“That was a lot,” muttered someone behind me as we shuffled, along with 2,700 other attendees, out of the Hynes Convention Center’s cavernous main stage.
It was an apt way to describe Jack Newton’s opening address kicking off the 13th annual ClioCon. Newton came out in a trademark blazer-on-t-shirt look and proceeded to serve the audience a fire hose in the face worth of information. Looking both forward and backward, Newton walked through the company’s moves over the last year — and its pending acquisition of vLex — Newton stringing everything together into a fairly overwhelming vision. In a space where tech providers like to stake out a cozy niche, Clio is going to do… everything.
Well, not everything, but most everything. Small law firm practice management remains at the core, but now they have a completely separate unit working on Biglaw and large corporate legal departments. Business of law remains their legacy, but now they’re a practice of law provider. Legal research? Sure! Law firm AI? Why not? CRM? Of course! One clever joke at 8am’s rebranding aside, by the end of the presentation, it felt as though Clio isn’t competing against other practice management providers anymore, but everyone from Thomson Reuters to Harvey.
Legal tech doesn’t have a history of anyone being all things to all people, Newton explained that we’ve reached a crossroads where it’s not only a possible approach, but an essential one.
Artificial intelligence runs on context. Without context, it’s just hurling words at a dartboard while assuring the user that their query was very smart. With context, the algorithm can provide better responses and make connections across the workflow. So tear down the silos between business of law and practice of law. Allow the system to understand the calendar and exactly what that means for drafting.
“With Clio Work, we’re launching a new era of legal productivity,” Newton explained. “By integrating vLex’s world-class legal research library and Vincent AI directly into the Clio platform, we’re giving legal professionals one intelligent workspace to manage cases and execute AI-powered workflows, all without switching systems. Clio Work leverages more context than any legal AI in the world, combining your matter and practice data, together with the world’s most comprehensive database of legal data, to deliver the highest quality outcomes. It’s everything a lawyer needs to think, write, and win, all in one place.” The Intelligent Legal Work Platform, as Clio brands it, brings Clio’s core products — Manage, Grow, Draft, and the new Work — into a single AI nervous system.
But this horizontal expansion of what Clio’s offering its small and solo customers, organically inspired the vertical expansion into Biglaw. Getting Clio to this point required key acquisitions. Good thing the company had gobs of money. Specifically, Clio went out and picked up ShareDo (revamped as Clio Operate), which provided an operational spine for massive firms built to make managing 2,000 lawyers feel less like herding cats through Outlook. And very soon, Clio will have acquired vLex and its Vincent AI offering that rests on a billion-plus legal document archive (becoming Clio Library). The thing is, these were already enterprise-grade tools with homes in Biglaw, so Clio might as well join that market too.
Legal tech doesn’t scale up from small law to Biglaw very often. On the other hand, Clio has the advantage of integrating products with existing Biglaw relationships. It’s easier to close the deal when you’re already inside the door.
All this Biglaw talk could have alienated the small law crowd, but Newton made sure to assuage those fears. Enterprise won’t steal zero-sum resources from Clio’s small law work, it’s going to be a completely separate unit. It’s also, he explained, going to funnel key insights back to the small law product. By solving Biglaw’s toughest operational puzzles, Clio plans to effectively level the entire profession. When a 2,000-lawyer shop demands bulletproof features, the same code improves billing for the 10-lawyer firm down the street who otherwise might have just developed its own nimble workaround.
This all felt a bit like a moonshot. Legal tech vendors don’t generally talk like this. There’s always talk of exciting updates and expansions, but Newton’s vision involves fundamentally rethinking how law firms divide their work. It’s all about the execution, of course, but looking around the convention center and remembering my first ClioCon in the basement of a Chicago hotel with a few hundred attendees, it’s difficult to bet against Clio’s capacity to convert on its ambitions.
The post Clio Unveils Plan To Become An Everything App For Lawyers appeared first on Above the Law.
“That was a lot,” muttered someone behind me as we shuffled, along with 2,700 other attendees, out of the Hynes Convention Center’s cavernous main stage.
It was an apt way to describe Jack Newton’s opening address kicking off the 13th annual ClioCon. Newton came out in a trademark blazer-on-t-shirt look and proceeded to serve the audience a fire hose in the face worth of information. Looking both forward and backward, Newton walked through the company’s moves over the last year — and its pending acquisition of vLex — Newton stringing everything together into a fairly overwhelming vision. In a space where tech providers like to stake out a cozy niche, Clio is going to do… everything.
Well, not everything, but most everything. Small law firm practice management remains at the core, but now they have a completely separate unit working on Biglaw and large corporate legal departments. Business of law remains their legacy, but now they’re a practice of law provider. Legal research? Sure! Law firm AI? Why not? CRM? Of course! One clever joke at 8am’s rebranding aside, by the end of the presentation, it felt as though Clio isn’t competing against other practice management providers anymore, but everyone from Thomson Reuters to Harvey.
Legal tech doesn’t have a history of anyone being all things to all people, Newton explained that we’ve reached a crossroads where it’s not only a possible approach, but an essential one.
Artificial intelligence runs on context. Without context, it’s just hurling words at a dartboard while assuring the user that their query was very smart. With context, the algorithm can provide better responses and make connections across the workflow. So tear down the silos between business of law and practice of law. Allow the system to understand the calendar and exactly what that means for drafting.
“With Clio Work, we’re launching a new era of legal productivity,” Newton explained. “By integrating vLex’s world-class legal research library and Vincent AI directly into the Clio platform, we’re giving legal professionals one intelligent workspace to manage cases and execute AI-powered workflows, all without switching systems. Clio Work leverages more context than any legal AI in the world, combining your matter and practice data, together with the world’s most comprehensive database of legal data, to deliver the highest quality outcomes. It’s everything a lawyer needs to think, write, and win, all in one place.” The Intelligent Legal Work Platform, as Clio brands it, brings Clio’s core products — Manage, Grow, Draft, and the new Work — into a single AI nervous system.
But this horizontal expansion of what Clio’s offering its small and solo customers, organically inspired the vertical expansion into Biglaw. Getting Clio to this point required key acquisitions. Good thing the company had gobs of money. Specifically, Clio went out and picked up ShareDo (revamped as Clio Operate), which provided an operational spine for massive firms built to make managing 2,000 lawyers feel less like herding cats through Outlook. And very soon, Clio will have acquired vLex and its Vincent AI offering that rests on a billion-plus legal document archive (becoming Clio Library). The thing is, these were already enterprise-grade tools with homes in Biglaw, so Clio might as well join that market too.
Legal tech doesn’t scale up from small law to Biglaw very often. On the other hand, Clio has the advantage of integrating products with existing Biglaw relationships. It’s easier to close the deal when you’re already inside the door.
All this Biglaw talk could have alienated the small law crowd, but Newton made sure to assuage those fears. Enterprise won’t steal zero-sum resources from Clio’s small law work, it’s going to be a completely separate unit. It’s also, he explained, going to funnel key insights back to the small law product. By solving Biglaw’s toughest operational puzzles, Clio plans to effectively level the entire profession. When a 2,000-lawyer shop demands bulletproof features, the same code improves billing for the 10-lawyer firm down the street who otherwise might have just developed its own nimble workaround.
This all felt a bit like a moonshot. Legal tech vendors don’t generally talk like this. There’s always talk of exciting updates and expansions, but Newton’s vision involves fundamentally rethinking how law firms divide their work. It’s all about the execution, of course, but looking around the convention center and remembering my first ClioCon in the basement of a Chicago hotel with a few hundred attendees, it’s difficult to bet against Clio’s capacity to convert on its ambitions.
The post Clio Unveils Plan To Become An Everything App For Lawyers appeared first on Above the Law.
