Jack Newton Keynote Highlights: Clio Cloud Conference 2024

To kick off our 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference in Austin Texas, Clio Founder and CEO, Jack Newton, delivered a powerful keynote on how legal professionals can harness momentum to create long-term success.

He explored the current state of the legal industry while unveiling Clio’s latest innovations and offered a glimpse into upcoming Clio feature advancements designed to continue driving legal tech, and the profession forward.

The biggest Clio Conference yet!

Jack welcomed 2,500 in-person attendees and over 1,500 live virtual participants from 42 countries worldwide, marking it as Clio’s biggest conference to date.

What’s more, Clio now helps over 150,000 legal professionals in 130 countries, has partnered with 110+ bar associations and law societies (including all 50 states), works with 280+ app integration partners, joined the Forbes Cloud 100 list for the first time, and raised a historic Series F funding round. It’s safe to say that it’s been a busy and exciting year for Clio!

Harnessing your momentum

This year’s conference focus is on harnessing your momentum, driving continuous progress, and generating lasting transformation in the legal industry for all.

Drawing from Jim Collins’ “flywheel effect” in Good to Great, Jack explained that success comes not from one big decision, but from a series of small, strategic steps that compound over time.

This idea mirrors how legal tech integrates with firms: no single tool creates success. By adopting new ideas and making incremental changes, firms build momentum, driving faster, more efficient growth—just like a flywheel.

By resisting new technologies, it’s no longer a matter of if your firm will fall behind, but when.

The Legal Trends Report…AI realities and opportunities

Jack was elated to unveil the latest Legal Trends Report and shared key findings throughout his keynote. This year’s report provides valuable insights for legal professionals, with a strong focus on how AI is reshaping the legal industry.

From automating routine tasks to revolutionizing long-established billing practices, AI is driving rapid and essential changes in how law firms operate. The pace of these shifts is both remarkable and necessary for the industry’s evolution.

Read the report, available now, to uncover key insights and data on how to accelerate your firm’s progress by building on your existing momentum.

Learn more about AI in legal in Clio’s annual Legal Trends Report. 

Creating a connected law firm through technology

What we are building at Clio is a unified platform that serves as your law firm’s single source of truth, centralizing data accessibility to enhance insight and actionability.

In the last few years, Clio has been working towards this vision with the launch of multiple product features, such as Clio Accounting, Clio Payments, Clio Grow, Clio Draft, Clio File, and now, our AI-powered tool, Clio Duo–with Clio Manage acting as your firm’s central intelligence hub.

As Jack explained, the growth of Clio’s portfolio is aimed at reducing friction and pain points you experience at your firm, allowing you to keep up with growing client demands as expectations evolve.

Adapting to a world of rapid AI innovation

With the level of advancements being made in AI technology, we are seeing a rapid shift from not being able to trust AI to AI becoming smarter and more reliable, opening up the door to vast opportunities for the legal industry.

Lawyers are leading the charge in welcoming this new technology, with AI adoption in law firms surging from 19% to 79% in just one year—an unprecedented shift. Despite being risk-averse, the legal industry has embraced AI faster than the cloud, which took over a decade to achieve similar adoption.

While there have been some missteps, AI is already integral to daily workflows, offering efficiency and competitive advantage–It’s quickly becoming essential for future-ready law firms.

If your law firm doesn’t embrace AI, you’re at a fundamental competitive disadvantage, and you will lose.

AI is set to transform legal services, helping deliver better outcomes to more clients and improving the way lawyers work. Those embracing AI will outpace those who don’t. While the power of AI might have been overstated in the short term, we cannot underestimate its potential in the long term.

Eliminating friction with AI is the best way to help more people, close cases faster, and get your firm paid faster.

Introducing Clio Duo

One way that Clio will utilize AI to reduce friction is with our new AI-powered tool, Clio Duo. Jack provided a live demo during his keynote, showcasing how Clio Duo can assign tasks for you, offer case and communication summaries, create calendar meetings, and help legal professionals organize their priorities.

Clio Duo has been built to revolutionize where and how lawyers spend their time, boosting productivity and improving efficiency. Learn more about Clio Duo and book your demo today!

The demise of the billable hour with AI

While the billable hour is unlikely to vanish entirely, the legal industry is undergoing a significant transformation in how it values legal services. With advancements in AI, our Legal Trends Report estimates that nearly 75% of legal tasks could be automated, reducing billable time per case.

AI allows legal professionals to maximize their impact and time, and we should be embracing the opportunity to allow these outdated billing models to fade into the past.

For firms relying on hourly billing, automation could lead to average revenue losses of around $27,000 per year, prompting a re-evaluation of traditional billing models.

Jack encouraged the audience not to view this as a threat, but in fact, view it as a massive opportunity to improve the legal industry as a whole.

By adopting AI efficiencies and offering flat fee billing—favored by 71% of clients for its transparency and predictability—law firms can improve efficiency, send bills faster, close matters 2.6 times faster than with hourly rates, and help more clients than ever before.

This shift will not only boost your bottom line but also reduce friction for access to justice. The urgency to disrupt the legal industry has never been greater, with 120 million legal issues in America going unresolved each year, leaving countless individuals without justice or closure.

AI is disrupting the legal field by forging new ways to break down barriers and deliver justice more equitably and efficiently for all.

The truth is, our industry is overwhelmed

Jack jumpscared the audience with the sounds of a phone ringing, notification pings, email alerts and more, in an attempt to highlight just how overwhelmed legal professionals are. There is simply too much to do and not enough time in a day.

To highlight this, Jack shared that a staggering 67% of law firms we reached out to in our Legal Trends Report secret shop study did not answer our emails. And only 52% of firms either answered or returned phone inquiries about legal services, scoring significantly lower than compared to our secret shop in 2019.

This is a manifestation of the access to justice gap: people are literally unable to get in touch with a lawyer.

Clio’s aim is to reduce this friction and give lawyers their time back by automating redundant tasks and streamlining their workflows, allowing them to help more people.

Stop wasting your marketing budget

Interestingly, while lawyers are not answering their emails or phone calls for potential clients, they are spending, on average, 5% of their budget on marketing, growing 8% annually. This translates to over $20 billion annually being spent on legal marketing.

The industry is not doing a great job of capturing the demand for legal services, essentially lighting our money on fire.

This is why Clio is focused on improving the client intake process and offering a frictionless experience for law firms and their clients.

With Clio Grow’s automated intake features and a built-in scheduler, we aim to automate as many steps in the intake process as possible, creating a world where intake happens automatically in the background.

Jack also announced the launch of a new series of revenue reports in Clio Grow. For the first time, firms can now use real billing data, pulled from Clio Manage, to determine what marketing lead source, campaign, or referral is driving the most revenue for them.

Stop wasting marketing dollars and precious time analyzing data. It’s time to automate your intake and pull clients in through methods that you know work.

Boost daily productivity by reducing repetitive efforts

Once you capture these potential clients, and the retainer is signed, it’s time to dive into the case. Clio Draft’s new Questionnaire Templates (launching in early 2025) will make this process smoother by allowing clients to enter their information at their convenience.

These questionnaires reduce the need for repeated information requests and give clients peace of mind, knowing their sensitive data is handled securely.

With just a click, all the information from the questionnaire is automatically populated into the appropriate forms and court documents, ready for e-filing. This not only speeds up the document creation process but reduces the risk of errors.

Lawyer-client communications rehaul

Backing up again to the secret shop, we know that communication between lawyers and clients is essential but needs a lot of improvement. To further assist with this, we have redesigned the communication interface inside of Clio Manage, coming at the end of 2024.

A more organized and streamlined view will help you stay on top of client communication and respond with fewer clicks, all while securely logging interactions across email, phone, text, and the Client Portal.

Streamline and automate your law firm’s workflows

According to the Legal Trends Report, lawyers spend between two and five hours per week minimum aggregating and summarizing information from different sources. Often, the first hour of a lawyer’s day is spent figuring out and organizing what needs to be done and prioritized first.

In addition to Clio Duo’ capabilities to reduce time lost, Jack was excited to announce automated workflows coming to Clio Manage in 2025. This comes after the huge adoption rate and success of auto-workflows inside Clio Grow.

On average, firms using Clio Grows automated workflows were able to intake clients four days faster than firms that were not, and we are excited to bring this same type of impact to Clio Manage. This will improve the flow from client intake, all the way to creating and assigning tasks in Clio Manage as cases progress.

The more efficient your operations are, the more you can dedicate resources to client intake, which as our data shows in the Legal Trends Report, is vital to your firm’s future success.

Increasing firm intelligence

What gets measured, gets managed – Peter Drucker

What needs to be measured and managed looks different in every firm. That’s why we’re releasing a custom reporting feature in Clio Manage (coming in early 2025), allowing you to dive deeper into your firm’s data to spot bottlenecks, track inefficiencies, and analyze key financial metrics.

You’ll be able to hand-pick the specific metrics that mean the most to your firm, share them with colleagues, and make better data-driven decisions to stay competitive.

Keynote takeaways

Jack closed out his keynote by highlighting that together with our customers and partners, we can continue to drive incredible transformation in this industry, finding incremental but relentless improvements in how we run our firms to better address the needs of our clients.

Clio is not just about offering you new tools; it’s about transforming how legal professionals work, making each day more productive and focused on what truly matters: serving clients and advancing your firm. Always striving to find new ways of putting energy into your firm’s fly-wheel, and eliminate friction at every step along the way.

And lastly, AI is a force multiplier for your firm and enables the best use of your time. We believe that you are a better legal professional with AI, and a better legal professional with Clio.

See you next year in Boston!

As Jack wrapped up his keynote, he revealed an exciting surprise—ClioCon 2025 will be held in Boston, Massachusetts! We’re thrilled to gather with attendees next year as we dive into our 2025 theme, “Uniting Brilliance”, and look forward to exploring new horizons together.

Get your 2025 ClioCon passes—and score big savings for a limited time!

We published this blog post in October 2024. Last updated: October 21, 2024.

Categorized in: Clio