How the Legal Aid Society of Story County increased capacity by 15% with Clio for Legal Aid and Served 32 Additional Cases

How Clio Helped

When Peggy first joined the Legal Aid Society of Story County in 2015, the team was already using Clio, and over the years adopted Clio Grow and Clio Payments; in 2024 the organization also adopted Clio for Legal Aid—a set of features designed to optimize Clio specifically for legal aid attorneys and nonprofits.

Peggy learned about the Clio for Legal Aid program while attending her first Clio Cloud Conference as part of  Clio’s Academic Access Grant program.

At the conference, Peggy learned more about how to use technology to help the society improve their workflows—and about Clio for Legal Aid.

“I was impressed with how much we learned about how to use Clio and how many people we were able to access. Through that, we learned how to automate our documents, and we were also introduced to this new program called Clio for Legal Aid.”

“We were lucky to have the opportunity to participate in that. We didn’t even realize how much it would benefit us. We just wanted to be a part of the change and see how it could help us, and also how we could help them, because I know that we operate a little differently than other legal aids.”

Top 3 Ways Clio and Clio for Legal Aid Have Positively Impacted the Organization

For the Legal Aid Society of Story County, funding is at the crux of many challenges—and this is one of the most impactful areas that Clio and Clio for Legal Aid have been able to assist with.

“The biggest problem that Clio for Legal Aid has helped us solve is just understanding our funding as a whole,” Peggy says.”

Clio for Legal Aid provides a real-time understanding of financials and funding

“What I love the most about Clio for Legal Aid is, as the executive director, I need to know where we are in real time with our drawdown. I need to know exactly how much money we have available from each funder, how much has been allocated, and how much we are utilizing this month.”

“This is particularly useful because I’m still expected to carry a caseload, which is very difficult when I’m supposed to handle all of the other administrative processes. So, it allows me to know if my attorney staff is maintaining an appropriate level for this month, or if I need to put down some of the administrative things and spend more time on my caseload to make sure we’re meeting that deliverable mark.”

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The Clio for Legal Aid Dashboard informs educated decisions for the organization

“The main feature we use right now for Clio for Legal Aid is our organization dashboard. I use it a lot to filter out what we aren’t billing.”

“I can look, and we have our different funders listed, and then it will tell me how much of our time isn’t allocated to a funder. I can click that and go down to figure out if there are other things there that we should be allocating to a funder.”

“Clio for Legal Aid has definitely helped us manage our funding sources. We have four major funders, and I know how many hours I am supposed to get from each funder each year. Having it in our dashboard and seeing it billed down in real-time tells me where we are at any given time.”

“So, when we have our staff meetings each week, we can go in and talk about what’s happening in each case, and also if there is a chunk of specific work that needs to be completed in that area.”

“If I need to draw down that area, now we can look at who we could be providing more services to, to ensure that we’re meeting our requirements there, where we couldn’t before. Before, there was no real-time understanding of where we were. It just required you to do the billing, and you could know it once a month.”

With Clio for Legal Aid, it’s easy to track timing

“Clio for Legal Aid has allowed us to track timing. We don’t really track expenses per se, because we don’t charge our clients anything, but tying Clio Payments to our main Clio Manage account has allowed us to do the triple route reconciliation much quicker.”

Other Benefits of Clio

Clio Payments facilitates easier connections with donors

Donations are integral to the Legal Aid Society of Story County, but before using Clio Payments, the organization was held back by old-school collection methods. Clio Payments makes things easier.

“Before using Clio Payments, we were never able to take donations through a card. We weren’t able to take a client intake fee, a nominal intake fee that we charge for services. They had to pay it in cash. Eventually, we learned how to take it like through a Square, but we couldn’t take trust funds with anything but cash. We didn’t take checks, so it’s really brought us into the modern day.”

“I think we’ve received a couple of thousand dollars in donations already through Clio Payments. So, it’s really expedited. The process of connecting us with the money we need to survive and to perpetuate our mission.”

Overall, Peggy says she enjoys having Clio Payments alongside Clio for Legal aid. “It allows us to collect and connect with our donors better. Especially if we wanted to do recurring donations, which is super interesting.”

Clio Grow streamlines the organization’s intake process

“We’ve just onboarded Clio Grow so that we can expedite our intake, because that’s still kind of in the Dark Ages. People still have to use a cumbersome login on our website, which sometimes goes down, or come in and fill out an application in paper format. So, we anticipate that that will continue to improve.”

“We get anywhere between 300 to 400 applications a year, and, obviously you have to be a resident to qualify for services. But just by making the slight changes that we’ve made, we have increased our scope.”

Clio is intuitive and easy to use

“Technology can be very intimidating, especially for office support staff with little to no experience. So I sincerely appreciate how intuitive and user-friendly the Clio platform is.”

“It’s important for it to be easy to use, to be very intuitive. And it’s also easy to fix. You can’t really make a big problem happen. If you put something in wrong, it’s easy to go back, figure out what happened, and fix that issue.”

What’s Next

Using Clio and Clio for Legal Aid to streamline workflows and implement more effective processes has allowed the Legal Aid Society of Story County to increase their caseload, which effectively means that the team is able to provide prompt legal services and access to justice to more people who need them in the community.

“The increase in the caseload really highlights the reduction of wait time that a person has to spend on our waiting list.”

“From the time that they apply to the time that they meet with a client has been anywhere from eight weeks when I was a staff attorney with three attorneys, years and years ago, to the last couple of years, where I think we were up to almost four or five months. That can be a dreadfully long wait when you are trying to get something important done, like a divorce, especially a contentious one, but divorce any kind, or child custody issues. We would try to expedite people as much as we could, of course. If there were domestic violence issues, we would try to expedite them to the front of the waitlist.”