The New Clio Experience Aims To Be Effortless

During his keynote at the annual Clio Cloud Conference, CEO and Founder Jack Newton announced the launch of the “new Clio experience” — a top-to-bottom re-engineering and redesign of its practice management platform. ATL recently spoke with Jack and Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in Residence, about the company’s evolving mission.

You’ve said that the launch of the new Clio experience — developed under the code name “Apollo” — signals a change in the company’s mission, moving practice management to the cloud to moving the practice of law to the cloud.  Could you elaborate on the implications of this shift?

Jack: Technology companies need to constantly reinvent  themselves. Our original mission, which sounded audacious in 2007, was to move practice management to the cloud.  We see this as substantially complete. In our first ten years we succeeded in delivering a cloud-based tool to allow lawyers to practice more efficiently. As Clio enters our next decade, we’re asking “what is our second act?” We talk a lot at Clio about the idea of “effortless experiences.” The truly transformative companies of the last decade — Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Netflix — have all really had effortless customer experiences at the heart of what they are delivering. We think that the same opportunity exists in the legal industry. Lawyers should be delivering services in a way that is as effortless as possible for their clients.

To give you an example, today you see a lot of brick and mortar law offices and expensive downtown real estate that clients need to travel to in order to see their lawyers.  We see that interaction moving to one that is effortless, mobile-first, and cloud-first, and one that clients can access through their smart phones, where, for example, one can have a secure real-time video chat with their lawyer on-demand.  

Obviously the new Clio experience was created drawing on lessons learned over the last decade. Keeping in mind the proverbial wisdom that we only truly learn from failure and missteps — can you tell us about some of the major lessons learned over the years and how they inform the new Clio experience?

Joshua: There are a couple different angles to that question. One concerns Clio as a product and what we’ve learned in the last ten years. Our designers and product managers have done extensive reviews of both the user statistics we track, as well as over 600 hours and 60 days conducting in-person interviews over the last year alone. They have traveled to cities across North America and essentially embedded themselves in customer law firms to see how they work, giving us insights beyond what is available from the statistics. Those two things came to together to inform the design of new Clio experience. This depth of insight is something no other competitor has.

Jack: On the company front, nine years ago we simply threw a software tool over the fence and asked customers, “is this useful?” We had a very asymmetric relationship, where we created a tool and we hoped people would get benefit from it. What we have seen over the last nine years is that our relationship has evolved from a “product provider” to a more comprehensive partner to our customer. Law firms are coming to us with questions way above and beyond just technical support on how to use Clio as a product—they are coming to us for help on how to grow and market their firms, including things like what their hourly rate should be. That was really the genesis for the Legal Trends Report that we launched in 2016 and just issued the second edition of at this year’s Clio Cloud Conference. That was a real inflection point for us as a company — we’ve evolved to this relationship where we are a trusted partner who can give advice not only on how to run their software, but on how to run their firms. We know that the highest performing law firms in the world are going to be running Clio.  And that’s a partnership model, almost acting like a BCG or McKinsey in collaborating with our clients to invent what the future of law looks like. That’s a pretty dramatic evolution from where we were nine years ago.

At some point in the future, do you see a firm or law practice’s use of one particular technology as opposed a competitor’s becoming an actual differentiator from the perspective of the consumer of legal services?

Jack: Our focus is on turning Clio into a tremendous competitive advantage for the lawyers who use it. We know that clients like working with lawyers who use Clio and happy clients will bring more referrals and more repeat business. Customer experience is really at the heart of what drives growth for law firms. Now that we help law firms work efficiently and handle a large volume of business, we want to help them grow their law firms, get more clients, and have highly satisfied clients. We talk about Net Promoter Scores (NPS) being one of our North Star metrics, and importantly this is not just the NPS of our customers, which we monitor religiously, but the NPS of their clients, and what behavior on the lawyer’s side drives high rates of customer satisfaction.

Joshua: We are not a consumer brand, we are a business-to-business brand, but we are seeing consumers enjoy the use of our product — whether it’s the client portal or the clear billing. We’ve even had a few customer clients come along with their attorneys to the Clio Cloud Conference to learn about this company which has made their lawyers so much more engaging and effective.

Jack: We have no ambitions at the moment to become a consumer brand, but what we aspire to be is the technology behind the curtain that allows our lawyers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by their high degree of responsiveness and communication. Clio lawyers are the kind of lawyers who delivers amazing work, having reaching their full potential enabled by our technology.

Obviously the role of AI is only going to grow in the legal industry –and every other industry. Is Clio’s emphasis on the client experience presage the beginning of a true disintermediation of legal services, where the lawyer begins to be removed from the equation?  

Joshua: Yes, we are going to remove the lawyer from certain actions, actions that the lawyers shouldn’t be doing anyway. When you look at the Legal Trends Report, you see all the administrative tasks that are taking lawyers away from their billable activity. That’s the sort of thing where we think technology can remove the lawyer, so we are not removing the lawyer from the practice of law, but from having to micromanage the business of law.

Jack: When you look at the way lawyers are spending their days right now, they are spending 6 hours of an 8-hour workday on administrative and overhead-related tasks and only 2 hours on billable work — that is the the part that need automating, the part where the robots need to come and save the lawyer. In those missing 6 hours, that is where AI can shine. The place where AI will never supplant the lawyer is in the lawyer-to-client interaction where they are helping the client solve their problems and understanding all the nuances of the client’s personal life and business. If anything, we want this positive, effortless experience to allow lawyers to deliver on the competitive advantage of being human.