“From cradle to grave it can be in the same system - it absolutely saves us time”

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) is a state government body which has overseen the control, management, restoration, conservation and regulation of fish and wildlife in Arkansas for more than 100 years.

Its mission is to conserve and enhance Arkansas’s fish and wildlife and their habitats while promoting sustainable use, public understanding and support.

The challenge: hundreds of time-sensitive contracts

AGFC employs more than 650 people, with a legal team including four attorneys and three support roles.

Its vital work requires hundreds if not thousands of contracts each year, covering everything from land maintenance to forest management, property management, repair and construction, as well as the sale of hunting and fishing licenses.

AGFC relied on a software solution built internally for managing contracts. The contract specialists at each of AGFC’s 15 divisions needed this system to get contracts created, reviewed and executed.

However, difficulties in maintenance and access to the system were causing headaches for Jim Goodhart, General Counsel; John Marks, Senior Assistant General Counsel; and their team.

[The old system] was painful and clunky to use, didn't support modern features such as eSignature, and regularly required manual intervention by our IT staff - John Marks, Senior Assistant GC

“The original developer of the system had moved on, and over time the internal system had become outdated to the point where updating it was not feasible. It was painful and clunky to use, didn't support modern features such as eSignature, and regularly required manual intervention by our IT staff for it to work,” explains John.

Templates were created in Microsoft Word and weren’t easy to use or maintain. “Those difficulties affected our Legal staff, all our contract specialists, and our field staff.”

The nature of AGFC’s work means that many contracts are time-sensitive, relating to weather conditions for construction and seasonal activities like hunting and fishing. John and his team needed to find a reliable solution to review and execute contracts quickly, and at scale.

In the short-term, contracts needed to be visible in order to track obligations and mitigate the risk posed by a missed renewal date, for example, due to difficulties in accessing the old system.

The requirements: “we needed a smooth, intuitive workflow”

Jim and John kicked off AGFC’s search for a long-term end-to-end contracts solution by consulting trusted review sites like Capterra, as well as their peers in other wildlife conservation agencies, to find a platform that fit their requirements.

The new solution needed to be:

• End-to-end: AGFC wanted to initiate, review, customize, share, sign and track contracts in one unified workspace - “we weren't looking for just a repository” 
• Easy to use: “We needed a smooth, intuitive workflow to go from a contract from a person in the field through approvals to eSignature”
• A trusted business partner: “some platforms insist on selling you lots of bells and whistles that aren’t needed,” whereas AGFC wanted a good fit and a collaboration for the long term

Having compared numerous platforms, AGFC felt that Juro presented the best balance of ease of use, end-to-end coverage, and a trusted business partner who aligned with their need to be fiscally responsible. AGFC implemented Juro in early 2023.

The solution: ‘one system from cradle to grave’

Juro’s legal engineers worked quickly to get AGFC up and running early in Q1 of 2023. With optimized workflows in place, the process now looks like this:

• Contract templates are drafted, amended and controlled centrally by Legal Assistant Sissy Phillips, with John’s assistance and oversight
• Contract specialists in each of AGFC’s 15 divisions can create watertight contracts in moments from those templates
• Collaboration and negotiation can happen in-browser
• In the field, AGFC management and counterparties can eSign securely on any device, enabling time-sensitive contracts to be agreed quickly
• Post-signature, contracts and their obligations are stored and tracked in one unified workspace.

With frictionless workflows in place, AGFC’s contract specialists can quickly create, negotiate and agree contracts of all types, with the solution adopted by a huge range of counterparties: “People sign contracts with us all the way from big companies to one-person businesses providing janitorial services,” says John.

Juro’s best-in-class speed of implementation and support meant that AGFC was able quickly to migrate all templates to the platform.

“Instead of passing around Word documents and tracking changes, all our templates are centralized in one system,” John explains, adding that by using Juro’s powerful conditional logic feature, “we can change what provisions are in the contract based on how the user fills out the form, and we can change how the form displays too.”

Instead of passing around Word documents and tracking changes, all our templates are centralized in one system - John Marks, Senior Assistant GC

Once up and running, AGFC could use the frictionless self-serve workflows they’d built to execute contracts faster and in greater volumes, getting hundreds of contracts signed each quarter in 2023.

The results: “it frees up time and makes life easier”

AGFC started out with a custom solution that was difficult to access, maintain and operate. Within a couple of months of seeking a new solution based on public reviews, they had selected and implemented Juro to enable specialists across 15 divisions to execute contracts faster with a huge range of counterparties.

The experience for AGFC’s legal team has been overwhelmingly positive, in terms of saving time on contracts, as well as mitigating risk through improved visibility. “From cradle to grave it can be in the same system - I think people appreciate that, and it absolutely saves us time,” John says. 

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Juro’s ease of use and end-to-end coverage set AGFC up for success, and the team has also found Juro to be a collaborative partner when it comes to adding new features to the platform: “it’s a two-way communication where we’re being asked for feedback, and it’s being implemented in a lot of cases.”

“It’s helped them get contracts through faster, and allows people to see where their contract is and exactly what’s going on with it, so we get fewer questions - that frees up time and makes life easier for us. I would definitely recommend that folks take a look at Juro.”