Contract automation that scales with the business

Cleo is a San Francisco-based company that aims to support working parents. Cleo was founded in 2016, and recently raised $40m in a Series C round to help businesses care for their modern workforce.

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The challenge: manual processes, growing team

Cleo didn’t have a dedicated internal operations function in place to manage contracts until 2020. Prior to this, David Swenton, director of business operations, was responsible for contracts, which lived in Word.

“I had employment offer letter templates set up in Word. To send to a candidate, I would open the template, create a version unique to that individual, save it as a PDF, upload to our eSignature platform, and email to the candidate.”

This process for each document was time-consuming, made worse when candidates wanted to negotiate terms in the offer letter. The painful negotiation process would involve:

• Deleting the contract from the eSignature platform
• Making the suggested changes in Word
• Saving the contract as a PDF
• Reuploading to the platform
• Resending to the candidate for signature

Over the course of a year, Cleo’s headcount tripled. The hiring momentum reached a point where David realized that the amount of time spent on paperwork and legal documents was unsustainable: “It was taking me 20 minutes for each document, and this was a huge time drain.”

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The requirements: what did Cleo need?

As the hiring curve grew steeper and Cleo continued to scale, David knew this process was not robust and would not scale with the business. David wanted an all-in-one contract automation platform that would streamline the contract workflow; ease the negotiation process, and free up his time for more high-value work.

Juro’s analytics features are great - it takes seconds to access this information and helps us improve our process and remove any bottlenecks

The solution: contract workflows that scale with the business

In September 2019, David implemented Juro as Cleo’s contract automation platform. The platform was quickly adopted to agree and manage a variety of documents.

• Dramatic time-savings: “the primary return on investment for me has been in time-savings. With the old process, it was taking up to 15 minutes to create and send an offer letter. Now, with Juro, it takes two minutes, from the template to an email.”
• A centralized workflow: “I can create a personalized offer letter from a template in Juro and negotiate in-browser with the candidate, allowing them to leave suggestions and comments on the document itself. Even post-signature, everything is centralized in one place and easily searchable, which has benefitted the wider business.”
• Actionable insights: “Juro’s analytics features are great - I can view statistics on the end-to-end process, the volume of contracts sent for signing, and filter by contract type. It takes seconds to access this information. It’s useful internally as it helps us improve our process and remove any bottlenecks.”
• Contracts in one place: alongside offer letters, Juro is also used to manage contractor agreements, consulting agreements, NDAs and onboarding forms. “Employment-related agreements represent 90 per cent of documents the business sends out for signature, so I wanted to automate that workflow first. Now I’m looking at how we can digitize offer agreements for customers.”

The time we’ve saved equates to almost two full working days - and this will multiply as we continue to scale and use Juro for other use cases

The results: streamlined, supercharged contract automation

Cleo wanted a contract automation platform that would save time on the contract process, ease negotiations, and free up David’s time for more high-value work. Since implementing Juro, the business has seen the benefits of a streamlined workflow.

“The time we’ve saved equates to almost two full working days - and this will multiply as we continue to scale and use Juro for other use cases.” David can now dedicate his time to the growing internal operations team with the reassurance that contracts are under control: “Juro has delivered on the promise it sold of getting time back on contract automation - I would absolutely recommend it!”