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

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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