I spent Friday in the British Columbia city of Burnaby, just outside Vancouver, visiting the headquarters of Clio, the company that developed the first commercially released cloud-based practice management platform. I was there along with three other bloggers and journalists for a media briefing in advance of the Clio Cloud Conference later this month.
I agreed in advance of the briefing to an embargo that prevents me from telling you until later this month about Clio’s product news. But I can tell you something about what I saw and I can certainly talk about the company.
Clio’s offices occupy the top two floors of a building in a nondescript office park. IBM formerly occupied the space and continues to operate on the building’s lower floors. The space is techno-hip all the way. There’s a yoga room, a meditation room, and a ping-pong room. A central open eating area includes taps dispensing craft beer and both red and white wines. There are no private offices or cubicle walls. Seating is open for everyone, including the two founders, Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau. The obligatory foosball table had a corner all to itself.
Clio cofounders Rian Gauvreau and Jack Newton at their Vancouver office Friday.
Coincidentally, earlier this year, I visited the offices of another practice-management company, MyCase, which is located in San Diego, also in an office park. Except for some differences in the architecture of the buildings they occupy and their floorplans, the two sets of offices were strikingly similar. If you’ve ever wondered where all the Post-It notes have gone, the answer is on virtually every vertical surface of both these legal tech companies.
One of the best parts of visiting any company is getting to meet the people who make them run. And one of the biggest surprises to me of my visit to Clio was to learn how many people Clio employs. As of today, it has 235 employees in four offices – 170 in its Vancouver headquarters, 40 in Toronto, seven in Dublin, and 16 in Calgary/Edmonton (and a couple elsewhere).
And it’s growing fast. It seemed that every other person I spoke to was a new or recent hire. I met one new hire who hadn’t even started yet, but who was following the lead of his partner, who joined the company earlier this year. The Vancouver space is nearing capacity, and it won’t take too many more hires before the company needs to find more room into which to expand.
Driving that expansion is an ever-growing user base. CEO Newton told us that Clio currently has 177,000 legal professionals across 90 countries as active users. Although subscription numbers for its competitors are hard to come by, estimates and guess-timates suggest that Clio’s user base far outpaces any of its competitors.
It is a remarkable success story for a company that launched its product just nine years ago. What makes it even more remarkable is that Clio and one other company, Rocket Matter, quite literally invented cloud-based law practice management. They did not come into this space and conquer it. Rather, they created the space and then owned it, each in its own way.
There is a friendly debate between Clio and Rocket Matter as to which came first. I looked at this once in a blog post and concluded that Rocket Matter was first out with its beta product and that Clio was first out with its general-release version, three months ahead of Rocket Matter. (I also wrote the very first blog post about Clio’s launch.)
Regardless of which was first, both were trailblazers. In fact, both were, at the time, radical, and they were radical for two reasons.
The first reason was that they were in the cloud. In 2008 when these products came out, many in the legal profession had never even heard of the cloud and, among those who had, the general consensus was that using the cloud was certainly dangerous, perhaps irresponsible, and maybe even heretical.
Second, even apart from the fact that they were cloud-based, they were radical for transforming the conception of what practice management software should be from cumbersome legacy systems to interfaces that were far more intuitive and agile.
Clio and Rocket Matter spawned a field of legal technology that was unheard of a decade ago and that is now one of the richest areas of competition and innovation in the legal industry. Both helped drive the legal profession’s broad use of cloud-based technologies – not just in practice management – and both helped drive much-broader use of practice management software.
In the years since they came on the scene, Clio and Rocket Matter have taken different paths. Clio has developed into a true practice management platform with a varied ecosystem of partners that bring it added capabilities. Rocket Matter has focused more on building and enhancing its core application. Clio has raised $26 million in venture financing. Rocket Matter’s founder Larry Port has turned away outside investors, keeping the equity close to home.
I was, of course, cognizant of this history as I toured the Clio offices on Friday and met with its staff. But what everyone there impressed upon me was that this is not a company that is content to rest on its laurels. These are people full of energy for their work and excitement about where their company is headed.
Clio defines its mission as follows: “Transform the practice of law, for good.” As it nears the ripe old age of 10, it could be argued that it has already accomplished that mission. But the clear message I heard in Vancouver is that Clio sees itself as just getting started, and that there are new trails it yet hopes to blaze.
What are those new trails? Well, stay tuned. I got a preview on Friday, and I’ll have more details at my Lawsites blog on the morning of September 25.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
