A sneak preview of our contracts workflow
It’s been a busy time for the team at Juro. We have been overwhelmed by the response to our beta and are starting to onboard the first few customers from our waiting list.
For those still waiting, we thought we would put together a few screenshots of what you can expect from our free product. We would love to hear any feedback you have, and will be with you for onboarding as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!
A word on our mission
Juro was born from a frustration with the clunky, time-intensive process that goes around legal contracts. Contracts are expensive to create, time-consuming to sign and hard to manage. We wanted to design a legal user experience that would keep the robustness of contracts but make the process both frictionless for our customers and delightful for the valued stakeholders on the other side.
So, without further ado, here is what we have built. Below are the 5 main steps in the Juro user journey…
Step 1: Select your contract
The first step is to choose whether you want to use our highly automated contracts or upload your own. Our own templates are drafted by ex Magic Circle lawyers, designed by technologists and programmed through legal algorithms. In non tech speak, what this means is that contracts can be heavily customised through Q&A, rather than living in the Microsoft Word world of risk and pain.
We give the option of uploading your own template because (some of us are former lawyers) we acknowledge that sometimes a contract is so bespoke to a particular business that you really need to get a lawyer involved to draft it. We are not replacing human judgement, just taking the pain out of the process. If you go down this route, you can still take advantage of Juro’s free field merging, e-signing and contract management tools. Phew.
Step 2: Define your contract parameters
If you decide to use one of Juro’s own contracts (the above is an NDA) — and we suggest that you do — we take you through a short series of questions before creating the document. If you get stuck, simply click ‘help’ to get tips and tricks from Juro on how best to customise the contract. Simple.
The purpose of the Q&A is to enable Juro to understand your legal needs and deliver a truly customised result. We are also aiming to save you time. One way we are achieving this is by integrating the UK Companies House API — this helps us get your legal company name, registered address and company number and instantly insert it into the contract.
Geek alert: our UI here is conversational and enabled by natural language processing, which means that you can create a contract through our web app but also on mobile or (coming soon) through platforms like Slack, Salesforce and Xero. We will be releasing our external API for developers shortly — details to follow.
Step 3: Review your contract
Once you have completed the Q&A, Juro will magically produce a fully customised contract for you to review. The contract is designed with the end user in mind (rather than the lawyer…), so it is written in plain English and eliminates unnecessary drafting. The contract has a summary sheet on page one so you can see key terms at a glance and you can even upload company logos to personalise the contract and help to make it more engaging for your the other side.
If you need to edit the contract here (e.g. if there is a very specific point you need to include), you can do this in seconds with Medium-style editing tools. Because we are integrated with GoogleDrive and Dropbox, you can also choose to keep your contracts in your own storage providers as well as in Juro’s secure servers. Everything is tracked in the workflow in the bottom left corner, so you never lose track of where you are.
Step 4: Sign your contract
When you are ready, you can sign the contract using our legally binding (and free!) signing tool. Our signing process is compliant with European e-signing legislation, and can be achieved in just a few clicks. Either draw your signature in the browser (or on mobile) or take a photo of a signature on paper and we will render it automatically.
Geek alert: Our e-signing tool produces a digital footprint of the document and all activity on it, which is turned into a cryptographic hash. The purpose of this is to enable a rock-solid audit trail that can be checked by our users to ensure the immutability of the document signed and the legality of the signing process.
Once you have signed, you can then send off the contract to the other side for them to sign. They will get an email notification and can sign in their browser. They do not need to be a Juro member to sign the contract, although we would love them to be… Once they’ve signed, that’s it.
You have closed a sale, taken on a new hire, agreed terms with a freelancer or raised money! The contract is now legally binding and you can get on with the real work at hand.
Step 5: View status of the contract
Once you have sent the contract off to the other party to be signed, you can access the contract from your Juro dashboard and check its status. Because we have collected your contract data, we can do some pretty interesting stuff. We will remind you when your key sales contract is about to expire, we will tell you about your risk exposure and we can integrate with CRM and accounting providers to save you time on data entry.
Integration, in fact, sits at the heart of Juro. Our first integration is with Slack, where we notify you as soon as your counterparties have signed and when there is a key deadline coming up. It is this integrated, frictionless approach with a focus on designing a better experience for the legal customer that drives everything we do at Juro.
Next steps
We are really excited to have you onboard, as we continue our journey to shake up contracts. If you have not yet signed up to Juro, you can join our waiting list by clicking here. In the meantime, we would love you to join our customer Slack group to chat with us and access the Juro legal forum. Any feedback is always welcome!
Love,
The Juro Team
