How AI is rewriting the in-house playbook: Richard Mabey on building Juro and rethinking legal workflows
The ex-Freshfields lawyer who built Juro into one of Europe's top legal tech companies sees a major shift underway.
Contents
In 2013, Richard Mabey walked away from the kind of job most junior lawyers spend years working towards: a corporate associate role at Freshfields. He wasn’t disillusioned with law. In fact, he actually enjoyed it. But the inefficiencies of legal work and an urge to start a company, left him with a lingering question: could this all be done better?
Rather than launch something straight away, Mabey followed a more measured path. First came an MBA at INSEAD, then a stint at LegalZoom - at the time one of the few scaled legal tech companies in the world.
It was only in 2016, three years after leaving Freshfields, that he co-founded Juro, a contract automation platform aimed at helping fast-growing businesses manage legal agreements with less friction. Quite the achievement given this was still the "dark ages" of legal tech.
Since then, Juro has grown into one of the UK’s standout legal tech startups. It now serves thousands of companies, employs a growing team across Europe and the US, and has raised over $31 million from some very serious investors. We sat down with Richard on The Non-Billable Podcast to ask him how he did it.
Listen to the full-length interview on the podcast. Episode page with links here.
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Building for an AI-first legal world
Juro’s customers aren’t law firms. They’re companies that need to agree and manage contracts at scale, and they increasingly want to do it without involving a human lawyer at all.
The company’s latest AI-powered tools can review NDAs autonomously within Teams and Slack, guided by playbooks defined by the legal team. That sort of capability is no longer hypothetical. "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."
This shift - from lawyer-led to agent-led - could drastically reshape what it means to be a legal team. The tools can now perform tasks that previously justified the hiring of junior lawyers. Mabey sees that reality hitting hard. "The consensus at our latest conference [Scaleup GC] was pointing towards fewer lawyers - and especially fewer junior lawyers."
The big question, then, is how do you train the next generation of legal leaders if no one is doing the groundwork anymore?
Mabey admits he doesn’t have a simple answer. "Training used to be: until you can show me extraordinary attention to detail in marking up an NDA, you will not be given more tasks. When you can do that task and you've mastered it, you'll then move on to the more difficult stuff, the SPAs... So the question is how do you train?"
Some firms are experimenting with simulations, he says, but the truth is the industry hasn’t figured it out yet. "It’s a million-dollar question, or maybe a billion-dollar one."
Business teams are can now use legal AI agents. The legal team just sets the parameters.
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Addleshaw Goddard | £52,000 | £56,000 | £100,000 |
| Akin Gump | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Baker McKenzie | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Bird & Bird | £47,000 | £52,000 | £98,000 |
| Bristows | £46,000 | £50,000 | £88,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Burges Salmon | £47,000 | £49,000 | £72,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | £50,000 | £53,000 | £88,000 |
| Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton | £57,500 | £62,500 | £164,500 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clyde & Co | £47,000 | £49,500 | £85,000 |
| CMS | £50,000 | £55,000 | £120,000 |
| Cooley | £55,000 | £60,000 | £157,000 |
| Davis Polk | £65,000 | £70,000 | £170,000 |
| Debevoise | £55,000 | £60,000 | £173,000 |
| Dechert | £55,000 | £61,000 | £165,000 |
| Dentons | £50,000 | £54,000 | £100,000 |
| DLA Piper | £52,000 | £57,000 | £130,000 |
| Eversheds Sutherland | £46,000 | £50,000 | £100,000 |
| Farrer & Co | £47,000 | £49,000 | £88,000 |
| Fieldfisher | £48,500 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Freshfields | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Fried Frank | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gibson Dunn | £60,000 | £65,000 | £180,000 |
| Goodwin Procter | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gowling WLG | £48,500 | £53,500 | £98,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| HFW | £50,000 | £54,000 | £100,000 |
| Hill Dickinson | £43,000 | £45,000 | £80,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Irwin Mitchell | £43,000 | £45,000 | £76,000 |
| Jones Day | £56,000 | £65,000 | £160,000 |
| K&L Gates | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Kennedys | £43,000 | £46,000 | £85,000 |
| King & Spalding | £55,000 | £60,000 | £165,000 |
| Kirkland & Ellis | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Latham & Watkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Mayer Brown | £55,000 | £60,000 | £135,000 |
| McDermott Will & Emery | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Milbank | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Mills & Reeve | £45,000 | £47,000 | £82,000 |
| Mischon de Reya | £47,500 | £52,500 | £95,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | £50,000 | £55,000 | £135,000 |
| Orrick | £55,000 | £60,000 | £160,000 |
| Osborne Clarke | £54,500 | £56,000 | £94,000 |
| Paul Hastings | £60,000 | £68,000 | £173,000 |
| Paul Weiss | £55,000 | £60,000 | £180,000 |
| Penningtons Manches Cooper | £48,000 | £50,000 | £83,000 |
| Pinsent Masons | £49,500 | £54,000 | £105,000 |
| Quinn Emanuel | n/a | n/a | £180,000 |
| Reed Smith | £50,000 | £55,000 | £125,000 |
| Ropes & Gray | £60,000 | £65,000 | £165,000 |
| RPC | £46,000 | £50,000 | £90,000 |
| Shoosmiths | £43,000 | £45,000 | £97,000 |
| Sidley Austin | £60,000 | £65,000 | £175,000 |
| Simmons & Simmons | £52,000 | £57,000 | £120,000 |
| Skadden | £58,000 | £63,000 | £173,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Squire Patton Boggs | £47,000 | £50,000 | £110,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | £50,000 | £55,000 | £100,000 |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Taylor Wessing | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| TLT | £44,000 | £47,500 | £85,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
| Trowers & Hamlins | £45,000 | £49,000 | £80,000 |
| Vinson & Elkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £173,077 |
| Watson Farley & Williams | £50,000 | £55,000 | £102,000 |
| Weightmans | £34,000 | £36,000 | £70,000 |
| Weil Gotshal & Manges | £60,000 | £65,000 | £170,000 |
| White & Case | £62,000 | £67,000 | £175,000 |
| Willkie Farr & Gallagher | £60,000 | £65,000 | £170,000 |
| Withers | £47,000 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Womble Bond Dickinson | £43,000 | £45,000 | £80,000 |
Rank | Law Firm | Revenue | Profit per Equity Partner (PEP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DLA Piper* | £3,010,000,000 | £2,400,000 |
| 2 | Clifford Chance | £2,300,000,000 | £2,040,000 |
| 3 | A&O Shearman | £2,200,000,000 | £2,200,000 |
| 4 | Hogan Lovells | £2,150,000,000 | £2,200,000 |
| 5 | Freshfields | £2,120,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 6 | Linklaters | £2,100,000,000 | £1,900,000 |
| 7 | Norton Rose Fulbright* | £1,800,000,000 | £1,100,000 |
| 8 | CMS** | £1,620,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 9 | Herbert Smith Freehills | £1,300,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 10 | Ashurst | £961,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 11 | Clyde & Co | £844,000,000 | £739,000 |
| 12 | Eversheds Sutherland | £749,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 13 | BCLP* | £661,000,000 | £748,000 |
| 14 | Pinsent Masons | £649,000,000 | £793,000 |
| 15 | Slaughter and May*** | £625,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 16 | Simmons & Simmons | £574,000,000 | £1,076,000 |
| 17 | Bird & Bird** | £545,000,000 | £696,000 |
| 18 | Addleshaw Goddard | £495,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 19 | Taylor Wessing | £480,000,000 | £915,000*** |
| 20 | Osborne Clarke** | £456,000,000 | £771,000 |
| 21 | Womble Bond Dickinson | £448,000,000 | £556,000 |
| 22 | DWF | £435,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 23 | Fieldfisher | £407,000,000 | £966,000 |
| 24 | Kennedys | £384,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 25 | DAC Beachcroft | £325,000,000 | £700,000 |
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For a closer look at the day-to-day of some of the most common types of lawyers working in corporate law firms, explore our lawyer job profiles:
From Freshfields to founding
Mabey started Juro because he couldn’t ignore the inefficiencies he saw firsthand. After Freshfields, he did an MBA at INSEAD, a stint at legal tech pioneer LegalZoom, and eventually began building the company. "Rather than just start, I did the lawyer thing - go get more experience first", he says.
Those early years were anything but easy. Juro spent its first four years getting to $1 million in ARR (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."
For Juro, the inflection came with the rise of generative AI. Mabey’s team had previously avoided the first wave of AI which saw law firms using early iterations of tools like Kira Systems and Luminance - too much setup, not enough payoff, in his view. "It wasn’t really worthwhile once you'd done all that work", he says. "But with GenAI, especially the agentic AI wave, everything changed."
Now, Juro’s vision is bigger than contracts. The company wants to become the default platform for automating legal work inside businesses. Not just contract management, and not just for legal teams. "We are seeing a trend where more and more work that we thought was legal work, but isn’t really legal work - it’s just done by the legal team - is being farmed out to business teams who are self-serving for the first time on those tasks thanks to AI."
Why category doesn’t matter
Juro’s market is typically lumped into contract lifecycle management (CLM), a crowded category with dozens of players. Mabey likes to challenge the label. "We’ve always been quite different from CLMs. Our product is decentralised, embedded in other tools, and built to enable self-serve."
In fact, Juro is often chosen for exactly that reason. "We’re a Marmite product", he says. "Some teams love us because we’re designed for business teams. Others want a centralised command-and-control tool controlled by legal, and they don’t choose us. And that’s fine."
As the legal tech market continues to heat up - with funding rounds piling up in both Europe and the US - Mabey sees signs of consolidation. "There’s an incredibly wide pyramid of seed-stage startups, many doing very similar things. Some won’t survive. Some will be acquired. But it’s still early. No one has achieved real scale yet."
He points to companies like Clio (estimated $300 million in ARR) and Harvey (reportedly around the $80 million mark) as standouts - but notes how small that still is relative to broader enterprise SaaS. "If Salesforce is doing $38 billion in ARR, no one in legal tech is even close. We’re still scratching the surface."
Many legal tech startups are doing very similar things. No one has achieved real scale yet.
The future: agents on the frontline, lawyers on the edge
Mabey is especially bullish on agentic AI. While some companies are still racing to bolt AI onto legacy workflows, he sees a fundamental shift underway: "You can now get agents to do the work without you doing anything. That’s the big, big shift."
And unlike first-gen co-pilot tools that simply guide a user, agents act autonomously. "You can say: ‘Look, agent, go and read my playbook, understand all of my previous contracts, and based on that, give me a markup of this NDA’."
Still, Mabey insists that this isn’t about eliminating lawyers altogether. It’s about rethinking their role. "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."
As for the long tail of legal work - consumer contracts, small claims filings, wills - Mabey sees immense potential for AI to drive access to justice. He says he's a fan of Garfield AI, for example, the first AI-driven law firm to get SRA approval.
"The reality is that we can automate the production of a simple will using AI and the output will be just as good as a human."
Mabey agrees that we're still underestimating the impact of AI on legal work. Conversations are still, understandably, focused on how the technology will make existing use cases more efficient - contract drafting, reviews etc. We often don’t think about the things we don’t even know it will enable.
For Juro, the focus remains on building a platform for the new reality, where legal work happens faster, across more teams, with fewer blockers. "We think the answer is for legal teams to enable business teams to self-serve on legal tasks", he says. "We want to become the default platform for automating legal work within a business and we want to become the market leader".
What matters now is judgement, communication, problem solving. That’s what lawyers will focus on.
| Firm | London office since | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| Baker McKenzie | 1961 | Finance, capital markets, TMT |
| Davis Polk | 1972 | Leveraged finance, corporate/M&A |
| Gibson Dunn | 1979 | Private equity, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Goodwin | 2008 | Private equity, funds, life sciences |
| Kirkland & Ellis | 1994 | Private equity, funds, restructuring |
| Latham & Watkins | 1990 | Finance, private equity, capital markets |
| Milbank | 1979 | Finance, capital markets, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Paul Hastings | 1997 | Leveraged finance, structured finance, infrastructure |
| Paul Weiss | 2001 | Private equity, leveraged finance |
| Quinn Emanuel | 2008 | Litigation |
| Sidley Austin | 1974 | Leveraged finance, capital markets, corporate/M&A |
| Simpson Thacher | 1978 | Leveraged finance, private equity, funds |
| Skadden | 1988 | Finance, corporate/M&A, arbitration |
| Weil | 1996 | Restructuring, private equity, leverage finance |
| White & Case | 1971 | Capital markets, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Law firm | Type | First-year salary |
|---|---|---|
| White & Case | US firm | £32,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | International | £30,000 |
| A&O Shearman | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | International | £28,000 |
| Freshfields | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | Silver Circle | £28,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | International | £28,000 |
| Linklaters | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Mishcon de Reya | International | £28,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | International | £28,000 |
This is a condensed version of our full length interview with Richard Mabey on The Non-Billable Podcast. View the episode page here.
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
| Firm | Merger year | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| BCLP | 2018 | Real estate, corporate/M&A, litigation |
| DLA Piper | 2005 | Corporate/M&A, real estate, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Eversheds Sutherland | 2017 | Corporate/M&A, finance |
| Hogan Lovells | 2011 | Litigation, regulation, finance |
| Mayer Brown | 2002 | Finance, capital markets, real estate |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | 2013 | Energy, resources and infrastructure, insurance, finance |
| Reed Smith | 2007 | Shipping, finance, TMT |
| Squire Patton Boggs | 2011 | Corporate/M&A, pensions, TMT |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
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