How ex-Freshfields lawyer Richard Mabey built Juro into one of Europe’s top legal tech startups: unlearning lawyering, agentic AI in legal and the future of junior lawyers
Description
In this episode, we sit down with Richard Mabey, the co-founder and CEO of Juro. A former Freshfields lawyer, Richard left private practice in 2013 to pursue an MBA and later joined LegalZoom, before launching Juro in 2016. Nearly a decade on, the company is now one of Europe’s leading legal tech startups, helping fast-scaling businesses automate their contract processes and manage legal work with a radically different approach.
Richard talks candidly about his founder journey - from teaching himself to code in the early days, to building a company that's now helping hundreds of legal teams deploy AI agents directly into tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. We dig into how Juro thinks differently about contract lifecycle management, why Mabey believes the next generation of legal work will be agent-led, and what it really takes to get lawyers to embrace automation.
We also cover why Mabey thinks legal teams are being asked to do more with less, how agentic AI is already substituting junior-level tasks, and why the CLM category may be ripe for consolidation. Whether you're building legal tech, working in-house, or trying to understand what the future of legal work might look like, this episode is full of insight from one of the sector’s most thoughtful founders.
Chapters
00:30 Introduction: From Freshfields to Founding Juro
03:44 Starting Small: Building a Legal Tech Community
07:00 What Scale-Up GCs Really Care About
10:15 The Lawyer’s Role in an AI-First World
13:52 The Impact of Agentic AI on In-House Teams
17:05 The Training Problem for Junior Lawyers
21:10 The End of the Law Firm Pyramid?
24:30 How Juro’s Agents Actually Work
27:48 Replacing Low-Value Work with Automation
30:33 From Founder Doubts to Product Inflection
34:10 Building a Legal Tech Startup in the "Dark Ages"
36:45 Fundraising Lessons and Conviction in the Problem
39:30 How Juro Differs from Traditional CLMs
42:58 Defining the Agentic AI Opportunity
44:42 Why Legal Tech Will Consolidate (Eventually)
46:35 The Vision for Juro and the Future of Legal Work
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