How Family Law Attorney Jennifer Reynolds Serves Clients with Clio

Jennifer Reynolds, Attorney and Founder, Fresh Legal

Jennifer Reynolds is undeniably a forward-thinking Family Law lawyer. An attorney of seven years in a client-centric practice, she has been a Clio customer since setting up her firm in the spring of 2013. Meeting the emotional needs of her clients, while streamlining her workflow, has required creatively integrating legal tech into her life and into her practice.

Dealing solely with the practice of Family Law, Jennifer manages a range of cases that deal with separation, divorce, and prenups. She operates her firm with an alternative mindset from the standard practice of revolving door clients and return business. Having trained in collaborative law and alternative dispute resolution, she encourages clients to consider collaborative ways of finding solutions to their issues. This is also a culture she lives by—seeking creative alternatives to time-consuming tasks with Clio.

Starting her practice with a move from on-premise solution, PC Law, Jennifer was looking for a client and Mac-friendly family law software to form the infrastructure of her practice. After looking at all the options, Jennifer realized Clio’s intuitive family law features and the use of automated legal technology would benefit both her and her clients. Customizable bills, a client portal, online intake forms, and template-based document automation changed her practice and simplified the divorce and separation processes for her clients.

Customizing Family Law practices with Clio

Jennifer has yet to max out on personalizations for her firm and caseload with Clio. “It’s a constant evolution. Once you have the realization of the outcome you want from Clio—it can easily be achieved in an afternoon and integrated into your firm by calling support, exploring a functionality, or via Zapier.”

The main feature transforming her Family Law practice? Clio’s Custom Fields. To attempt to quantify the efficiency injected into her day as a result of this single feature would be impossible. “Within an afternoon, I had everything set up. Once you know there is something that you want to achieve with Clio, if you set aside an hour, you can get it done—really quickly.” It makes collaboration with clients, opposing counsel, and third parties simple. All relevant details are now held in one place such as when a couple moved in together, date of marriage, date of separation, kids’ names, dates of birth, court file numbers, and all other matter-related information she needs.

Jennifer can now deal with queries about any aspect of a case in a moment, without having to place a call on hold. “Clio makes me look like a superstar with an amazing memory.”

The evolution of a Family Law practice

Legal advice alone is rarely sufficient to see people through to a solution in a Family Law dispute. With professional degrees of emotional support and hand-holding necessary, Jennifer knows how cost-efficient it would be for clients if they could find these services when they come to their Family Law lawyer. She plans on providing these resources to her clients in the future. “You don’t just hire a lawyer when you come to Fresh Legal, pay them on an hourly basis, go to court … I want to go out of the box … to help with some of the more practical, emotional parts of separation.”

For many small law and solos, firm growth means increased caseload and profit. For Jennifer, she considers growth a multifaceted, but natural, element of her practice. Change of billing structure, the inclusion of non-legal staff, and exploring the customizable elements of Clio as they develop are integral to this. The growth of Jennifer’s practice with Clio has brought her to two Clio Cloud Conferences, resulted in close relationships with the Clio team, and allowed her to learn about the business side of law and legal tech.

Your silent partner

As a whole, both the client-facing and back-end elements of efficiency within Clio add to Jennifer’s practice—without her clients even knowing

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