How Upton, Mickits, & Heymann Said Goodbye to 3rd-Party E-Filing with Clio

Scott Seelhoff, Attorney at Upton, Mickits, & Heymann, L.L.P.

Scott and his team are always looking to make their office more efficient. As an early adopter of Clio, they signed on as a partner to help develop Clio File, Clio’s new court e-filing solution.

The State of Texas requires e-filing for all civil, family, probate, or criminal cases in the Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, Courts of Appeals, and all district and county courts. Scott and his firm had been using multiple third-party solutions to e-file with the state court. This meant that each time a member of the team needed to file a document, they would create the file in Clio, export a pdf, and then upload it to the third-party website.

Each service handled documents differently, which made it difficult to keep track of confirmations and service fees that needed to be passed on to clients.

How Clio Helped

Too many unclear processes → simple, streamlined workflows

Everyone at the firm uses Clio File on a daily basis, and feedback from the team has been very positive. They can create documents in Clio and submit them to the court in a matter of clicks—all without leaving Clio Manage. It’s simple to use and reduces the number of steps in the e-filing process, which saves everyone time.

Difficulty tracking e-filing fees → Easily capture and apply expenses to client bills

Service fees are recorded automatically in Clio Manage, making it easy to capture 100% of your e-filing expenses in your client bills.

Time-consuming confirmation processes → Instant court-stamped confirmations

Once the court has accepted a filing, Clio automatically saves a stamped copy of the pleading, which the firm can share with the client so they know it’s been done. This saves them from having to visit the court website, download a copy, and upload it to Clio.

Additional benefits to using Clio

Easy to use, firm-wide. Clio File’s intuitive design is simple, quick, and easy to use. If someone goes home or isn’t available, since it’s in Clio, anyone can pick up the case and submit the filing with a few clicks.

A record of every e-filing. Clio keeps a running history of everything the firm files with the court, including easy-to-access filing receipts and email notifications for all accepted and rejected filings.

Full transparency on filings. The dashboard in Clio File shows all of the documents that have been submitted, so that if there’s an issue the team will know to follow up—which was something that was very difficult to identify when using a third-party service.