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Juro: Artificial contract intelligence

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: March 10, 2017

As much as I resist, the whole artificial intelligence thing is creeping into legal software. Or more like rushing into it headlong.

The newest entry into AI applied to the law office, or law office applied AI, or, I dunno, is the British startup Juro (https://www.juro.io/landing), which is aiming to “turbocharge” the act of negotiating, writing, executing and managing a contract.

This kind of approach is a part of a growing list of apps that, while potentially useful to attorneys, can also act as a way for potential clients to avoid the need for an attorney. The sort of thing the legal community probably needs to keep an eye on, ya know?

The company has yet to set up shop in the U.S., but that is only a matter of time.

“Create, sign & track beautiful contracts in a matter of seconds” is the language that greets visitors to the company’s website. Juro is an end-to-end contract negotiation and management tool.

The two founders of Juro, which has just received $750,000 in seed money, met at business school. Both were frustrated by the “clunky and time consuming process around legal contracts,” according to one of the founders, Richard Mabey, and eventually took up the task of applying AI machine learning principles to that task. Mabey became an M&A attorney who also worked for Legal Zoom before starting Juro.

Juro’s software can create contracts in “seconds,” interfacing with tools like Salesforce and Slack to negotiate and sign contracts in their browsers, storing the contracts in a searchable dashboard, and data basing all company contracts for future reference in negotiations.

All team members, including counsel, can communicate at all times during contract negotiations through their existing CRM, all negotiations are tracked and analyzed in real time, an agreement is reached, the contract is electronically signed, and voila! Quicker, cheaper, more transparent, more reliable.

Juro doesn’t seem to be seeking law firms to sell into. Instead, they are seeking high-volume business-to-business companies for their program.

Watch out, folks. The learning machines are coming to eat you up.

Scared? You should be. Check out a detailed interview with Mabey here: https://artificiallawyer.com/2017/01/20/the-juro-story-legal-contracts-may-never-be-the-same-again.


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