening. I mean, the whole movement of legal operations, so people like Mario Carol from Google now driving this, is I think such a hugely positive thing. We are freeing lawyers from the shackles of uncertainty and risk and worry and low value work and helping them to do high value impactful work. And that can only really be a good thing. 

Geoff: So on that basis, and I think I've formed a slightly different view now on what my private practice life would have been had I stayed in private practice. Now that you know that five years on and you've helped contribute to some of these developments and changes that have happened, do you think, armed with that potentially a greater appetite of law firms to change, would you have left private practice at the time that you did?

Richard: It's a really good question. I mean, I love Freshfields. I had a really, really good time there. I was lucky to have the training. I thought the people were fantastic. I still think that people are fantastic. Would I have left? 

So I think there's two uncertainties. Like one is that I had literally no idea what would happen to the legal profession. So I think when I left Freshfields, which was in, I don't know, 2014, something like that, this was not a thing. There was no such thing as lawtech, legaltech, tech. It was just Word, Outlook, and that was the end of it. So I didn't know that would happen. Had I known, I think I would have really loved a career as an in-house lawyer.  I would have loved to be a GC, to be a legal ops professional. I think it's fascinating and really, really interesting and impactful work. So I couldn't rule that out, but it didn't seem like a viable path at the time. 

And, the second is that I'm not sure I was massively cut out to be a lawyer. I don't know how you feel about this now as an entrepreneur, I think there's a certain risk appetite I had. I'm very interested in being a generalist, covering a broad range of things. So I'm not sure I would have been an awesome firm lawyer. Maybe in hindsight it was for the best, both for me and for the firm.

Geoff: I think it's one that I share as well. The world that I was looking at at the time was bleak, actually, for an associate who was interested in tech. But it's now a very, very different world. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of these firms going forward. 

One question I like to ask people right at the end of our discussion is what's been the most defining moment or piece of your career to date? What's got you to where you are today, five years into Juro and everything being a wonderful success? What do you think was the formative experience that led you here? 

Richard: Yeah, it's a really good one. One thing that definitely has driven me in Juro is really having experienced the pain point myself. I think, as an entrepreneur it takes a certain amount of confidence. If you're like me as a medium introvert extrovert with a certain level of risk aversion, there are certain scary things about ditching your career. I mean, my mother is still asking when I'm going to go back to the law firm.

So, there's a certain amount of pressure. But I think one thing that gives you amazing confidence is if you yourself have personally experienced horrendous pain at the hands of a business process, of one kind or another, for me it was contracts and high volume contracts, it gives you a lot of confidence because you know that there's at least one human being who could really benefit from the mission. And if you can find two or three, then you know, you might have a viable business. So, I think that was a big one. 

Then I remember one particular project I worked on a private equity transaction, negotiating 50 NDAs with a number of bidders in sort of five days. If you've been a lawyer you'll know that's the main way you sort of wonder where you saved the version, you'll sometimes do it on your desktop or you do it in like SharePoint and you realize you've got like 300 files and then there's sort of horrendous risks that you're going to choose the wrong one. And that nightmare pain, I think, has really driven what we've built as Juro. Probably not a defining moment in a good way, more defining moments in terms of that experiencing a problem. 

Geoff: I'm getting chills from the situation you just described that I have experienced in the past as well. 

Thank you so much for your time today. It's been a real pleasure. I think we've covered a lot of really good ground on, not just hearing more about Juro and where you all came from and what drives it, but also your thoughts on where we're going to go and the blend that we're going to see, or how law firms and legaltech companies are kind of going to be one in the same, really, I think is the output of that in the fullness of time, but all driven ultimately by the desire of pleasing your customers, then the customers being the most centric part of it all. And I think that's an element that I think is worth everyone continuing to bear in mind and something that we definitely keep in the forefront of our mind is who our customers are and what do they actually want and are we solving their problem.

So thank you for very enjoyable evening. Look forward to speaking to you again very soon. Thank you. 

Richard: Thank you. Nice talking to you.