B2B marketplace contracts: how to agree them at scale

Jacq Abernathy: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. My name is Jacq Abernathy. I'm the VP of Customer Success here at Juro and your host today. Marketplace businesses agree and manage contracts at really what would be considered unprecedented volumes. And many of them are able to do this at a speed that is unrivaled by many, whilst also collaborating across multiple teams as well. So there’s certainly no small feat there.

At the forefront of this, we have two companies, Wolt and Takealot, that are two marketplace businesses that have very successfully implemented self -serve contracts and streamlined their contract processes with Juro. And we’re joined by two of their very own. They’re going to talk us through how they’ve successfully implemented self -serve contracts at a very huge scale. We’re going to also see the slide in the platform as well. And then they are going to, we’re going to dive into some practical advice and actually walk through some lightning fast workflows that are going to help set you for faster contracting in 2024.

So I’m going to introduce our panelists today. We have two individuals. We have Maryke Richards, who is the Senior Legal Counsel at Takealot Group. And we also have Juho, who is Project and Outsourcing Manager at Wolt. Thank you both so, so much for joining us. I’m going to involve you in this conversation very, very shortly. Before we dive into this, I just wanted to encourage all the participants today to ask questions throughout a session using the questions tab. We are going to try to get to as many of these as possible. And then finally, just one quick admin note, we are recording a session and a copy of this will be sent to your email addresses once the webinar concludes. So I think those are all the fun details. So with that, let’s go ahead and dive into the meat of the topic. So Maryke, I’m going to start with you.

B2B marketplace contracts: legal teams

Maryke Richards: Hi Jacq and everybody. Thank you so much for the lovely introduction. Really happy to be part of this discussion today. I'm the senior legal counsel and myself and my team oversee all the corporate and commercial work for the Takealot Group. So the Takealot Group currently consists of three group companies, our primary brand, which is Takealot.com. That's a pure-play e-commerce platform selling general merchandise. And through this platform, we also act as a marketplace for third-party sellers.

Then we also serve as a company called Mr. Delivery, which is our on-demand food delivery business. This business functions fully as a marketplace for restaurant and other food outlets. And then we also have Superbliss.com, who's a pure play e-commerce retailer specializing in fashion and home wear.

And so as the legal team, we support all three of those group companies. And when it came to looking at contact automation platforms, we obviously were looking for a solution that would be fitting for all three of these businesses who are very distinct and very different in their own way. And so we were looking for something that had the capability to create bespoke solutions for each one of them. We are 18 to 24 months into our journey with Juro. And so I look forward to sharing what we've achieved within this period, but also what's still ahead for us. I think just in the last year, we've generated over 10 ,000 documents in the platform. And we now have 240 active users across organizations. That's across all the three group companies.

Jacq Abernathy: Amazing. Thank you so much. So three different group companies, nearly 10 ,000 contracts, your processing documents, that is quite the scale. And one of the questions that we hear often from folks that are contemplating moving into the space comes down to how do you successfully implement or work on a tool like this? And so my question for you is, can you share how Takealot's legal team collaborates and agrees on contracts across the business?

Unified drafting and negotiation at B2B marketplaces

Maryke Richards: 100%. So we didn’t have, perhaps as a starting point, when it came to embarking on this project, we didn’t have the luxury of having a dedicated legal ops person in our organization or specialized project managers. To assist with the implementation of this. This is a project that we took on as the commercial lawyers, wanting to look at more efficient ways of contact negotiation and drafting and execution across all through the group companies. And so from the onset, we were always going to follow a very user-centric approach to implementation, which is spending enough time defining what the problem is that you’re actually trying to solve.

Within each one of those businesses, which required a lengthy consultation process with all the users that we were dealing with. It was also always going to be a collaborative approach. So we wanted to design for the user, but also with the user. And so in designing bespoke solutions with each user within Juro, we were designing those solutions collectively with them.

Maryke Richards: So we didn’t take an approach of this is the legal team trying to implement tech just to augment the delivery of legal services to the group. We wanted to see how we can enable these businesses to scale also the way in which they contract and also for each one of those businesses speed to market and the speed at which we take innovation to the market is so important. And we wanted to see how we could support that as the legal team.

Jacq Abernathy: That’s great to hear. And sometimes I find that there’s this desire to want to get something live really quickly, because obviously you want to be able to kind of solve the problem you’re trying to solve. But what I’m hearing is that you guys almost like slowed down to speed up by really understanding these cases and really getting a sense for how these things have operated, which clearly has helped create a positive impact for your business. I understand. Nice. Love that. Thank you. So you guys have one central legal function you mentioned across the different business units. How is it that you today delegate and manage the various and numerous legal tasks across all these multiple departments and boards?

Self-service B2B contracts

Maryke Richards: So because we want a central legal function, we also wanted to create a system within the Juro platform where we create opportunities for the users to self-service so that we limit the legal to use intervention to transactions and to contracts that are actually of high value, high risk or that require strategic thinking.

And so there’s, we’ve had to identify the documents that we could deploy, that users could use to solve service and then also structure those that require legal intervention or intervention by other stakeholders in the business, whether that be our finance team or our engineering team or our data security. And so we structured each document based on the requirements of that particular team and user group that we were dealing with.

And we also enabled them through building playbooks into each one of their templates, dealing with general questions that we get and are often in the legal department, whether it’s around the liability or jurisdiction clauses, but also giving playbooks on the commercial terms, sections of the contracts that they deal with. To empower those individuals to be able to negotiate and conclude those contracts faster.

Jacq Abernathy: That’s great. So it sounds like you guys have taken, you’ve been able to achieve a balance where you’re not just managing the legal tasks, but you’re really helping to empower your end users to be able to do as much as possible by themselves without necessarily involving you in all the details. Is that correct?

Maryke Richards: Yes, that’s correct. 100%. And we also found through building these solutions collectively with the users, they also gained a better understanding of their own projects. And so it involving them in the implementation process and building bespoke workflows within the platform for them. So it’s been a win win both ways really.

Jacq Abernathy: Perfect. That was going to lead me to my next question, which is any of the positive outcomes may be expected or unexpected that came from implementing Juro.

Maryke Richards: Absolutely, that was one of them. Definitely, we saw enhanced collaboration between legal and all the other stakeholders in our business. A greater understanding of their own contracts as the users. The terms of it, harder to negotiate it because they also had better, they had their playbooks now. And so even onboarding new users becomes easier once your workflow is actually created and your playbooks are embedded in those documents.

And so that was some of the unexpected benefits that we experienced and then also just up-skilling the legal team itself because we didn’t rely on an external team or outsource the implementation. Our own team learned a lot about systems implementation and so it was a great learning experience and we’re still continuing to learn. Like I said, it’s like we’re only 24 months into our journey but there’s still a lot to build and you guys keep deploying new functionality. And so as soon as we think, OK, we’ve mastered this now, there’s obviously wonderful new functions available that we need to learn how to use and then also how do we deploy that to enable the businesses to use them.

Jacq Abernathy: That’s amazing. Well, thank you for that. And sometimes when I’m catching up with some of our customers, we often hear that. Kind of preusing a tool that helps scale the legal team. Oftentimes you get sucked into these day to day tasks where there’s not even bandwidth to think about other areas of the business that would allow the team to upscale as well.

Risk in B2B marketplace contracts

So it’s interesting to hear that reflected in this conversation as well. And one more question for you, which is probably, which might be a big one, this often comes up when we have these types of webinars and conversations, comes down to kind of, the risk aspects when you’re moving into a scale platform. So specifically, how did you handle any legal or risk aspects when you moved to self-serve your contracts on such a big scale as you guys are doing now?

Maryke Richards: So there’s great tools within the platform that allows you to mitigate legal risk as well. And so in addition to structuring the actual document in a way that allows certain users to make certain inputs. We also drafted SOPs for each particular team. That clarifies exactly what they’re allowed to do within that document and which parts the legal team or the finance team or IT security team need to be involved in. And then what’s great about the platform as well is you build those approvals in systematically.

I mean, you know, you work with us on workarounds where a user can’t just upload a third party document and send it for signature. Because there are approvals embedded in those documents that triggers a notification to the legal team to look at that document. And so what’s great about the Juro tool is that those sections that do require legal’s input of the document is built into the system. And that’s how we manage the legal riskwhen we deploy it.

Jacq Abernathy: Nice. That’s so cool to hear because you’ve kind of worked with the users to help them enable and have self-service as much as possible, but not to the point where they’re creating risk for the business because you’ve been able to provide a layer of controls within your setup allow you to close off parts of the document that someone other than a qualified lawyer should not be participating in. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much. We’re going to come back to you later on in our webinar today. We’re going to open up questions more broadly to the audience, but I’m going to go ahead and just transition quickly. So for everyone in the audience, we were able to understand for Maryke some of the anticipated or unanticipated positive outcomes and how she’s been able to enable her team to give you some real life tangible access to this. We’re just going to give you a quick demonstration of how this might come to life in the platform itself so you can see firsthand what this looks like.

Self-serve contract drafting demonstration

Sam: Hey there, this is Sam from the Juro Commercial Team. In the next few minutes, I’m going to show you how, as a salesperson, I can get a watertight contract from draft to signature without having to rely heavily on my legal team. So let’s dive on in. First of all, what we’re looking at right now is the general sales workspace. As a salesperson, I only have access to the sales workspace and the documents within. All other sensitive documents can be hidden by legal. So let’s create a contract.

First of all, what I’ll do is go to add document and create from template. It’s worth noting that contracts can be created via integrations. So as a salesperson, this could be from my CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, or if I was in the HR team, for example, this could be from an ATS or an HRIS system. For now, I’m going to create from template directly within Juro. I’ll be prompted to select the template that I want to use. So in this case, SaaS terms with a clear description of when this should be used provided by the legal team. I’ll be then guided through a questionnaire. So this is going to guide me how to fill this contract out quickly, confidently with a universal data structure as well. So name of other party, entity, address, effective date, governing law, selected as UK.

Sam: And then payment terms as an example. Of course, this questionnaire can be completely customized and I can see a status bar showing how many questions left I do need to complete that. Click continue and that will initiate a new contract. Now we see the body of the agreement has been created and we also have a summary of the key information on the right hand side here in a data layer we call these smart fields and it will show you exactly what’s contained within the contract.

As a salesperson, I can be limited from actually editing the body of the contract. So editing any of the free text, what I would be able to change is the predefined fields, the key variable information that’s contained within the contract. I see now that the contract is populated. We also have some conditional logic. So according to selection, such as for example, governing law, I can have different positions appearing automatically within the contract that are predefined by the legal team.

Not only the clauses and terms can be populated, but also the approvers conditionally. So what I’ll do is open up the document members here and I see in this case that I have one approver added automatically and I have one approver who is not added yet. The reason being is that this is perhaps someone from the finance team. This person is added as an approver only when the payment terms do not equal our standard 14 days.

So if I change that, let’s say as a salesperson, I were to have selected a non-standard position of 30 days. What I would then see is that the conditional approval is now added and this person now needs to quickly give a thumbs up on this contract before it’s sent for signing. We can collaborate on this internally. So if as a salesperson, I need to quickly ask someone a question, I can tag them and I can say, you know, can you check X position?

Drag and drop that onto the document, this person will then get a notification saying they’ve been tagged via email, click on this, see what’s being referred to. They can then respond saying, you know, looks fine. Then resolve that comment. We’ll then send it off for approval. So approvals can be sent from within Jura. This will go to the approvers email address. In this case, what I’ll do is I’ll just approve this one internally. The document owner then gets a notification and we can go ahead and send it off for signature.

To send it off for signature, all we need to do is add the email address of the signatory. Once that’s ready, click prepare sign and request and we can send it off now from within Juro, perhaps with a signing reminder there. I’ll do so now. So that’s the process for creating a watertight contract from start to finish with guidance by the legal team as a salesperson. Thanks.

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