{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"<iframe src=\"https://embed.acast.com/$/690212f54013c81f9af07e68/6af38464f40d635e8722ed2c?\" frameBorder=\"0\" width=\"700\" height=\"250\"></iframe>","title":"Richard Mabey - Why the billable hour refuses to die","description":"<p>Recorded at Legal Geek London 2026, this episode features Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of Juro, the AI contract platform for in-house legal teams. A former lawyer himself, Richard built Juro alongside a community of around 2,000 in-house lawyers that started with a blog and an event for five people. Later that day, he took the stage to talk about Juro’s upcoming launch of skills, a way for in-house lawyers to configure agents that people in the business can self-serve on.</p><p><br></p><p>In this conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, he goes deeper into what AI means for the way companies are built, for the future of law firms, and for who actually does legal work. What makes this conversation stand out is how outspoken Richard is. Juro has grown its revenue eight to nine times since 2021 while keeping its headcount at around 80 people, and he is not afraid to make bold predictions about the rest of the market.</p><p><br></p><p>He explains what he sees happening:</p><ul><li>Why building a community around the challenges of in-house lawyers, from mentorship to mental health, mattered more than talking about the product</li><li>How Juro grew revenue eight to nine times without growing the team, and why low management overhead and high talent density beat the classic venture playbook of building layers</li><li>Why the key question for any organisation is which jobs actually require people, and how starting from first principles helped Juro reinvent itself while it had hundreds of customers to lose</li><li>The startling drop in UK graduate recruitment places in professional services, from 180,000 to 50,000 in a year, and why cutting entry-level roles may be short-sighted for firms that still need the partners of tomorrow</li><li>Why he hopes in-house teams will insource routine work, and why firms living off commoditised work are most at risk while good firms will be fine</li><li> His prediction that 80% of legal tasks will be done without lawyers by the end of 2027, and why that is already true for routine contract work but not yet for the whole market</li><li> The surprise in Juro’s data: lawyers letting sales teams review and sign NDAs themselves when AI redlining finds no issues against the playbook</li><li> Why AI is good for access to justice, and why the consumer legal opportunity is enormous and often overlooked at legal tech conferences</li><li> Why taste and judgment matter more than ever, and how product managers with legal domain expertise now ship a feature in a week instead of three months</li><li> Why Juro hires for learning potential rather than experience, and tests candidates on tasks they know nothing about</li><li> Why the billable hour is like a cockroach after a nuclear bomb, what Freshfields and Latham &amp; Watkins are doing differently, and why the answer is not to cut fees but to bill for value</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Richard offers a candid view from the vendor side of legal tech: AI is changing who does legal work and how companies are built, and the firms that innovate in how they deliver and price their services will do better than ever, while those built on routine work will struggle.</p>","author_name":"Recht in je Oor"}