Jack Newton:
You can convert leads to clients and automate as much of that process as possible.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the traffic, rankings and cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services and strategies that help law firms not just survive but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Do me a favor and hit that follow button right now to subscribe. You’ll be the first to get every new episode delivered straight to you the moment it drops, giving you the edge. Let’s get started.
Meet legaltech pioneer, Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Clio, the world’s largest legal practice management software. Since creating Clio in 2008, over 150,000 legal professionals have trusted Clio to help grow their practice. Jack delivers insights on emerging industry opportunities, using data to make informed decisions and choosing solutions that drive long-term success. Clio recently launched a PI specific product that I think practice owners of any size will find invaluable. Here’s Jack Newton, CEO at Clio, on how the Cloud changed the trajectory of his career.
Jack Newton:
It was really clear to me as a technologist … My background by the way is computer science, machine learning. This is what I’m steeped in. So I come to legal from a technologist’s perspective. And what was clear to me in 2007 was the Cloud was this once in a generation technology wave that if you could jump on that wave and ride it, you could do some pretty incredible things. What I wanted to hone in on was what is an industry that is ripe for transformation and maybe even disruption with the Cloud. And phoned up Ryan, my lifelong friend, and said, “Hey, this Cloud thing’s going to be big. What industry should we look at bringing it to?”
And I describe us at that stage more or less being like two hammers looking for a nail. We were convinced about the Cloud, looking for an industry that could really be transformed by leveraging the Cloud. And Ryan at the time was working at Gowlings, which is one of Canada’s largest law firms, about a thousand lawyers. And he said, “I think lawyers could use a lot of help with technology.” The light bulb moment was looking at the legal industry, looking in particular at how mobile that industry is, how there’s many solo small and medium-sized firms that don’t have dedicated IT staff, they don’t have servers, they don’t have the support. And the Cloud was really an epiphany for that segment of customers and that’s the origin story for Clio.
Chris Dreyer:
I guess Clio started off with Clouds and file storage and document management, but today it’s significantly different, right? So would you put it more in the case management document storage side or is it now end to end? I mean, the CRM down to the project management. What is really the main components of Clio today?
Jack Newton:
So the breadth and depth of both the market we serve and the product we provide has expanded very substantially over the last 15 years. What used to be our only product is now called Clio Manage. So that’s the … we call it the hub of everything we do in Clio. And that’s still your core LPM/case management system. What we launched back in 2019 was our second product, which is called Clio Grow, which is a legal CRM. And this is all about tracking your leads, nurturing your leads, converting them to clients, tracking where you’re deploying your ad spend, what your highest ROI ad spend channels are. And really our view with bringing Grow to the equation is that Clio can provide a comprehensive view of your client journey, all the way from your marketing spend and intake all the way through to what’s your lifetime value of that customer after you’ve finished billing them and maybe after they’ve become even a repeat client for you over time. And let that feedback loop drive decision making around what you should spend on advertising for example.
We’ve recently launched a number of new products, including Calendar Rules, which helps you automatically docket all of your key dates around a case. We’ve launched Lawyaw, which is our document automation platform. We recently at Clio Con in October launched Clio File, which is an e-filing solution built right into our core LPM. And we launched our first AI product, Clio Duo, which is an integrated AI assistant integrated directly into Clio’s products as well. So Clio has grown from a sole product back in 2008 to a pretty broad and expansive and comprehensive group of products today.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things that I really liked being the host and hearing what you’re saying is, hey, it’s built for the solo up to the enterprise. Because I have looked at some of your competitors, some of the other options and it looks like there’s a extreme cost education process that it goes through to even use some of those tools and it wouldn’t make sense at all for a small firm. And I like that Clio has the capabilities to do small to enterprise. So if we were going to start with Clio Grow, let’s talk about some of the core features that you think of and I think of on a CRM. Obviously the data. How does the data integrate to say a website and the intake process of a firm? Where does Clio … just opening it up to you to start.
Jack Newton:
So you spark up Clio Grow and you’ve got basically two choices. You’re going to wire this up to an existing website that you’ve got and you want to make sure you’re funneling all your leads into Clio Grow or you don’t have a website baby, which is the state that a surprising number of lawyers are in. And we actually help you stand up your own website in a matter of minutes using tools integrated into Clio Grow. So we call that Grow websites. There is a huge amount of opportunity for lawyers to … I describe it as digitizing their entire intake workflow. I think the days of saying, “Here’s my 800 number on a billboard by the interstate,” are numbered. And at the end of the day, even if they see that billboard, they probably want to go to your website and they want to deal with either a chat bot on your website or they want to deal with an intake form on your website.
So a key part of Clio Grow is … again, whether it’s with a new website that you stand up with our own tools or integrate into an existing website, we help you create that intake form that brings that lead right into Clio Grow, into what we call the lead inbox. And then from that inbox you’re able to triage and with a Kanban board kind of system work your leads through the pipeline. You can automate big pieces of that advancement. You can do email nurturing campaigns to help convert those leads. And most importantly, you can make sure that you’re jumping on those leads, even with an automated, email within a matter of seconds. And as we all know, the time is a precious commodity when you’re trying to respond to these leads, especially in the PI world. Clients are going to go with … And we’ve done the data at Clio. I’d encourage your listeners to also check out our legal trends report. And if you just Google for that, you’ll find it. It’s free of charge.
But we go in depth in terms of what helps lawyers win business and the response time to inbound leads is, next to your reputation, the single biggest determinant of whether you’re going to win that lead or not. And when I say reputation, I also mean your Google My Business profile, which is another part of what Clio Grow offers, which is we help you stand up and automate everything around your Google My Business profile and make sure that you’ve got a great Google My Business profile and your leads, again, will come right from Google My Business. We also let them schedule an initial consultation with you right from Google My Business or right from your website. So this is a really cool capability of Grow as well where there’s essentially an integrated version of … Your listeners might be more familiar with Calendly, which if you’ve gotten an invite, you get to choose one of five times that works for the person on the calendar.
We’ve integrated that kind of capability right into Clio Grow so your clients can schedule time for an initial consult based on your own live real-time calendar to get that intake meeting booked. That gives you just a high level of what the workflow looks like. And Clio Grow’s mission as a product is to help make sure you can convert leads to clients and automate as much of that process as possible. Maybe the last thing I’ll say about Clio Grow that I’m super excited about is our partnership with Google where we integrated Google local service ads directly into Clio Grow. And you can deploy LSA campaigns right from Clio Grow into local service ads. And again, for anyone that’s not familiar with this new type of ad unit that Google’s launched, it’s really powerful because you only pay for leads that you generate from the campaign as opposed to pay-per-click where you could be lighting lots of money on fire and never actually converting anything. This is only for a lead that reaches out to you and actually engages with you for a certain amount of time.
Chris Dreyer:
Local services, ads or LSA present an awesome opportunity on Google because they’re at the top of Google. They hold the best virtual real estate when it comes to location, location, location. Not to mention they are pay-per-lead, not pay-per-click. LSA positioning is determined by region, response and reviews, which means prompt intake and great service fuel this marketing flywheel. By integrating with solutions like Clio, automation boosts response rates to new client inquiries. While legacy channels remain extremely relevant, LSAs form an indispensable component on the client journey for PI practices. And combined holistically, they enable injury firms to scale efficiently. Now let’s hear from Jack on how Clio improves response times to drive this flywheel.
Jack Newton:
We have emailing and texting built in. The other thing I’ll comment on, Chris, that I didn’t mention about the Clio platform and part of what makes it so powerful is we describe Clio as the operating system for legal. And one of the ways we stand behind that claim is not just that we’ve built this comprehensive end-to-end solution for law firms but we’ve actually built an integration platform on top of that that allows third party vendors to tie in and to integrate in with Clio in a really deep way. So even if we’re not providing some of the functionality you might want, whether it’s text messaging or scheduling or maybe it’s reputation management post engagement, you want to plug in Google or QuickBooks or BirdEye or you name it. CallRail is another integration partner that’s very popular.
We have over 250 integration partners that tie into Clio and expand Clio’s capabilities in really powerful ways, either from a functionality standpoint or in some cases it’s in a practice area specific way as well. So if you check out … If you just Google “Clio app directory”, you’ll see this incredible list of integration partners that any one of our customers can light up in an instant and have this really powerful extension to Clio’s capabilities.
Chris Dreyer:
Let’s move down the client journey a little bit more to the case management side. Some consumers get frustrated because they don’t get the communication. I love that you said you’ve got the Kanban approach. \[inaudible 00:11:18\] you can drag it to probably a different stage and then an automation goes out. Talk to me about just the case management, some of the key features that come to mind on that side.
Jack Newton:
We give you a single comprehensive view of your case and the case status in one location. Your data lives in one place. You never need to enter your data more than once. The data that you enter in Clio Grow, for example, flows right through into Clio Manage. And then if you’re automating a document workflow using Lawyaw, it draws from the same data in Clio Manage. So there’s this idea that it’s your source of truth, your system of record, where you know the data is always most correct and most up-to-date. We make managing affairs in your law office easy. So communicating with colleagues is easy. Assigning tasks to colleagues is easy. You have one document store where you know your most up-to-date documents are available. We also are, I would say, unique in the marketplace in that we’ve invested significantly in tools that help you communicate with your clients more effectively as well.
So we have a tool called Clio for Clients, which is a native iOS and Android app that your clients can install. If you check this out on the app store, both on Apple and Google, you’ll see it’s got basically a 5.0 rating 4.9 rating from thousands of clients that love this product because it makes doing a secure message with their lawyers easy. It makes setting a document or scanning a document with their phone to their lawyer very easy. It makes billing and payment super streamlined. And it just helps them feel more connected in real time to their lawyer. And lawyers love it because it’s a single conduit that gets them in touch with their client in a way that is not as personally invasive as text messaging where you might start getting those calls at midnight or text messages off hours that are stressful. These messages from Clio for clients are going to your whole law firm, so your assistant or your partner can respond to those messages and not just you.
So it’s a great way of putting the weight of your whole firm behind your client experience. So that’s another huge upgrade. For personal injury lawyers in particular, what we’ve heard from over the last number of years is we love how comprehensive and how strong Clio’s core LPM capabilities are, but we need better support for contingency building, we need injury calculators, we need more in the way of PI-specific functionality. And if you just added this quote unquote “small amount of functionality” to Clio, it would be the perfect fit for us. And we’ve spent the last year building out this PI capability and we’re really excited to bring it to market. We launched it at Clio Con back in October of this year. The response has been tremendous.
We also launched with new integration partners that talked about that application integration ecosystem. So we have some new PI-specific partners that are coming to the party with us, including EvenUp, which helps automate the generation of demand letters, as I’m sure a number of your listeners are aware of. So that ties right into … And again, you don’t need to re-upload data. That feeds right into EvenUp and you get your demand letter pushed right into Clio. We also partnered with a really cool startup that Bob Simon is supporting and backing called Attorney Share. So this is a referral network that you can plug right into Clio and easily refer out and take in referral cases through this trusted referral network that Attorney Share is building. But that’s a little bit of the highlight reel of what Clio Manage offers.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of times you’re in more jurisdiction, you need to monetize the lead, so you’ve got the integration to Attorney Share, which is a marketplace and that’s fantastic on its own. But what kind of capabilities does it have to work with your peers in terms of transparency and just the referral relationships?
Jack Newton:
We see this referral network as a really key aspect of how especially PI lawyers work with one another. And what we’ve thought about Clio Grow as is essentially the routing protocol for how leads move around and how they get accepted and sent out. So referrals are really a first class citizen in Clio Grow where referrals will show up in your lead inbox and you’ll be able to prioritize them and rank them. And in this integration with Attorney Share, and there’s other referral networks we’ll be plugging into over time as well, you’ll be able to again see what referrals are available to you. And then take them right into Clio Grow. Again, without having to re-enter any data, without even having to touch a keyboard. And have this referral and all the associated case data waiting for you to review and potentially schedule an initial intake meeting or whatever the next step would be with that client.
Chris Dreyer:
All these capabilities are amazing. I think any individual that’s looking for more leverage from a software capability … There’s so many different … There’s marketing application. There’s leverage from a labor perspective. You can enhance your team with the AI with the tool. In the market, there’s your Lead Docket, Filevine, your Litify, and Clio. There’s a few others, but typically I hear the decisions on those three. Where does Clio stand out amongst some of your peers? Because I know you’ve analyzed them. I know you want to stay ahead of the pack. What do you say to those individuals?
Jack Newton:
We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about or worrying about the competition at Clio. We’re very focused on our customers and what they’re asking for and innovating on their behalf. We’ve been doing that for 15 years now and we have seen a lot of success with that approach. We’re two to three times larger than our next closest competitor in the marketplace. We’re by far the largest legal practice management provider on the planet. And as a result, the commitment I can make to any customers when they’re doing this bake off and thinking about who do I go with, I can promise you that we’re going to have the highest innovation velocity. Because we are benefiting from this flywheel effect where thanks to the fact we’re the largest provider in the market, we can invest the most in our product. We have an engineering team that is larger than most of our competitors’ entire company to give you a data point.
So we’re able to invest more in the product. We’re able to make the product better and innovate faster than any of our competitors. And that’s a virtuous flywheel where that in turn brings more customers into our orbit and we’re able to keep accelerating that flywheel of innovation and working really closely with our customers to, again, build what they’re asking for, but also build on their behalf, innovate on their behalf where they may not understand what’s possible with technology. AI is a great example. But we can build deep empathy for the problems they face and understand how we can bring the power of technology, bring the power of the Cloud, bring the power of AI to bear to really solve those problems for our customers. So when I get asked that question, Chris, by a customer, that’s really the commitment I’ve made for 15 years, which is basically you will not regret choosing Clio.
You’ll be in good company with thousands of your peers. We’ve got over 150,000 legal professionals on the platform. Will be innovating so fast, you’ll probably ask us to slow down because it’s hard to keep up. And that’s proven to be a successful formula. And hey, there’s the bake-offs and feature matrixes and all that that folks can go check out. But I really think that it’s more about the relationship. But I won’t get in front of you or your audience and say Clio is the right choice for anyone regardless of their situation. The right choice might be one of the companies you mentioned. Everyone’s got their sweet spot. Every firm has a different set of needs. And you need to approach this purchasing decision with a lot of gravity because it is like getting married in the sense that you’re going to be with this provider for five or 10 years.
And if you get it wrong, if you get a year into this and realize I made a bad choice and I need to switch, or worse, you get three or four or five years into it and realize all my data’s in here, I’m firmly entrenched, and this company is not … I mean, sometimes you see companies aren’t viable, they end up failing, they end up going in … they get acquired by a PE firm and stop innovating and start ramping prices. You can end up in a very ugly situation very quickly. And it does get as messy as a divorce in terms of … Not that you need to worry about data migrations with divorces, but you have a whole lot to worry about with a software product and a complex product that makes the switching cost extremely painful. So I think doing your research, doing your homework, and really doing that bake off, but also importantly engage with the company or the personalities there, personalities you want to engage with and work with for the long-term. Because it is really a long-term commitment.
Chris Dreyer:
I recently … I found that our CRM wasn’t … And we’re not talking volume where a personal injury law firm could field thousands of leads. We’re talking a hundred. And it was still a very big decision because of the data migration and a transparency and getting up to speed. So on that end, let’s say the scenario that they have a CRM, but they’re really not happy moving over to Clio. What’s it look like from a ramp perspective of implementing it, understanding it from an intuitive perspective, what’s that look like? Because a lot of times this is a big decision for many attorneys.
Jack Newton:
Yeah. I think the first thing you want to do is get familiar with the new product in a low stakes way. So don’t start using it on the first day in production where you’re like, I need to start taking these leads and converting them. They’re all real leads. They’re all real clients. Give yourself the time of playing around with the platform for a month. Set up a test website with a test intake flow and do fire drills with your staff. Make sure you can actually use the software, that you can be responsive to clients, that it feeds into it manage as the LPM, that you can see that data flow and know that that data flow is watertight. Because every one of those leads is worth thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars. There’s real stakes here. So make sure those flows all work.
Make sure that you understand the software, give yourself time to just tinker with it and play with it and do that in a way that’s not super high pressure, i.e., in production. And then once you’ve got the ropes learned, I would say the second piece is, and you can do this all in parallel by the way, but map out the data migration. You can either work with a third party to do that data migration. There’s a lot of great professional services firms that do this. Clio happens to offer data migration services free of charge. So part of our onboarding processes, offering free data migration. So we can take data from whatever CRM you’re in today, bring that into Clio Grow or Clio Manage as the case might be. That applies to your LPM as well. So if you’re switching both CRM and LPM or case management system, we can do that all in one fell swoop.
I tend to recommend doing the migration over a weekend. So you wrap up with one system on Friday and you’re on the new system on Monday. You might have a bunch of your internal people and a bunch of third parties working like crazy for two days, but making that a very clear juncture is a good idea. And then I usually recommend keeping your old system up and running for a period of at least three months, if not even up to a year, to make sure that if you realize like, oh, I forgot this bit of data, you can go back and retrieve it or maybe even do a secondary data migration to get that data into your system.
And then we’re just about on the new year. This is a bit late in the game to be thinking about the data migration but I also recommend trying to align those switching points around a month end and in some cases a year-end where you can say, hey, I’ve effectively \[inaudible 00:23:00\] a very clear demarcation point, switched from one system to another, and you know your books are correct in the old system. And going forward from a certain date, you can start referencing the new system.
Chris Dreyer:
You’ve got the Clio Cloud conference coming up October 2024. Tell us just a bit about what people can expect there. And then final question, where can people go to connect with you?
Jack Newton:
Yes, I’m glad you brought up the Clio Cloud conference. This is another reason to go with Clio actually is one of the most innovative and fun and engaging and informational conferences in legal is Clio Con. It’s widely regarded, including by luminaries like Bob Ambrogi as the best legal tech conference full stop. And it’s October 7th and eighth this year in Austin. So this is I know a little ways off, but if this conversation has peaked the interest of anyone in your audience, a really immersive way of learning a lot about Clio but also about the future of legal in general. And just to get a great sense of what the current trends are is checking out Clio Con.
Go to cliocloudconference.com. You can sign up for your tickets. We have a phenomenal keynote speakers lined up for next year. We’ve had a long lineup of past keynote speakers. As somebody that’s into marketing, we’ve had Seth Godin speak. We’ve had Gary Vaynerchuk on stage. We’ve had just an incredible array of really powerful keynote speakers. And to your final question, you can find me on Twitter or I guess X now, at Jack\_Newton. I’m Newtonian on Instagram. And if anyone would like to shoot me an email and follow up on anything they heard today, I’m Jack@Clio.com.
Chris Dreyer:
There was a ton to take in from today’s conversation, so let’s recap. Time for the pinpoints. Attract more leads with LSAs. Local services ads present a great opportunity for personal injury practices, with LSA’s prominently displaying top performing firms above Google searches. This pay-per-lead pricing creates targeted ready to convert leads. Integrating solutions like Clio will boost response rates, driving reviews, and lower your CPAs.
Jack Newton:
Clio Grow’s mission as a product is to help make sure you can convert leads to clients and automate as much of that process as possible. And you can deploy LSA campaigns right from Clio Grow into local service ads.
Chris Dreyer:
Make informed choices. Use data to optimize your marketing and labor spends. Bring everything into one system so you can see that entire client journey from initial marketing spend to lifetime value. This helps maximize ROI on ads and streamline your operations.
Jack Newton:
So there’s this idea that it’s your source of truth, your system of record, where you know the data is always most correct and most up to date.
Chris Dreyer:
Take your time. Switching systems can be like getting a divorce, messy and expensive. So you need to approach the decision carefully. Make sure you understand the new tools, test everything out, and take the time on the data migration.
Jack Newton:
Everyone’s got their sweet spot. Every firm has a different set of needs. And you need to approach this purchasing decision with a lot of gravity because it is like getting married in the sense that you’re going to be with this provider for five or 10 years.
Chris Dreyer:
All right everybody, that’s it for this toolkit. For more information about Jack and Clio, head on over to the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button. Subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.
