The 13th annual Clio user conference kicked off this week with the traditional opening keynote by Jack Newton, Clio CEO. Newton delivered what may have been the most consequential keynote in the company’s history and one that signals a shift by Clio from a traditional practice management provider to a comprehensive platform that essentially does everything for the business and practice of law.
The Announcements
Newton walked through a number of updates and enhancements to Clio’s core products of Manage, Grow, and Accounting. He also announced a move by Clio to go after the large firm market, firms with over 200 employees. (Clio has historically served solo, small, and, more recently, midsize law firms). Clio recently acquired ShareDo to facilitate this addition. ShareDo offers practice and management software for many large firms.
But That’s Not the Big Story
Clio also earlier this year acquired vLex, the heavy-duty AI legal research player. The acquisition is pending regulatory approval. It is the vLex acquisition that is powering the Clio transformation that Newton described in his keynote.
vLex has a huge amount of legal data in its wheelhouse to power sophisticated legal AI research. On top of this data, vLex developed Vincent, a powerful AI tool to work with this data and enable all sorts of actions and work.
This means a couple of things. First, by acquiring vLex, Clio can now offer its customers AI legal research tools. Clio customers will no longer have to go one place for its practice management needs and a second place for its substantive legal work, like research. It makes what Clio can provide much more comprehensive and all inclusive.
Second, by getting access to vLex’s powerful AI tool, Clio can allow its customers to apply Vincent to a firm’s internal documents. Clio’s tools can thus offer a whole range of automated AI work across the firm. In essence, it’s marrying internal and external data upon which AI can run.
So Clio can now offer such things as a transactional and automated document drafting which Newton described as a drafting teammate. It can offer tools that manage workflows. Clio can automate client intake almost completely, even determining whether an engagement should be accepted in the first place. It can calendar dates and then automate compliance.
It can write briefs. It can take actions and steps in matters to automate a huge amount of work throughout the life of a matter from billing to collections. It can do sophisticated legal work like complex contract analysis, legal research, or brief writing. From back-office work to preparing the Supreme Court brief, Clio’s tools will be embedded and central to what law firms and lawyers do.
The vLex acquisition also means that Clio is no longer a practice management company. It’s much more of a comprehensive provider of all needs of its customers big and small.
To the extent it wasn’t before, Clio is now a legal AI company. No one else in the market can offer such a monolithic set of service powered by internal and external data. It’s now the proverbial one stop shop that other vendors have been trying to figure out by either offering integration with other vendors or even loose partnerships. But those arrangements can be complicated and not allow for nimbleness and centralized decision making which matters now more than ever.
But There Are Dangers
Newton took a few moments during the keynote to walk through what a day in the life would look like for a lawyer using a full set of Clio AI tools. He showed the tools doing virtually everything that needed to be done.
But then it hit me. Much of what many lawyers and legal professionals do every day can now be done by AI tools. With AI doing so much, what will lawyers do all day? What will paralegals and administrative staff do??
At several points during the keynote, Newton referred to the AI tools as a “teammate.” He even described Vincent as a “brilliant junior associate.” That’s great but what happens to all the work the human “teammates” were doing? How do you become that brilliant human junior associate when the so many legal answers can be found through AI?
It’s often said that AI will enable lawyers to do the more sophisticated legal work that they don’t have time to do now. But is there really enough need for that kind of work? (Not to mention the fact that not every lawyer is good at the vision thing.)
And where will these sophisticated thinkers come from in the future if we don’t need as many associates? Which raises an even bigger question: how will we train and develop younger lawyers to be future lawyers and thinkers? How will we develop younger lawyers to be strategic thinkers?
The truth is pretty clear: the legal profession as we know it is going to be different and perhaps even downsized. We have to face the possibility that lawyers and legal professionals may need different skills.
It’s an inevitability and reality that few in the legal business are preparing for. I talked to Ed Walters, vLex’s Chief Strategy Officer, after the keynote and he made a very good point: “We need to be teaching younger lawyers things like judgment, discernment, counseling, and how to assess the outputs of AI.”
Those that do will prosper, those who don’t won’t. As William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
We also need to recognize that there will certainly be smaller administrative staffs, who are composed of people who will be hurt the worst by job displacement. While it’s true, as John Foreman, Clio’s Chief Product Officer, put it, “AI is really good at administrative work and a lot of administrative work just isn’t getting done.” But that still means that some job functions that humans are doing will be replaced creating the risk of job displacement.
You can’t blame Clio for these risks. It’s doing what other vendors are trying to do and it’s doing it more responsibly than most. But I saw maybe for the first time how disruptive AI can and will be.
And there’s another danger when one company provides all the necessary services.
Enshitification
Once Clio can provide soup to nuts needs of law firms such that other vendors are rendered irrelevant, the temptation to increase prices and decrease services will always be there. Once you are in a walled garden and a company like Clio can provide the kind of wall-to-wall service you can’t get anyplace else, it’s tough to leave the garden. Even if it ultimately costs more to get less. It’s the enshitification syndrome that Cory Doctorow waxes eloquently about in his book titled Enshitification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
Again, Clio shows no indication under present leadership of going this route. As I said before, it’s one of the more responsible players in legal tech. But things can change. Leadership can change, economic forces can shift. All of which points to the risks of a single provider being able to meet every need.
Make no mistake, being able to serve the majority of customers’ needs with one provider is good for lots of reasons. But customers also need to recognize that there are risks. Divorcing a provider is not easy, particularly where you have to replace one vendor that supplies your every need with six or seven separate ones. You need to have an exit plan out of the walled garden.
The Big Story
So the big story from the keynote is not the new and shiny AI products Clio introduced and Newton discussed.
It’s Clio’s transformation from practice management provider to comprehensive legal services platform, one capable of handling sophisticated legal work across every aspect of a firm’s operations. For customers, it’s undeniably powerful. Whether it proves to be a blessing or a curse will depend on how both Clio and the legal profession navigate the profound disruption ahead.
Time will tell.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
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