What's next for Clio? 'We’ll always remain focused on customer success'
Jack Newton, the CEO and founder of Clio, a legal technology company, speaks Monday during his morning keynote address at the 2024 Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Victor Li)
As Jack Newton, the CEO and founder of Clio, a legal technology company, took the stage for his keynote address Monday at the 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference, happening this year in Austin, Texas, he was in a reflective mood.
The company has come a long way since it debuted at the ABA Techshow in 2008 and hosted its early Clio Cloud Conferences at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel in Chicago. For the longest time, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company was content to market its practice management software primarily to small law firm and solo practice lawyers in the United States and Canada.
Today, the company is worth $3 billion and has expanded to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand while sponsoring an NHL team and packing convention centers for its annual conferences.
According to Clio officials, they hope to get even bigger in the coming years.
With the newly announced generative artificial intelligence productivity assistant Clio Duo leading the way, the company now boasts a suite of products aimed at helping lawyers with tasks including billing, accounting and client intake.
The goal is to dramatically expand its presence in the world of mid-market firms while establishing itself in more countries.
Ronnie Gurion, the chief operating officer at Clio, says the company is looking to be a global brand and already has relationships with consultants, lawyers and firms in nearly 130 countries in addition to the ones in which they already have a significant presence.
“We’ve really honed our go-to-market strategy over the last couple of years,” says Gurion, who joined Clio in 2021 after working in various executive roles for Expedia, Orbitz, Airbnb and Uber. “We expect to supercharge that now.”
Citing the findings in the company’s latest Legal Trends Report, Gurion points out that lawyers are leaving billions of dollars on the table, and that even the slightest bit of help could make a huge difference in terms of increasing productivity and bringing in more money.
“The rate of adoption of AI has been mind-blowing and exciting,” Gurion says. “Even a few minutes of savings can go a long way.”
Gurion acknowledges that the midsize firm market is wide, vast and diverse, with different needs and pain points compared to solos and small firms. Nevertheless, he asserts that Clio, which defines midsize firms as having between 20 to 200 lawyers, is well-positioned to serve them, pointing to the company’s emphasis on customer service and customization options.
To help the company realize its expansion goals, Clio, which is also an advertiser with the ABA Journal, plans to aggressively hire sales people, according to Jenny Dingus, senior vice president of global sales at Clio. Despite its plans to expand, Dingus says the company will maintain its focused, specialized mindset and hopes to use that to help Clio enter new markets.
“At our core, we are a legal tech company,” says Dingus, who spent 10 years at RingCentral, a cloud-based communication platform, before joining Clio in 2022. “All we do is support legal professionals and their needs.”
And as those needs expand, Clio plans to accommodate them. According to Jonathan Watson, the chief technology officer at Clio, Clio Duo does not yet have legal research and writing capabilities, nor is it capable of analyzing a firm’s past matters to help guide decision making on fees, billing rates, budgeting and internal strategy—but those options are on the horizon.
“Like any growth stage company, we have to think how our culture will evolve over time,” says Watson, who joined Clio in 2017 after working as director of engineering at Shopify. “But we’ll always remain focused on customer success.”
