Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey is co-founder and chief executive of Juro, a UK company whose software lets businesses draft, negotiate, sign, and manage contracts in one place. He trained as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields and is known for building Juro for in-house legal teams at fast-growing companies instead of law firms.

Leaving Freshfields

In 2013 he left a corporate associate job at Freshfields, the British law firm, convinced that much of legal work could be done better. He told BDO what he had seen there: “I saw smart people, both on the client and lawyer side, spending most of their time shuffling Microsoft Word documents inefficiently while spending vast amounts on legal fees.”

He did not start a company right away. “Rather than just start, I did the lawyer thing - go get more experience first,” he told The Non-Billable Podcast. He took an MBA at INSEAD, worked at LegalZoom, and in 2016 co-founded Juro with Pavel Kovalevich, an INSEAD classmate who took charge of product and technology.

Slow years, then agents

Juro took four years to reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue. “It was slow and deliberate. We were doing design partnering, iterating. A lot of people give up after year one, two, three... but sometimes the inflection happens at year five,” he said. He had kept Juro away from the first wave of legal AI, which he saw as too much setup for too little payoff, and says generative AI and agents changed that.

Juro’s tools now review contracts such as NDAs inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, following playbooks the legal team writes. “Business teams used to ping legal saying, ‘Here’s a contract - please mark it up.’ Now they’re deploying AI agents. The legal team just sets the parameters.” He calls Juro “a Marmite product” because teams that want business colleagues to serve themselves love it, while teams that want a central system controlled by legal choose something else.

What lawyers will do next

He expects the drafting side of law to keep shrinking. “The production of legal deliverables - your NDA, your SPA - is becoming commoditised. What matters now is judgement, communication, problem solving. That’s what lawyers will focus on.”