Pavel Kovalevich

Building Juro in 2018: or why six people moved countries to help make legal more human

News
July 1, 2019

Making legal more human is a seismic shift that we’re serious about driving forward over the years to come. Making six people move to another country is a much more immediate change - but as we gathered pace in 2018, Juro tripled in size, and we found a group of amazing people ready to cross continents for our customers.

When I first met the team I was amazed by their ideas and their professionalism. Juro is a chance for me to work on something that I hope is changing the world
- Anton Korochinskiy, Developer; moved from Amsterdam to Riga

Doubling down on data

A key goal for 2018 was to make good on the promise that data has been making to the legal sector for years, if not decades. We built a dedicated team to focus on machine learning: our lead data scientist, Matt Upson, and our machine learning engineer, Aleksej Ermolaev, have been busy exploring the dividends that a data focus can bring to our customer. Matt and Aleksej have been building machine learning models that will allow any user of Juro to automatically recognise key contract data. This sprinkle of machine learning magic will dramatically reduce the amount of time users need to spend on proofreading and marking up contracts, letting them focus on high-value tasks instead, without sacrificing certainty in their legal documents. Look out for it in early 2019.

It's a great experience to work in an international team, and there are interesting and challenging tasks in machine learning
- Aleksej Ermolaev, Machine learning engineer; moved from Moscow to Riga

Design-first - always

Richard and I founded Juro with a mission to make legal more human, and that means never deviating from design as a guiding principle. Too many legacy tools are far too difficult to use, squandering any chance of making users’ lives easier by burying functionality in clunky interfaces. Bringing in our product designer, Ilya Bovkunov, was a huge step forward in our mission to change that landscape.

I really believe in the product, and that we are truly doing something different. We actually care about customer feedback, which a lot of companies say, but don't really mean or action
- Emily Zukauskas, Sales manager; moved from Montreal to London

Over the course of 2018 we worked to redesign the whole product, bringing every interaction together into one consistent look and feel. During the course of Juro’s development, we naturally collected various artefacts, quirks and nuances that we felt interrupted the frictionless process our customers deserve. To fix this we streamlined our user experience, focusing on key business cases and integrating customer feedback. The adoption rates of Juro are exceptional within legal tech, and we’ll never compromise on making our solution intuitive and easy to use.

Start-ups are always about hard work, so either believe in founders and their decisions or don’t work in the company. In this case, it’s superb
- Ilya Bovkunov, Product designer; moved from Moscow to Riga

Killer features

Something that’s always guaranteed to bring the whole company together - from product developers through to sales, marketing and of course customer success - is when we launch a feature that we know our customers are dying to use. In that regard we hit some major milestones on the product roadmap this year:

Approvals

Many of our customers are growing quickly, with complex workflows driving their businesses forward; but getting a robust audit trail of a contract that’s simple to use makes their lives a lot easier. Getting our approvals workflow into the product helped to remove friction from so much of the contract lifecycle.

Versions and history

Transparency is a core principle at Juro (to see just how core it is, check out our privacy policy). Offering our users that same transparency over the history of their documents is non-negotiable, so it was great to roll out our versioning functionality. Users can navigate the history of how and when changes were made, and by whom; they can even control which users have visibility of which changes.

Next-level API

In 2018 we rolled out full API access to all the core functionality of Juro. This meant we could increase the custom integrations our clients can use, but it also allowed us to integrate with essential tools like Salesforce to manage contracts. We also integrated with Greenhouse, Slack, GDrive and Companies House to make sure your contracts live where you do.

Juro gives me the opportunity to work in an exciting sector that combines two fields I'm most interested in: legal, and innovation through technology. And who wouldn't want to move to London, the European hub of innovation for all things LegalTech?
- Josephine Hanschke, Customer success associate; moved from Berlin to London

2019 and beyond

Our open product roadmap gives you a long view of where Juro is headed; but there are specific new features we’re beyond excited to add to the platform in the months to come. Get ready for:

  • Granular control of the approval and signing flow: just as you can manage the sequence of viewing and signing of documents in the physical world, you’ll be able to control your digital contracts with the same granular detail in Juro.
  • Augment your negotiation flow with redlining: this will make it easy to discuss, accept and reject comments on your contracts as you negotiate and collaborate on them.
  • Enhanced collaboration: mention and tag team members by names as you work on documents together in Juro.
  • Instant history: easily view the full, granular detail of everything that’s happened to your contracts and templates.
  • Flexible signatories and signatures: because signatures don’t always happen in the same place, so you’ll be able to drop signatures anywhere in the document, and synchronise them across the contract or template.

Sign up to our newsletter in the footer for updates, and stay tuned to our product roadmap to see real-time progress as our features move from planning to reality.

I feel so lucky to be part of such a great team and leaving my beloved Scotland for Juro was definitely the right choice
- Adrienne Murphy, Team assistant; moved from Glasgow to London

Welcoming new employees to Juro has been a pleasure that’s only set to increase next year, but more importantly, it’s been thrilling to welcome so many new customers that share our vision of more human legal processes, where contracts are necessary - but they don’t have to be evil. We look forward to meeting more of you at our events in 2019 (with CLOC London first in January - say hello if you’re attending). We don’t know how many people will cross oceans to help with our mission next year, but we know we’ll move mountains to make sure we achieve it. Have a Happy New Year, from everyone at Juro 🎉

Pavel Kovalevich is the CPO and co-founder of Juro

Instantly book a personalized demo

  • Schedule a live, interactive demo with a Juro specialist

  • See in-depth analysis of your contract process - and tailored solutions

  • Find out what all-in-one contract automation can do for your business

4.8
4.8

Schedule a demo

To learn more about the use of your personal data, please consult our readable Privacy Policy.

Your privacy at a glance

Hello. We are Juro Online Limited (known by humans as Juro). Here's a summary of how we protect your data and respect your privacy.

Read the full policy
(no legalese, we promise)