5 Legal design: Building an Exceptional Customer Experience

Richard Mabey, Juro, legal design - process, products, user experience; venture capital; AI in the legal sector, machine learning.

Stephen Turner, the host of Lawyers of Tomorrow, interviews Richard Mabey, the co-founder and CEO of Juro, the award-winning, end-to-end contracts management platform about the importance of legal design within the legal industry.

Richard gives encouragement to legal entrepreneurs who wish to take the plunge and design, build and then finance the commercial development of their own solutions to customer or stakeholder pain points. Stephen and Richard discuss when to seek venture capital support and what venture capitalists are really looking for, including the difference between the U.S. and the European approaches. Richard underlines the importance of the three Ts - “team, technology and traction.”

Richard explains that legal design is “a process where you look at what you are doing and then iterate to a better set of solutions”. Legal design affects all areas of a legal business, including operational organisation, communications and the way the business connects with and serves customers or important ‘internal’ stakeholders such as human resources, sales teams and employees or partners.

Richard talks through some real-world examples of successful legal design and gives practical advice on implementing legal design and points to design tools that listeners can use in their businesses. One example of a useful tool that lawyers can use when designing the most efficient way to organise their projects is a Kanban board - a tool that shows work as a set of tasks moving along streams of workflow. Both Richard and Stephen use Kanban boards in their businesses and they discussed the key benefits and how using this simple and easy-to-use tool can have a profound effect on operational efficiency, productivity and prioritisation.

Richard explains how Juro has been designed to remove friction from the process of managing contracts by removing the inefficiency and error-prone system of ‘email tennis’ and ‘red lines’, where endless drafts of contracts are sent back-and-forth between the parties by email. Juro also utilises machine learning to provide historical insights into how its customers contracts have previously been negotiated, for example, by identifying the most commonly negotiated clauses – which is incredibly useful data for a business to have to hand. A business may have tens of thousands of contracts and, using Juro, they are all searchable for the powerful insights that lie within.

Richard and Stephen then discuss how artificial intelligence has moved beyond the theoretical and is now at work in the legal sector in the form of successful technological solutions. However, you’ll not find any ‘AI hype’ on this podcast! Richard explains exactly what 'machine learning' AI is and how the legal sector is leveraging machine learning in powerful software tools that convert unstructured data into structured data.

Finally, Richard and Stephen discuss how legal education can evolve to encompass the study of legal design, emotional intelligence and the harnessing of innovation and technology to provide better solutions to customer and stakeholder problems.