We see a great consolidation in the
legal world with law
firms. And also I
see it now in the legal tech world. Technology will make legal services more accessible to the masses. We're putting a lot of energy into generating demand, but then just letting that demand fall on the floor. 70 percent of phone calls and emails are being ignored by lawyers. And the next chapter to your question, I think is AI. What do you
credit your success to? to building something like that is because there's no way that's easy. It has to be deliberate. It is deliberate. Welcome to this episode of bourbon approved where we interview those who have been both successful at law and life. And today we have a reoccurring episode because we have on Mr. Jack Newton. Happy to be here. And Jack was one of our, I think, original, like, first 10 guests that we had on the ep, on, on the show.
And for those of you who don't know Jack, he's the founder CEO of a company called Clio, which is the largest case management platform in the world. And we're here, Shooting on set in Austin for Clio con. That's right. Happy to be here. So I have, I have a Clio con ish pour for you to start. The first one that I have here, um, this is the trademark. This is actually, it's bottled here in Texas, but it comes from Canada.
Oh, is that right? Okay. This
starts in Canada. Then comes here to Texas, his age, age 12 years altogether. But this is straight from Canada. I know your offices are in Vancouver. You're here in Cleo Con in Texas and Austin for this one. So we're going to start off with a little bit of a, a traveled pour. I know you're a little Freud, a little Freud 16 type guy from the first show, but we'll start this off from Vancouver to Austin. Let's see how it goes. Oh, that's smooth. That's fine.
Yeah. So you're fresh off the stage from your, uh, keynote. And for those, there's 3, 000 some lawyers that come here, 5, 000 altogether. That's right. You're watching. Um, you just came off of your keynote and a lot of things you talked about were China, the struggles from small midscience firms, a lot of communication errors. And I think it said that, you know, This year, we've grown from 2019 to 2023 or 2024 of like 67 percent of lawyers don't respond to emails.
Yeah. And how is like, what are you guys doing to solve this now? Because I know you're big on like client centric operations.
That's right. And what's more anti client centric than not picking up the phone or answering the email? And this was the kind of mind boggling stat we got out of this year's Legal Trends Report. Yeah. You know, maybe for anyone that's not familiar with the study, I'll give a brief synopsis. But in 2019, we, we had this intuition based on all the conversations we were having with lawyers as well as clients that law firm responsiveness was just really poor.
And so we, we launched this secret shopping project where we hired a firm to secret shop 500 law firms and basically pose as. A legitimate client that's a good fit for that law firm's profile and phone into that law firm and send an email to that law firm to see if they could engage a law firm to help them solve their legal problem.
And what we found in 2019 was that about 60 percent of those emails and phone calls went completely ignored by the law firms, didn't pick up the phone, didn't return a voicemail. Didn't answer the email. And this is
something you're doing at Clio where they're not paying you to do the service. You're just doing due diligence to see how can we help you guys. No, exactly.
We're not trying to, you know, embarrass anyone. We're just trying to shine a spotlight on the industry. By the way, I don't call anybody back. So that'd be a fail. No one's, no one's bad. People feel, we all feel this. We feel completely overwhelmed by the number of demands we have on our time. And when we talk about the access to justice crisis, I think people often think about it as This kind of intellectualized problem, but what we see with this data is so concrete.
It's literally, you know, more than half of the people that are calling into these law firms trying to get help for their issue are being ignored. And what was shocking was we, you know, we did that study five years ago. So we thought, Hey, there's been a lot of progress in terms of technology. You think things would change? You think things would change? We've had a pandemic, you know, who knows? Did that help or hinder?
And so, so we, we chartered, uh, another secret shop again of hundreds of law firms, both phone and email, as well as other communication channels. But what was surprising was things actually got worse. We went up to about 70 percent of phone calls and emails that are being ignored by lawyers. And, and again, you know, we, we, we can't reconcile this with also the amount of energy we see and money we see lawyers putting into marketing. We're, we're putting a lot of energy into generating demand.
But then just letting that demand fall on the floor and it's kind of a shocking thing to see and I think it's especially shocking because it's not just I mean, maybe you think I've got enough clients to kind of meet my needs today. I don't need to pick up that phone, but I don't think lawyers appreciate what a negative is. public perception they're creating in doing that.
And even if the lawyer you're phoning might not be able to handle your problem, can they help refer you out to a lawyer who might be able to help solve that problem?
We worked a lot on together with when we, you know, being a Clio customer, the A1 that we wanted was customer satisfaction, be able to be their general counsel, to find them the best fit. Sometimes it's not our firm. So we've gone through the adventure and. With your Google partnership, we've done a lot of LSA ads. Yeah. Through your power, it's been crazy.
So we've been, so we started this journey, maybe February, March, when we did that integration and implement it, we have been beginning blown up like crazy. We had to restaff on the intake. Is that right? Yes. Yes. We had to do a lot more, um, some virtual assistants to be able to pick those up because we had to, like we had to have people in.
One in Madrid because we have a lot of people speak Spanish because we had to keep up with the right amount of business That were coming but for me, it's like would you rather? Scale up or be status quo totally Why not like even if we can't help them we're pushing it through attorney share with your integration
and the way you're doing this Is is the way to do it, which is you know, what we're saying is, you know as a lawyer You don't need to be the one picking up the phone exactly. You could be hiring an intake firm You can be hiring Lower cost labor offshore. You can be doing a ton of things. Artificial intelligence. You could be leveraging AI. I mean, we're not far away from from AI being able to pick up the phone and redirect queries.
But
now, which is
crazy. And I saw Clio duo, which we were excited about last year. And I mean, it's a game changer for everybody. It's a game changer for people that don't for people that are watching or listening. Clio Duo is going to have the opportunity where you have a chat bot essentially to query on your data. Yeah. So you log into Clio and you can ask it to do any task that you want.
And it learns, I mean, there's a teaching experiment, but that for me is going to revolutionize the efficiency for law firms.
Yeah. It's like having staff built into your LPM, but staff that never get tired, staff that never have a bad day, staff that has a photographic memory, staff that can consume hundreds of pages of documents in seconds. And, and answer queries about anything that's going on in your practice or your documents. Like, it's just, it's hard to conceive of the power that unlocks and we're just getting started. Like, this is V 1. 0 and we're seeing an exponential increase in capabilities.
And how do you guys stay abreast with like, well, I'm going to take a step back with you because I always like to humanize or get because our first episode, if you haven't watched the first episode, we did a lot about Jack is. The founder of this company, The Struggles. We'll get to some of that where you guys are now. We'll do the
YouTube thing. Check out that
episode here. Yeah. We'll click here, like here. There's actually a link to my, to my friend's wiki feed episode. Somebody in the back now. Um, so one of the things that I love about like Jack is you're a great human being. And I wore, I wore my, my girl dad t shirt here. Cause like I got this dad rules. So I wore this one of my kids had like a little mermaid theme birthday party, but. For you guys, like you got three kids. I do. Like you are active with them all the time.
And I just, I'm fascinated by your ability to run a multi billion dollar company and still find time for your wife and kids. How do you do that?
I mean, I couldn't imagine being able to run the multi billion dollar company without them is the way I might kind of twist that in a, in a different perspective where You know, it's, you know, it's interesting if I think back to my early, early days with, with Clio, um, you, you've met Tanya, my wife, amazing woman, we get along amazingly well, but I remember one of the few arguments we've had over the years, debates, maybe is a better way of putting it, was when to
have kids, and I was starting out Clio, uh, we just turned about 30 and, and, uh, You know, I think that that biological clock people talk about started to go off. And Tanya was like, I think it's time to start a family. And I had just launched Clio. You know, I was like, look, we're, I'm doing a startup. This thing's going to be hugely demanding. Most startups fail. Like we've got a mortgage. Like we don't need kids on top of that.
And, you know, Tanya has been unfailing in her support of the Clio journey. And in me taking what seemed like a crazy bet on this startup idea back in 2008, But, but again, when, when we started talking about having kids, I, I just felt like it was too high risk a time period and she made the point, you know, asked me the question, like, well, if not now, when, you know, when's it ever going to feel like the right time? And I realized she was right.
And shortly afterwards, uh, we were pregnant with, with Ian, our first kid and Ian's about. the same age as Cleo now. Ian just turned, uh, he's turning 16 this January and we, we launched Cleo just a few months before we, we had Ian. Did you
do that strategically so that he was hockey born in January? That might've been part of
it, but the, you know, it was really mostly around Cleo, but I, I think you and I are, are, are cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways, Bob. But what, what I found and I didn't anticipate in having kids was they gave me so much energy. Like it, it wasn't this. This zero sum game where, you know, I was investing time with the kids and then losing time with Clio.
Like, it was actually spending the time with the kids, being able to disconnect from And you know what it's like to run a company, to run a startup. It's just, you never stop thinking about it. And I found pretty much the only time I stopped thinking about it was when I was holding, holding my kids. But this
is the point, like the, the ability when I have to unplug with my kids, I get more creative, envisioned thoughts for the company because I get unplugged from
the day to day. Totally. And you don't realize that's part of the creative process. And I think, you know, especially in the, like the early 2010s when I was founding Clio. This hustle culture around startups was a big thing. Like, you can't have kids, you can't have a family, you can't get distracted by everything, everything's got to be the company. And I kind of rejected that in the, you know, early days because I just felt like I don't see how that's sustainable.
You can't give up everything for the company. But where I think that equation's got it so wrong is it's, it again treats things as a zero sum game. And one of the most important books I've read over the course of the last, Decade or so is that a Dr. Seuss book? Uh, that too. Where will you go? One of the best. Oh, the places you'll go. But the places you'll go. That's right. But Simon Sinek's book, um, about the infinite game. I like his leaders eat last leaders eat last is so great.
Uh, uh, the why is great. Like he's just amazing. He's he's keynote Cleo con someday. Simon, if you're listening, uh, open invite, but we, you know, what he talks about in the infinite game is just this idea that most of the games in life, most of the things in life are not zero sum games. They're actually positive sub games. And maybe, you know, the idea is, is it's not a zero sum game to build a family and build a company alongside each other. Maybe that's actually a positive some game.
Maybe building a family equips you. to build a company better. And that's exactly where I've landed with the benefit now of 16 years of hindsight, this journey of having, so this leads me to my next four
because I mean, God, it's like, it's like you choreographed where you got to finish your first four for the second. All right. Wow. Bottoms up. Hey, by the way, the, the ad you had of you being in Canada, leading in the last Clio, we brought that ad in this episode cause it's, it's fantastic. Um, No, but I, I, this one, um, this is the Cooper family one here in Texas. They, they, they brew this here in Texas and this is a small batch. So what they do is they, they age this here.
They only do small batch whiskeys. They release it here. There's a picture of a box here because for you, you fought for everything for you to be started this company. But what they do is they do this from their family distillery. small batch and I feel like everything you do, no matter how big, how You guys are a big family. It's all about community and what you were just talking about.
It's a page out of your book of treating everybody that works with your company as a human being and as a family member, rather than a commodity, right? Rather than that hustle culture that we've seen in other industries. And I think that's when I talk, people like, why do you like, like Cleo and do things? I'm Be in the room with people in the team and you'll understand.
I think that's a, I'm glad you said that because I think you do get a special vibe from every single person that's on the Clio team. And I think that that vibe is a function of them all being part of a bigger cheers again, cheers again, feeling like they're part of a bigger mission. Like this idea that we're transforming the legal experience for all is something every. in and that we're part of a movement where we're driving this change in the legal industry. Okay,
this one's so much better.
Oh, that's delicious. This is, this
is awesome. So I've never had this one, so I'm very excited that we poured it. Oh, the small batch, small family, but no, this, yeah. Wow. This made me like this cleared my mind. Now I feel like I can strategize forever with you. No, but I think, um, when I come to Clio Con, I And this is, I think next year you're going to be in Boston, which we're excited about. Um, it's a different experience for folks that never been here because we go to a lot of legal tech conferences.
I got a lot of legal conferences. And it's very male chauvinist driven for the most part. If you're outside of this world, that's what it looks like. This is like a safe place for, for growth and for people to, Just feel welcome and loved. And when I went to your sales kickoff one in Toronto, just being in the room with your team, it's a different energy. People just don't understand it. What do you credit your success to building something like that? Because there's no way that's easy.
It has to be deliberate.
It is deliberate. And it's, I would say, through cultivating something that we found, uh, in the early days of Clio, which was an incredible culture. And a place that was safe, trusting, supporting. And we realized there was this opportunity to build a different kind of company. And the way we describe our cultural North Star is as a human and high performing company. I thought you were going to say hyperbaric chamber, like in a time space continuum.
Well, we use those to be human and high performing. And
Kleon, Klingon, I see a lot of similarities in sci
fi. I'm a big Star Trek fan. Oh, God, I love it. Like, Picard is my, like my early leadership hero. But, you know, that's, that's an aside. We can, we can come back to That's where I get a little more beard. I mean,
no, he was, he, he didn't
do a beard.
He never did a beard.
No, no beard. I think maybe in one of the movies he ended up with a beard. But, uh Uh, yeah, I think he rocked, you know, the bald head and there's, did a good job. There's a great, what,
what's that lyric line where he goes, da da, like John Lip Picard. Oh, I gotta think of it. It's like a nineties.
I know, I, I, I can't think of it, but I know what you're talking about. But by the way, love the beer, Jack. Thank you. I gotta tell you, man. Yeah. Well, speaking of family, I, you know, I was on vacation with a family in August and grew in a vacation beard. And then, you know, my kids were like, dad, keep, keep the beard. And then, you know, they're like, they're 12, 14, and 15 now, and.
speak in language I, I don't understand most of the time, but my, my oldest son's like, you've got, you've got aura, is what, have you heard that one? I've heard
it recently, right before. Apparently
it's a compliment. I was like, what is aura? Is that good aura? Is that bad aura? Like, do I have a halo? What are you talking about? But, uh, they said they liked it. You know, the ultimate decision maker is Tanya and she, she said she liked it. So I decided to grow it out a bit. And, uh, so far so good. But back to your question around culture, I think it's about.
So being really clear on what your values are and then living those values and living your values are not just putting them up on a wall somewhere or putting them on a poster. Living your values means that you hire people that ascribe to those values and can demonstrate how those values resonate with them. You fire people when they don't live those values and can't modify their behavior to better live those values. And you demonstrate to your team through.
the people you promote that are living those values, how important they are to you. So what we've seen at Clio is they've become part of the daily language at Clio. When people talk about the actions they're taking, they talk about our values like thrive as team Clio or customer success comes first. We, we see people, um, referring to those values on a daily basis. So I think that's part of the, The deliberate act you need to take to foster culture. But
how do you, cause you guys have to be hiring constantly all the time. We are, like crazy. But how are you finding people that match the personality test of Clio? Is there like, are you guys making them do psychological tests or something? No
psychological tests. I mean, that'd be kind of
cool
though.
I
know there's a lot of, especially tech companies that do do that. Really? I always have tongue in cheek. I don't, I don't personally believe in those, but we, you know, we, we, we talk about, for example, Um, customer centricity as being one of our main values. Our first value is customer success comes first. That was your book. I have it signed in my house. Yeah, exactly. I talk about it in my book.
So we, we ask, you know, our prospective employees, you know, talk about how you think about decision making. Can you tell us examples of how you've, uh, been caught in a situation that you might have to make a decision that's either You know, in favor of the customer or, or acting against the best interests of the customer and how you navigated that, how do you incorporate the customer's perspective into your decision making process?
And if we don't hear the right things, you know, we just see that, hey, they don't, they're not gonna align with this value. This is gonna be an uphill battle for them. Um, we have a culture screen that's part of every interview. What's a culture? A culture screen is, I know what a urine screen is. A culture screen is, you know, I'll, I'll, so. Maybe I'll rewind the clock back to, you know, 2010 or so, you know, Clio starts really scaling. We start hiring a lot of people.
Me and Ryan, my co founder. But you and Ryan
were just going door to door the first,
yeah, when was the big ABA
tech show launch?
2008. 2008. So 2010, we had like a couple of years of solid growth under our belt, but we're starting to grow. What I think the really crucial phase of your growth story is, is kind of from a, from a Call it 100 employees to 200 employees. What you pass there is the Dunbar number, right? You've probably heard of the concept. I have not heard this. No? Okay, so the Dunbar number is around 150, and that's the number of close relationships that you can keep in your head, basically.
That's the number of people that you can understand, you can remember, like, I remember your name. I know who your kids are. I know your wife's name. I think it's basically like the number of relationships a human being can maintain. Whenever
my graduating high school in Pittsburgh, we had about 150 kids.
Yeah.
And I know, I know like every single person went to high school with. So whenever I see people that went to bigger high schools, this is funny. I've never heard. Yeah. So this Dunbar, how do you not understand? Like, how do you not
know every single person? So this Dunbar guy was a social psychologist and he looked at the history of mankind. And if you look at like the size of an army platoon, It's around that size. If you look at all sorts of fundamental units of civilization over the years, this Dunbar number is a really important number because once you cross it, you lose this close connectivity of, of, of the team.
And that, that's when Ryan and I realized what we had done unintentionally is, for example, we stopped being involved in every interview. You know, so the call it the 200th Cleon we hired, Ryan and I never met. And I remember we walked into the, you know, kitchen one day at, at the office. and met a person that, let's just say was not , what we thought was a cultural fit. We were just like, who, who is this person? And how, how do we hire him? We don't think this person's gonna work out.
And sure enough, they ended up being terminated for making a bunch of bad actions, creating a bunch of, of controversy and needless brain damage. Um, and we realized like, Hey, we had a mis-hire that was probably avoidable if we had just met them in the process. So what we did at that point is we introduced a culture screen. That's the last step of every interview at Clio. Um, at that point it was to, to meet either myself or Ryan.
At this point at 1200 people, it's meet one of, you know, about a dozen people we have in the company that are, are, have the stamp of being culture screeners. And what we do is we look for people that are not necessarily culture fit. I actually think that's an overly, uh, constrictive framing, but people that are going to be culture at.
Even if they're not exactly like what we imagine is the prototype for a Cleon is what they bring to the table going to be additive to our culture, um, as opposed to being detrimental to our culture. So we make hiring a really deliberate process with a lot of steps. If you, if you talk to anyone that got hired at Cleo, they probably say like, man, I ran a gauntlet to get hired at this company. Like you have multiple interviews for senior hires.
We have a project that we basically, it's almost like a. A Harvard case study kind of project, like go tell us how you're going to help expand Clio into the mid market, and we'll give them a bunch of data and we give them a couple of weeks to do that project because you have to compensate them to do that. No, no. Wow. And that's where people are like, I had to work to get this job. So the bar is extremely high.
And then on top of that, we create this culture screen that we again, make sure that you are. A good fit with a team and I think that it's a lot of work to get right But when you get on the ground of something like if you
have one toxic employee even out of
a
thousand
Yep, you
can ruin the whole thing.
You gotta you gotta excise them like as quick as you can There's a fantastic podcast On This American Life, uh, called Bad Apples. Have you heard this episode by chance? No. I don't understand how you have so much time to read books and listen to podcasts. I care a lot about this stuff. So, if I have a spare eight minutes, I'm listening to a podcast about culture. I'm reading about social dynamics. Because I know you run every day. I run every day. I'll listen to podcasts on
my run. That's when you do your, that's your time?
Not really, actually. Most runs, I like to do, Nothing. When I work out, I like
nothing. I like to think about shit and do things. Exactly.
But if I'm driving, if I'm doing anything else, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm soaking up something. But, you know, this, I want to, this American Life episode was so fantastic because I think what it did a great job of again, it was called bad apples and they did a data driven study showing how detrimental having any bad apples in your organization is because the interesting thing is it runs completely contrary to conventional wisdom on how social dynamics work.
The conventional wisdom is if you have, you know, like a lazy person on your team that if you've got high performers, they'll rise above that, right? Like they'll find a way to be high performing. And what this research showed is that basically there's three types of bad apples. There's slackers, there's depressive pessimists, and there's assholes basically. And these are the three types of bad apples you can have in your organization. And I feel like I would love to listen to this one.
Oh, I'll say, I'll send it to you. Maybe we can put it in the show notes. Uh, and what, what is interesting is that contrary to that conventional wisdom, these bad apples. Drag everyone else around them down. It's not that the high performers drag the bad apples up, which I think most people think is intuitively the case, but that the bad apples drag those high performers down. This is
like, because when we pick a lot of juries, so like in California we need 9 out of 12. Some federal courts I need unanimous. We try to weed out the bad apples. And, but in ours is like they can only have so much influence because you don't need, you need nine out of 12 or whatever. But if you get one bad apple on a federal case where you have to be unanimous, yeah, it's bad. Your, your case is done. I wonder if we can apply the same analytics. There's certain questions.
I asked juries to get out. Who the really bad apples are to get them.
Yeah. And you just got to get them out. You got to get them out. And that's I like how you say out, by the way. Very Canadian, right? So But it's true. You need to excise those. And, you know, a bad apple spoils the bunch. And I think what is so hard is not so, you know, somebody's, you know, a slacker, pretty easy to identify and get them out.
I think what many companies struggle with is what is often described as the, you know, the brilliant jerk, the brilliant asshole, somebody that is, and there's a lot of lawyers that fit this prototype. They're brilliant, they're great, great lawyers, but they might be awful. People and companies of all stripes have this. But how do you ferret that out from the beginning? Because you could be full school. Well, I think most people see it. Most people see it.
Most people know who the brilliant assholes are, but many organizations. You know, whether it's a tech company or a law firm kind of tolerate that person because they think the brilliant dimension outweighs all the toxic effects that never does. The other dimension is having, and it never does. Never does. But so many people, managers, executives, Fool themselves into thinking it does and they don't see the downstream effects that has on their culture We do a lot
with hiring especially for us for lawyers and you know, we're doing a lot of jury trials We have to people that resonate get that Initial gut check of credibility. We've had like one or two that have been We we talk a lot to staff if they're treating staff poorly. There's different things like it's different situations so One other thing I want to talk about this episode I have this tradition in my house. If you come over for a whiskey or two and you've been there is you have to rule.
I have these, um, Scotch rocks and they're, they're 20 sided die. So there's 20, there's 20 sides and they each have a different number. I play a lot. I just play a lot of judges dragons, but Jack had the highest role ever at my house. You still do. You have the record because somebody else holds a record. You hold the record. Wow. So Jack rolled a 38 out of 40, a 20 year old. And I mean, I was like, this is your luck score for the year. And I was like, holy shit, Jack rolled a 38.
Somebody rolled a 37 the other day and I had to break it to Jack. Newton broke, he beat you. And he's like, how is that
possible? But you did, man. So my, my wife often says I have a horseshoe up my ass. So that, that may be manifested with that 38 roll as well. But I mean, you're, you're died. Do you have magical powers? It has been a pretty incredible year,
but that's what, like, I literally, I mean, maybe it's a manifestation, but like, I always thought I'm the luckiest person in the world. I won a couple of game shows just by happenstance. I'm my, I married up significantly. It's more about putting yourself in position. Yeah. Tony is awesome. We went one time, the Jack and I, we were at dinner in Vancouver credit to you. I mean, just being the family, like they get away and one of their is your middle son, middle son,
Patrick. Yeah.
Split his lid up. It's lip open.
Yeah. Well his, the whole side of his face. So we were at, we're at dinner with you and Christine, uh, at Miku, my favorite sushi restaurant in Vancouver. We got a call from a good friend of mine, Scott, who sends me a photo of Patrick's face and he was playing field hockey and got a field hockey ball, you know, right smack on his jaw line and his face was torn open and it's bleeding. He's taken, taken to the hospital to get, I think what ended up being like 15 stitches.
Um, but yeah, life, life throws you, uh, curve balls all the time. But I, thank you. Thankfully, I think we'd finished most of our sushi at that point. We were close. We were close. We
were close. We had a long time, but I mean, Jack, so what, I mean, what's on the horizon because, you know, the last chapter I want to talk about here today is we see a great consolidation in the legal world with law firms. And also I see it now in the legal tech world. Yeah. Um, Clio is now probably the highest valued case management platform you've taken on. It was a 900 million investment.
Yeah.
What does that mean? Cause a lot of people that are lawyers are watching. Like, does that mean that Clio is going to try to like do X, Y, Z? Like, like what is the, what is the mission? Like what, what, why would you take on that capital? What, what are you looking to do?
Well, I would say first and foremost, what we're continuing to do is pursue our. Mission of transforming the legal experience for all. Is that your mission
statement?
That's our mission
statement. And I think a lot of like we, we've been very critical about making a mission statement that we adhere to. And a lot of companies take a long time to figure that out to write a mission statement. But I think it's important because you got to fall back to And
when I talked about that Dunbar number going from a hundred to 200 people. I think there's a few things you need to think about. You need to get your values written down, be really clear about what they are. You need to be clear about what your mission is as well, and, and your vision for what the future looks like.
And, you know, at, at Clio, we've got this very deep belief that technology and the technology we're creating, as well as the mindset that we are cultivating in the industry, will make legal services more accessible to the masses. We've got this massive access to justice problem I think a lot of lawyers, a lot of bar associations, a lot of law societies kind of intellectualize this problem.
They, they present access to justice like an externality that, you know, somebody has got to go solve that problem and that it's
wild. I mean, we talked about communication.
You can cure communication with technology, right? You can exactly like technology is a fundamental aspect of driving this transformation is our fundamental belief at Clio. That's our mission. And what, what's great about This last investment round at Clio is where our investors are just saying, keep doing what you're doing. Like you guys are doing an incredible job of transforming the legal industry.
We see how well you've capitalized and executed on the opportunity that the cloud represents and represented for legal. And the next chapter to your question, I think is AI.
Like it's, it's really, let's do exactly what we did with the cloud, which is make The power of the cloud, something that unlocks a new level and a new set of capabilities for law, for law firms, and let's do that with a I. And you saw that in today's keynote with duo, and I think it's incredibly exciting that will make the cloud look like child's play,
but this is the thing is, if you have a I baked into what lawyers in their day to day life, How many, how much better can they better serve their clients? Exactly. Spend more time in their living room rather than doing these little mundane tasks. Exactly. It frustrates me to no end when I meet with lawyer groups. I do it every week and they're so hesitant to do it. It's like, well, try a little bit. And I ask like, do you guys not use a calculator?
Like there's these little things you can do that was so archaic back in the day, but now here we are. Right. And if you want to be the best advocate for your clients, where should you be? It's not doing. These X, Y, Z tasks. No, it's not.
You should be talking to your client. You should be understanding their challenges, their problems, and figuring out how you can be the best partner to them in solving those problems. No, no client. You know, we had Seth Godin speak at Clio Con a few years ago. And I remember one of the phrases he, he uttered that, that has stuck with me is nobody ever woke up with a billable hour problem, you know, people wake up with real problems that they need real partners.
To help them solve and I think that's what, what AI enables for lawyers is you can automate the drudgery out of running a law firm and I think we'll in five years we're going to be in a world where AI is automating intake, it's automating answering phone calls, it's automating answering emails, it's automating help helping route legal problems to the lawyer that is best suited to solve those problems and lawyers are going to be put in a position where they can
focus on the highest and best use of their time, Which I think is going to be, if we think about what does AI leave for lawyers to do, it's literally to be human, you know, and to be great human. I'm
stealing that 100%.
Steal it. No trademark on that. Yet. But really, I think that's the case, is lawyers are going to be put in a position where they can be, connect empathetically with their clients and be true partners to them and helping solve their problem. No, AI is gonna
ever. AI is not good at empathy or strategy. It's not gonna do
this. It's not gonna do this. You can't throw two chatbots in a room and say, have a bourbon and hash out, you know, what the future of legal looks like. If they did, it'd
be very, very,
I don't know, it'd probably be very nice. They'd probably be so like, you know. Probably very nice. Probably very nice. But I think that, I mean, that's the future I see. That's the future I see. That's the future that Clio is helping create, uh, and, and that we, everyone at the team is super excited about helping realize. And then how do you get
the adoption from lawyers to take that step? That's the hard, getting them to change.
It's, it's, you know, it's the hard part, but the other, the other stat we shared in the Legal Trends Report, uh, this morning that I thought was, I still can't get over this stat, is the level of adoption we've seen of AI. in law firms over the course of the last 18
months. Because everybody's so excited about it, but then they adopt AI that's not real, or it's white labeled chat GPT, and it becomes a big, big problem. Because they were, somebody just said, Oh, let me sell you this product.
Yeah. But I think what we'll see is, is there's a lot of snake oil out there. There's a lot of like, like you said, there's a lot of stuff that is just off the shelf chat GPT or whatever else with a, with a white label on it. But we're going to see a thinning of the herd over the course of the next, the next year and the AI pretenders are going to get separated out from the real innovators in the space. But you know, as, as well as I do, like the technology is really there.
The, if you look at the progression we've seen, you know, just with chat GPT 3. 5 to 4, the progression we've seen with 4 to 0. 1 now, like this is orders of magnitude level improvements that we've seen. a handful of years, and that pace of innovation is going to continue, and it's going to be wildly exciting to see the impact that has on legal. And again, lawyers, I think, unlike any other technological evolution I've seen in legal, lawyers seem to innately realize what an opportunity this is.
And they're going to have a big challenge, just like everyone is, of kind of disentangling what's real from what's hype. And that's where you got to get these mentorship circles to figure out. Absolutely. What's really working? What is real? What is fake? And, and, and again, it like as, as a, I can empathize, empathize with the lawyers that are trying to sift through all of this, because overnight every product. I get this
question a lot. Where, where can lawyers go to figure out what's real and what's not? Where do you
go? Where I go is a, a website called Hacker News. Hacker dudes? Hacker News. Hacker, Hacker News. This is run by Y Combinator and it, It's basically like a discussion board, and it talks about all the latest news and technology, but importantly has a comment area where everyone, and this site's incredible. You've got people that are PhDs in machine learning, all the way down to, you know, engineers at Google and Meta and other companies commenting on these trends.
So it's an incredible place to get a real perspective on what's happening in the AI world. So. Uh, that's run by Y Combinator. It's called Hacker News. We've got people like Bob Ambrosi that do a fantastic job of surveying what's going on in legal tech. Um, and then, you know, as you alluded to earlier, I think where you really find the ground truth of what's going on is talking to other lawyers.
I think lawyers are better than almost any other professional at sharing information with each other around what works and what doesn't. You know, it's been one of the huge tailwinds of our growth over the years is Lawyers telling other lawyers about about Clio and your network
effect because the network of so many people reach out to me like what do you like about Clio and I show them like, Oh, wow, no, it could do XYZ.
Yeah, it can. Yeah. And that's so powerful. And, and you'll get that unfiltered, I think, very honest take from other lawyers. So find that mentorship group. Find that, uh, that group that you can connect with and get an unfiltered, whether it's mastermind group or just a loose kind of connection of colleagues that you trust, like plug into one of those groups. Yeah. And, and they'll give you the lowdown on what's really working and what's, uh, what's not. So, are both of our powders
dry? And, you have a little bit left. Alright, I'll finish this off. End of the episode here, and Jack, like, We could have you back every year because I feel like it's going to change the landscape every single year. And I think your keynote must have so much preparation into it. By the way, I have so many people that's that cite to your trends report.
Oh, it's a, it's incredible. It's a really, I'm proud of that piece of work. It's, it's a kind of an industry publication at this point that people reference back and it's helping drive the change we want to see. So right now we're trending
towards a bigger beard.
Maybe. Yeah. I
think we could do that. Um, we're trending towards more solos and midsize firms winning the industry right now. I think they're more nimble. They can embrace technology. They can do things like bigger than ever before. And I'm very, very excited for Clio's journey and your journey to, I mean, you guys are international at this point. I mean, you guys got offices in Ireland, 130 countries, 130 countries. That's insane.
People like we, people can get get out of like outside of their local bar, let alone their state, let alone their country. Yeah. Right. Um, so you guys are helping a lot of other folks. So like last thing here, Jack Newton floor, we're October 2024 here in Clio. We in Boston next year. What's the next 12 months going to hold for legal farm, legal owners, legal firm, firm owners, foam. I said, foam, I think legal foam, legal firm. There's a foam litigation.
That's like in my mind right now for mass tours that I can't get around.
Well, look, I think. Okay. I think about this year's ClioCon as a bit of a summit on AI. Like we're, we're almost two years into the AI hype cycle, right? We've gone through inflated expectations. We've gone through a bit of a trough of disillusionment. And I think the next year is going to be really about lawyers starting to practically integrate this into their practices in a way that really amplifies their impact. I think that's what the next two, 12 months are going to be all about.
It's going to be what we're focusing on at Clio is deploying this into our product and making it an inextricable part of your daily workflows in Clio. I think you're going to see more and more companies, whether that's Apple or Google or Microsoft. Weaving AI into products.
And I, I think we're gonna look, you know, I, I talked about my experience driving in a Waymo, uh, last week, , uh, in my keynote and, and how, you know, it just started to fade into the background that I had this, this artificial intelligence driving me around a city, like literally trusting my life with this ai, uh, driving around the city and, and forgot about it. Within 20 minutes, I think we'll look a year from now and see the way AI's been.
Woven into our daily use of our iPhone to our daily use of of Gmail or Outlook or Clio and forget a world that That that didn't exist. We're gonna start to take it for granted I think that's what the next year is gonna be all about
Jack Thank you for coming this episode of urban to proof and if we go back Before the people thought the cloud was crazy and now we can't think of a world where our documents are not living on the cloud We just 24 20 2015 people thought we were insane. Yeah You And here we are. Here we are. So, you know, Jack, thanks for coming on. You are a thought leader in this industry. We appreciate you having us here in Austin at Clio Con, and we're excited for this journey.
Thanks for coming.
Cheers, Bob.