Graeme Johnston / 22 July 2025
This post summarises what our Juralio software does, who it helps and how it works.
What Juralio does
Juralio helps with the process of legal work including
- Planning the work required in a legal matter
- Projecting financials (costs, pricing and profitability) for that work
- Adjusting to change (in complex work, “no plan survives contact…”) and communicating about how things are developing in practice
- Capturing the relevant process knowledge as flexible templates, without the expense, rigidity, fragility and other limitations of traditional if/then approaches to process modelling.
- Generating useful data from all this.
Who Juralio helps
Juralio has been designed for
- Legal services providers such as law firms
- Legal departments and other people engaging external providers and handling their own organisation’s legal issues (for example, compliance teams)
As such, it contrasts with the familiar categories of finance-focused software in legal focused either on providers (‘capture and bill more time’) or clients (‘scrutinise and control the time being billed to you’) which have become somewhat adversial in practice.
The reason that Juralio works for both “sides” and indeed for legal work that doesn’t involve an external legal provider at all, is that it’s focused on improving the reality of how work is done, rather than on justifying it after the event.
It helps you tackle the wasted time, risks and other costs and problems resulting from
- Overworking matters or otherwise spending time and other cost that isn’t really justified
- Misunderstanding and lack of communication within a matter
- Over-complicated time-based practices and software, including the overhead of billing guideline compliance and the time and relationship damage of billing disputes
- Inability to budget reliably
- Failure to learn effectively as individuals and as an organisation, because of inadequate and inaccessible data
Historically, many law firms haven’t cared too much about these things because time-based billing is so profitable. And many large organisations paying for legal work have complained about the problems but ultimately tolerated them, settling in some cases for ebilling / billing guideline approaches which offer at best only “symptomatic relief” and are at worst a theatrical extravaganza of action and reaction. That reactive approach is increasingly recognised as a costly distraction, and the onset of AI tools for both generating and critiquing narratives is only going to emphasise that.
In the current world of increased pressure on budgets, Juralio helps everyone involved in legal work to become more efficient and effective in their process and budgeting. And crucially, it does so in a way that is very centred on the human element. Two paths we don’t take are
- Simply conceptualising work as rules, which as anyone has tried it will know has significant costs of development and maintenance. It can work if you have true volume of matters following very definable routes, but it has very real limits.
- Assuming that everyone can just continue as usual with entirely unstructured approaches, with AI coming to the rescue in capturing what’s been done and perhaps in future helping with process improvement. That path is likely to accentuate the problems of legacy practices, rather than truly improving things.
Instead, we offer a way to conceptualise and handle work which gives control to individuals and teams to
- consciously but easily articulate work in greater or less detail, as suits their needs and inclinations
- share visibility of this within an internal team and across organisations (most notably, between law firm and client, and between legal department and business)
- develop and adjust process templates without the need for specialised consultants / teams
- follow such templates closely, or loosely, or not at all, depending on context and opinion
- see what’s actually being, and been, done, and thus share, reflect and learn from experience
This applies to a much wider range of work than what can be conceptualised as rules. Crucially, it works well for complex work with multiple moving parts and large teams, which is also exactly the sort of work in which budgets tend to get out of control.
Juralio also generates high quality structured data about what has been done, which can be used to improve how things are done in future, with benefits for pricing, profitability, predictability, learning and risk.
If you care about this sort of thing, there are also benefits for quality of life for clients and lawyers alike: less time wasted in, say, tracking project status down in email and Word documents or updating budgets in spreadsheets or figuring out how to do something effectively, or suffering the consequences of not doing it effectively. Which in turn can feed into staff and client retention.
How Juralio does what it does
It’s easier to show than to tell but some headline points are:
- Juralio allows you to break down your work easily into phases and their components, including tasks, deliverables and milestones
- This can be done at abstract (template) and concrete (matter) level, with the ability to use matters as the basis of a future template, stripping the matter back only to what’s of general applicability
- Dates, team members, status and other important things can be allocated to these
- Budgets can also be allocated to phases for a given period, including one or more pricing types
- Knowledge other than process and finance can easily be linked up to the relevant steps in a template so that such knowledge is presented to people exactly at the time they need it
- The software design makes it as easy as possible to learn and use, recognising that lawyers
- typically won’t spend significant time on training and
- usually aren’t comfortable with the type of spreadsheet-y or engineer-y software that seems natural to, say, finance or technology professionals
- Juralio can be integrated with the software lawyers use – email, calendars, document systems and finance systems above all – to provide a joined-up day to day working experience.With such integrations, Juralio can serve as a hub for defining and coordinating the work done, its costs and pricing and the data generated from this.
Some of the magic comes from the design and user experience, and from what we don’t do as well as what we do. We aim to help with the fundamentals, without distraction and over-reach.
Organisational size
At the moment, we’re focused on organisations with 50 or more lawyers, whether private practice or in-house. If you’d like to arrange a demo, please get in touch.