Majoto

Lawyers: do AI or die? A recent post by Andrew Wilkinson ("RIP most legal work 💀🪦") threw a cat among the AI pigeon-hawks and traditionalist doves. Most commentators in the legal space identified it as a legal UX problem, rather than the death-knell for human lawyers. But the usual conclusion was that lawyers should use AI, to keep up with client expectations. Majoto founder Denis Potemkin explores the paradoxes lurking beneath those glib waters, the questions which lawyers should ask themselves, and how they should think about the UX problem. Full article link in comments. #AI #legal #RIP #ornot

Among all the uncertainty and strife, in our respective worlds and in the world at large, we hope you will be able to relax, reconnect, and find wholesomeness and new inspiration during this holiday period. Thank you to all our friends, investors, customers and supporters for your continuing belief and friendships.

Lawyers tend to over-complicate things. One of the founding principles of the Majoto Beta Club - our innovation community - was to try to simplify them. And everyone knows that achieving simple is harder than achieving complex. That's why we instigated the Radically Simple Workstream with Sarah Fox - a project to explore just how much we could simplify a B2B agreement. Sarah was the perfect leader of this project, having made her name in shortening construction contracts to as little as 500 words! We're excited to publish the results of the team's work: a #radically #simple services agreement prototype. It comes with published standard terms, a matching SoW, various implementations including an automated template on the Majoto platform. There's also a graveyard document listing everything we took out, and why. Links to all the resources, in the comments. We hope that it serves as inspiration and guidance for others who want legal documents that are more accessible, clear and user-centric. If you have overly complex legal documents you'd like to simplify, but don't know where to start, get in touch. There are several ways in which our community can help. Huge props to the team Sarah Fox, Marco Mendola, Peter Hornsby and Sarah Sheehan for this result. Special thanks to our very own Samanth Dushyanth for getting it published and automated, and to our Beta Council for their support, especially Graeme J. for your insights and edits!

“Simplicity is a condition. Radical simplicity is a vision.” This strange vision of radical simplicity provided the motivation for a motley crew of innovators to work on tackling an intractable and complex legal issue... the 'word soup' of services agreements. With that vision, in December 2022 we kicked off our Radically Simple workstream in Majoto Beta Club. We wanted to experiment with and develop a radically simple consultancy agreement — to explore just how much agreements can be simplified. Our (quite badass) problem statement is: “How might we make it easier for organisations to conclude advisory services agreements that are clear, balanced and pragmatic?” To radically simplify, you must be able to fearlessly push the boundaries of conventional contracting. So, in typical Beta Club style, we gathered a multi-disciplinary group of experts led by me, facilitated by Marco Mendola and leaning into the expertise of Sarah Sheehan, Elizabeth de Stadler 🎈, Laura Fauqueur and Peter Hornsby. We mapped the problem, created personas, conducted direct user research and legal research, and model tech building, which you can access in Majoto. We’re excited to share the workstream’s provisional deliverable: an automated template ready to be tested by the community. The project and deliverable are summarised in our presentation deck. You can find out more, including accessing our supporting materials in the Majoto community (links below) If you want to test or use it, please register for the Majoto Beta Club and test the template in Majoto. You can also access the published version + statement of work using the links in the comments.   How would you solve our problem statement? Are you working on a tool or deliverable which we could learn from? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Please comment below or email us. #Contracts #LegalTech #BetaClub

A question for online services businesses: how hard (or easy) do you make it for your customers to cancel? A couple of legal updates should be of interest: 🇺🇸 In the US, there’s a new “click to cancel” law, kicking in early 2025. It’s designed to stop “predatory practices” by which failure to take affirmative action is treated by a vendor as consent to continue a service and be charged for it. Called a “negative option feature”. Requirements under the "click to cancel" law include: • Providing a mechanism for cancelling that is as easy as the sign-up method. • Getting unambiguously affirmative consent to both the negative option feature and the whole transaction (e.g. its own separate checkbox). • Disclosing key info (the charges and the deadline to act) adjacent to the consent mechanism. • Making the cancellation instructions simple. 🇬🇧 And in the UK, under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, consumers will have the right to cancel a subscription both during a free trial period and again during a “renewal cooling off period” which starts when the free trial ends (or when a subscription renews). • This extends the existing "right of withdrawal" rule in the EU and UK, which gives consumers the right to withdraw within 14 days of signing up to an online subscription service. • So consumers get two shots at withdrawal (while in the EU only once, at the start of the contract). • Failure to comply is a criminal offence so it's got teeth. We think these are good developments for consumers. But more work to be done.  Online services selling in the UK and US will need to update their legals and sign-up/cancellation processes. And you may want to think about whether you want to take advantage of the differences between the regimes, or have a one-size fits all. These updates to the law are a good example of how legals, process and UX need to work together to reduce friction and increase trust. Even better if they add to (not take away from) a positive brand experience - even for customers who want to leave. If your legals are not up to date, and you care about creating a positive brand experience, get in touch and we'll send you a cheat sheet. #SaaS #clicktocancel #brandexperience

"I sometimes hear lawyers say that it is not up to us, as we are usually not direct product owners but have an advisory position. Then I hear people in other functions, including product owners and even management, resignedly accept obscure legal products, because they think they have to. There is a gap and we have to bridge it." An insightful observation from Jessica Didrikson in this article on Nordea's explorations of legal design. Jessica is the instigator of the Design Lab, a Nordea Group Legal initiative launched at the beginning of this year in collaboration with Majoto. The Design Lab is a world-first learning and experimentation lab, unique in three ways: 1️⃣  it’s a customised multi-modal learning lab for legal teams in large organisations. 2️⃣  we don’t teach theory; instead we equip the teams with the Majoto design system which we use for all our customer-facing work at Majoto and LexSolutions. It's a very functional and systematised method driven by our tech outlook. 3️⃣  we combine learning with facilitated workstreams to help teams apply the methods to real projects. It's all about moving the needle on how the legal team delivers to the business, and making it scalable. It has been hugely enjoyable for me and the team, and exciting to see that needle moving across a range of documents and problems during the course of the year! Huge props to Jessica and her team for truly walking the talk: making legal design a top initiative, treating it as the multi-year journey that it should be, and now taking this huge step with the Design Lab. And to Jussi Koskinen for supporting it. Plus special mention to Homan Hamzeh for introducing legal design to the team in the first place - and his consistently excellent contributions during the Design Lab sessions! https://lnkd.in/d8pxBp_Z #legaldesign #legalops

Majoto and LexSolutions ran one of our high energy “workouts” at LegalGeek , challenging the participants to think differently about their operations “diet” and the foundational role that wellbeing plays. Huge thanks to Jimmy Vestbirk for the opportunity.

Continuing our showcase of favourite customers and projects, this is is an oldie but a goodie. Because the customer is still using this template - in its evolving form - with the same success, as its business skyrockets. Manufacture 2030 | M2030 offers a sustainability SaaS platform and related services to some of the world’s largest companies, to help their global supply chains reduce their carbon footprint. M2030 found themselves negotiating on customer MSAs each time - resulting in some very protracted negotiations. M2030 needed to secure revenue faster and cope with a growing deal pipeline. Working with LexSolutions, Majoto created new enterprise-ready terms of business for M2030, designed to be fit-for-purpose for enterprise customers. We identified common objectives and built the agreement around those. We used plain language and visual techniques to help customers navigate the agreement, understand it better, and to create trust. Since launching the new terms of business, M2030 have slashed time to contract and have been able to promote their terms as a better starting point. This has resulted in better risk positions for the business and created trust with customers - while helping to accelerate deals. Martin Chilcott, Chairman & CEO, said: "The new agreement is easy to understand and helps us get on the same page with customers quickly, reducing deal times by 50% on average, and in some cases by 80%." M2030 are a fantastic bunch of people working towards a better future for us all. We're so proud to have played a small part in that!

Our latest research report, 'The Purpose of Contracts', in collaboration with Deloitte, is now available for download: https://lnkd.in/gwqPVN4m This report is packed with: - Eye-opening insights into the evolving purpose of contracts - Actionable strategies to elevate your contract management game - Practical takeaways to foster stronger business relationships and drive value creation Don't miss out on this invaluable resource! #contractmanagement #legal #research #CCM

We don't do this nearly enough... But with a website refresh, we're going to showcase (and shout out) some of our favourite customers. LoftyWorks is a PropTech business which helps landlords manage their property portfolio, with a SaaS platform and related services. They came to us because their customer-facing legals were creating a lot of queries from new sign-ups and frequent negotiations. As their business grew, they needed to make the process more efficient and eliminate friction when signing up new customers. Majoto redesigned Loftyworks' legals to make them simpler, clear and on-brand and delivered the designs in Majoto’s platform. LoftyWorks can maintain the terms on the platform and publish them to their website with one click. We also gave them a new hiring agreement in a self-serve workflow, allowing them to sign up contractors more easily and keep track of what's been signed. The result? LoftyWorks eliminated virtually all of the previous frictions from their contracting process - all while reducing risk for the business. These are their SaaS terms as an example: https://lnkd.in/ddZqVb6u Kurt L., serial entrepreneur and now GM at LoftyWorks said: "We reduced queries by new customers by 90%, and reduced negotiations from 40% to zero. Our team has also appreciated how much easier it is now to update and publish the terms." Great product, great brand, great team - and now legals to match. We love working with you guys!