In what may be the first deal of its kind in the legal tech world, Juro and Wordsmith – both inhouse-focused – have formed a partnership using a Model Context Protocol (MCP) approach to provide an integrated AI offering to their clients, (see AL in-depth interview below).
The deal, which is not a precursor to a merger they underlined, will see Juro, an ‘intelligent contracting platform’, connect with Wordsmith, which describes itself as an AI workspace for inhouse teams. The idea is this approach, which leverages MCP, enables ‘mutual clients to leverage the best of both platforms as part of their legal tech stack’.
What’s especially interesting here is that both companies operate in the same segment of the market and both are very AI-focused. I.e. this isn’t an older CLM business hooking up with a new genAI startup to bring in something it doesn’t have. Rather, this is two pioneering businesses that are already well down the genAI road, but see that by combining their strengths they can provide a better total service to customers.
Juro’s 550-plus clients will be able to use Wordsmith – which raised $25m in June – as part of their core workflows, while Wordsmith’s clients will be able to ‘sync easily with Juro’s system of record and leverage its AI tools’. This includes AI-driven contract review, data extraction, and the deployment of agents across a wide range of use cases, they said.
As part of the strategic partnership, the two companies are exploring further opportunities for collaboration and deepening the integration. It will be fascinating to see where this goes – and also if other companies with connecting capabilities take the same MCP alliance approach.
For more insights into the deal, see the video (8 mins) discussion with Richard Mabey, CEO & Co-founder of Juro and Ross McNairn, CEO & Co-founder of Wordsmith. (The full transcript of the interview is below).
As McNairn says in the AL interview: ‘…..a lot of what we build at Wordsmith is a feed that sort of self-plans. So it orchestrates, depending on whatever you want to do, it’s kind of a dynamic agent in the sense that it just designs the best sequence of steps without you needing to pre-define it. And some of those steps pull together different components that it needs to complete a job.
‘So for example, if it’s going through 11 different things [such as] drafting a letter and doing a review and retrieving a document, that document may very well be sitting within Juro. And MCP allows us to bubble up all of those different tools and then surface them at exactly the right time in the right workflow to get the right outcome for lawyers and for the teams that they’re working with. I think it’s awesome that the Juro team have been progressive about opening up their platform. I think their MCP integrations are really starting to take shape.’
Before the interview, Mabey commented: ‘AI unlocks unprecedented opportunities for in-house legal, but the key is getting AI adopted. That means combining AI agents with existing workflows and embedding AI in existing tools. We are excited to partner with Wordsmith so we can deliver flexible AI automation across the whole contract lifecycle.’
And McNairn added: ‘We’re thrilled to be partnering with Juro. They’ve consistently pushed the boundaries of what contract lifecycle management can be. This partnership is about more than integration; it’s about giving legal teams the kind of intelligent automation that actually gets used day-to-day. Together, we’re enabling legal and business teams to move faster, with less friction, and with total confidence.’
And here’s the full AL Video Interview Transcript (produced by AI, of course….)
Richard Tromans (00:04.857)
Today we’re doing a special interview as part of the news about the alliance between Juro and Wordsmith. With us are the CEOs of both companies, Richard Mabey and Ross McNairn. First of all, congratulations guys, that’s a really, really interesting deal. Maybe one of you could just give us a bit of an introduction?
Richard Mabey (00:33.08)
Thanks so much. Yeah, we’re really excited to be doing this and at the core of the partnership is building what we think can be the best product experience for in-house legal teams at growing companies. really what got us curious, and Ross and I have been talking for a while about this, is that although Jura and Wordsmith are very different products, in many respects, complementary products, the missions behind the business are very similar. And we’ve always been about ensuring that the solution to legal work is not just helping lawyers move faster, but enabling business teams to self-serve within parameters set by lawyers. And Ross can tell us about Wordsmith, but that kind of similarity in shared DNA made this very easy to see.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (01:21.628)
Yeah, I completely agree. We love Juro, we think that…
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (01:32.176)
We also think they’ve done a great job on the community side of things so they get a lot of interesting insights. I think everybody knows Juro’s got an awesome community the way that they run Slack and the whole thing. It’s And I think Richard’s nailed it. know, like the way that we see the world is that we want to be one of the best places to free house lawyers to perform their job and service the rest of the business and Juro the rails to do that in other different businesses and we want to integrate with those rails so that lawyers can have the biggest and broadest reach that they can. So the team’s awesome, we’re very very excited to work with them, it’s been lovely just even the beginnings of this has been quite a nice cultural blend between the two companies and yeah I think that it’s a it’s a there’s there’s a lot of exciting value add that we can build on as we start to see how the two propositions can dovetail.
Richard Tromans (02:24.281)
And that brings me to the next question, which is, so how do they dovetail? Presumably there is some overlap considering you’re both serving the in-house world, you both have some degree of document reviewer. I mean, can you just talk us through how do the bits stick together?
Richard M. (02:42.21)
I can maybe share it at a high level. I think the MCP aspect of this is really interesting. And Ross is very deep on that. Has some really interesting things to say that. So, know, high level, it’s interesting. I legal tech is a very fragmented space in which you’ve reported on that a lot.
Our goal is not to build all the possible features that every customer might want. We want to be really good at what we do. And what we do at its core is contract workflow information. So we specialize exclusively in contracts. We have a repository, which is a system of records for contracts. And most of our AI tools interact with that in some ways. So AI review, undocumented review, AI extract, it all sits alongside the CLM in one system. Where we have kind of become much more open regarding our infrastructure in last probably six or 12 months is where we want to enable people to work wherever they want to work. And this has been historically the case with our CRM integrations and Slack and team integrations and so on. But increasingly we’re opening up Jiro. So if you want to control Juro from Wordsmith if you want to control it you’re over on chat GPT. We’re open to that because we want to give the client the best experience we can.
Richard Tromans (04:06.777)
And so Ross, so for you, where does Wordsmith end and Juro begin in this? Or do you just kind of work with the overlap?
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (04:20.756)
So there will be at times some of the, I don’t know, maybe 10, 20 % of what we do will overlap and in some cases. I think that’s quite healthy. Some teams will want to do it in one place, some teams will want to do it in another. There’s an overlap at the moment between nearly every single product in legal tech. So crisp boundaries isn’t…
Richard Tromans (04:27.107)
Right.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (04:43.64)
is a barrier to a much bigger piece, which is creating products that integrate with an ecosystem. And I think if you’re working specifically with the in-house,
the reality is that people have a stack. They have other products, they have tools, have different places they’re to store their knowledge, they have different messaging tools, they have different… all sorts of things. And we’re very open about that. We’re launching all sorts of integrations.
We want our system to able to plumb into all of those. And Juro is an awesome product for a segment of the market that are extremely happy with what’s they get from it and we’d love to be a part of that workflow. The MCP specifics, a lot of what we build at Wordsmith is a feed that sort of self-plans. So it orchestrates, depending on whatever you want to do, it’s kind of a dynamic agent in the sense that it just designs the best sequence of steps without you needing to pre-define it. And some of those steps pull together different components that it needs to complete a job.
So for example, if it’s going through 11 different things of drafting a letter and doing a review and retrieving a document, that document may very well be sitting within Juro. And MCP allows us to bubble up all of those different tools and then surface them at exactly the right time in the right workflow to get the right outcome for lawyers and for the teams that they’re working with. I think it’s awesome that the Juro team have been progressive about opening up their platform. I think their MCP integrations really starting to take shape.
We’re very happy to start with it. And it’s the first of several different things that we’ll do. We also have a number of integrations on our side that we’re opening up. So some of the things that we do around templating and document review are quite unique. And particularly the sort of multi-document and pre-processing side of things are not particularly common. So giving people on other platforms the ability to just use Wordsmith wherever they are is part of our view, right? We want to be amazing at that stuff. And we don’t need to do every single thing.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (06:52.986)
in the world to be an incredibly valuable bit of this ecosystem.
Richard Tromans (06:57.347)
Gotcha, gotcha, interesting.
Richard M. (06:57.55)
I think briefly to add it, in layman’s terms as well, the MCP side.
You can think of it as kind of a USB-C port between two AI applications and, you know, without going into the kind of technical specifics of it, I think that’s thing that’s really different here. So, Juro’s had the ecosystem for a while and we’ve had other companies build inbound integrations, but they’ve mostly been about field merging and pulling web hooks for notifications, kind of quite standard. I think this is very different, actually, as well as like what you can do with it is so powerful, broad.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (07:25.468)
you
Richard M. (07:33.336)
then it opens up to the whole new fact about these robin.
Richard Tromans (07:38.009)
Gotcha, gotcha. So just a couple of last questions, one which I’m sure everyone will ask, is this like a kind of pre-merger? Is this like, I mean, obviously I suppose you can’t disclose all the details of the relationship, but what happens next?
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (07:44.252)
Yeah, no, like we have a lot of time for Juro we respect them a lot
Richard (07:52.782)
So that’s it.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (08:00.636)
But we want to work with them as partners. I can say there’s no plan at the moment that either Richard or I have discussed around that. It’s not our intent to do anything of that nature right now. We’re on our mission and we want to get on with it. And I’ll let Richard say to Juro’s side.
Richard M. (08:20.014)
Yeah, absolutely. No agenda. I think this is, again, something we love in the Wordsmith DNA, which is like, the goal is to build an amazing product. That’s the goal. I think often you see these sort of strategic partnerships and alliances and they’re all about trying to lock in customers or get some advantage in the market. I think it’s like super refreshing the discussions we’ve had with the Wordsmith team, which are, we have customers who want it. We believe together we can be more powerful. We can deliver more value. In my experience, we do.
Ross – Wordsmith Ai (08:27.824)
Yeah, exactly.
Richard M. (08:49.988)
that and in legal tech I think there’s a real need for just great UX and great experience. You do that you know all kinds of opportunities can open but there’s no agenda behind this other than just to increase the customer value.
—
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