ClioCon 2025 Recap

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the podcast, or good afternoon, or wherever you're at. Welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to be here this week. Lynda and Sarah, hello.

Hello.

Hi. Where have you been?

I don't know, it's green, so Boston.

Boston, freezing our behinds off.

You went to Boston and what were we doing in Boston?

Clio, ClioCon.

ClioCon, that's what we're gonna talk about today is ClioCon. And I didn't get to go this year, but I'm so excited that you guys went and I can't wait to hear all about it. So who wants to start?

We're gonna kidnap you and make you go next year.

I already bought my ticket.

Okay.

I bought my ticket.

Okay, awesome.

Sarah texted me, she's like, buy your ticket right now. And so I did.

It's really worth it, Steve. I mean, if you use Clio, obviously, if you're not a Clio person and you focus on something else, you don't want to go. But I think I had a really high expectation of what was going to be new because we were told by multiple people that you better go and see. All the staff people are like, you got to go. There's exciting new stuff. There's exciting new stuff. I think that in the beginning, as I was listening to Jack Newton, who's the CEO, I was listening to him talk. I'm like, well, you renamed some things. And I was kind of like, think I was whispering to Sarah like, this is it. There's nothing big here until they get to the AI piece.

Yeah.

Was like, oh wow. Because AI was just, I mean, AI is still in its infancy, but what Clio is doing is, as I would say in Boston, wicked smart. I think it's definitely, really from all the other software that's out there that's adding AI in there, you're doing it to help you find your files or helping you rewrite your emails or whatever, the low, lowest tiered stuff. This one's doing and it's gonna do big things. It's just starting. I mean, kind of starting, right, Sarah?

It is. Yeah. So Vincent and work are the two core things that we saw and it was pretty remarkable. It definitely takes the researching and sort of the questions that you could ask it. It was a demo that we had with Natalie, who is an amazing ClioCon or a Clio, Cleon, I guess is what they call it. Sorry, this little bug is bugging me.

I thought you were excited.

I know, I'm like. He like showed Lynda and I, gave us a quick tutorial and showed us what the ideas were behind Vincent and researching. And so she's like, okay, what if you were a case and you wanna see, a soccer injury that happened, how many cases are out there that have been tried similar to this? And so she prompted this thing and it came up with a plethora of things and then it went further and it started to organize the data and you could essentially have it put a checklist together, a timeline together, take a— if you already had a brief on something else, summarize that for you, put that in a checklist format as well and had all the dates and all the calendaring and all the things that you would need. So I think of an attorney another product that we often see that clients pay for. They go out to research and come back. Well, this is all in core product.

Including the calendaring.

And the calendaring.

Wow.

And it's just the start of it. Now it'll get more robust as it goes along, obviously. But right now, just the bit that Lynda and I got the demo on, and it was a simple thing about a soccer injury. And if the—

We totally failed when she said, as an attorney, what would be a question you'd ask? And we're like, coming up with these questions. And she's like, no, as an attorney. And we were like, accounting questions. But I think the biggest part of all of that AI is if you think of ChatGPT, for an example, as one of the AI and you ask it something and it wants to please you, so it hallucinates sometimes, it gives you the wrong answer. And it's basically, I think of ChatGPT as it's swallowed up the entire internet and then it's pulled from everything, but there's no validation to what it has to pull from. So it does its best guess. Yeah. With this, they actually bought a company, or it was actually kind of two companies that house a lot of cases. And was it Velux? Is that how you say it?

That's what I was going to ask. Where are they getting their data from? Because they just had a huge infusion of cash, didn't they?

Well, not anymore. They spent it.

They spent it. So Velux is one of the announcements, and there's another. So Velux, a legal AI, and that they have a huge library. They have been around and doing legal research for a very long time. And there was Another product, and I could look—

It was the two products together because VLUX was the global one.

Yeah.

And the other one was US-based. So basically what these people have been doing is aggregating data from all cases, matters, decisions, and put it into one spot, which is completely validated data. So what Clio's doing is it's basically like Thomson Reuters as an example where the client—

Right.

Will spend money on getting that research and go in and find those case studies. Now, with this one, it wasn't super fast, but if you took on a case like the kid falling down on the soccer field and getting very damn, you know, very hurt, and depending on where it is too, that's the other piece of it. So say they fell down in Florida, it can pull case law and decisions from the state of Florida that are similar to this.

Real-time data.

Yep, real-time data that it has inside the platform that are actual cases and matters that have maybe already come to fruition. They already have a decision. They're similar where the attorney can argue that in court, that case number, blah, blah, blah, which they would do with going into like a Thomson Reuters project— program and finding it. This pulls it in for you and then lays out the case, every step that they have to do. They gave it a checklist, it gave it a table format of how the whole case was going to lay out. Stuff the attorney knows in their head, you don't have to think anymore. It's going to all be laid out. Dates on your calendar of when you have to get certain things done in court. I mean, it was amazing. Once it started spitting out the data, I was like, wow. I wish they had— I kept saying to Sarah, I wish they had that for accounting.

Yeah.

It also can screen, so they also had AI attached to their product, not Clio Manage, the other one.

Oh, there's Clio Grow. So Clio Grow will have its own. And we saw the core, we didn't see the Clio Grow side. What we, she and I got to actually work with Natalie on was the core product, which is Vincent and Work, Clio Work. So if you have Clio Do now, you're grandfathered in.

Oh, nice.

So yeah, you're smart to pick it up. But also though, with Clio Grow, it had a way of, You can filter and create it to screen the clients so you're not wasting time on a client that won't work with your firm or won't work with the demographic that you want to work with, your profitable client. It will kind of filter that out.

Yeah.

Save you time and money.

What I'll do for the show notes is I landed on right here in my corner window here. I was just looking up to see if I could get some transcript details, but the full keynote that he had, is available.

So I think—

Oh, nice.

In the show notes we should add that.

Yeah, because that's something you really wanna watch.

Yeah, it is something, exactly, like Lynda said. But, and they announced the different platforms that they purchased, so.

Yes, they spent $1 billion on acquiring—

$1 billion.

Billion. And then the other part, Sarah, that I was amazed at too was, well, parts of it. So the Manage is gonna have Manage AI. So you use Clio Manage, you can have Manage with AI in it, which will also help speed you up. But the fun part of it, when he started out, and I even said this to Sarah, I said, whoever does their videos for these conferences, they are just like— it was like a movie. It brought us back to 1985, and it showed everybody like fax, like attorneys faxing stuff to their clients. And you forget that's not that long ago that we were actually— that's our technology, right? That was our, you know, all the things that we forget that we lived with that was like— I remember my first time you saw a fax, I was like, how did that get through a phone line?

The little mini ones that put the paper in and it spits it out on the other side? They had one of those. They had like, who's going to be not needing a library? And then there's this like, legal research is done in a library. And then they had, you know what I mean? So they had a lot of—

The big cell phone with the big antenna. I mean, the things that you —you know, the dial phone wasn't there. You know, the things that you kind of grew up through working. You know, that's how far we've come and how fast things are. And when we watched her do this demo, it was not fast. Because she said a couple of times, you can set it up to search and get this data. And then you can continue working in another tab or another part of it and then come back to it, and it will have the result. So it's not fast. And you can see in the future, it's going to be faster.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

The thing that concerns me with all the AI though is the amount of energy it's gonna take to do these things.

Oh yeah.

It's not, it's a high energy thing and I don't know where we're gonna get all this energy.

I was just reading about that this weekend in the city where, in Denver area where I live, they're building a huge data center for AI. And I was reading about the amount of energy that this center is going to require and the backup generators, how big they are for this thing and how much water it's gonna take to keep the place, to keep all the equipment cooled down. Right, right. Yeah. Having worked in law firms, I wanna ask this. Did they show you at all, going back to the calendaring piece, did they show you at all, are they gonna start out with just like federal cases and then maybe later go down to municipal and so on like that? Or is it gonna be everything? The reason I ask that is because back in the old days, Law Toolbox, when they first started up, they only had a certain layer of calendaring that you could do. You file your motion, they have 10 days to respond and 21 days and blah, blah, blah, 7 days, you know, all those things. But when we got down down to the state and county courts. We couldn't get that information right away. Later on, they started adding and layering it in. Was there anything like that involved in that? And number 2, when are they going to launch?

So, okay, so they've launched parts of the product now.

It did.

There are part— yeah, you can purchase the product now. Now, the part that you're discussing in the draft, I think that's in drafts. And, um, uh, there's another component. There's— right now there's multiple products. So forgive Lynda and I because we sort of went—

oh yeah.

What's that? It definitely had an Intuit-esque moment at one point in that sense. But there are pieces that in, in pieces where multiple states are gonna start adding and have direct contact into. It's not at the federal level from what I understand, but the calendaring is internal based on the recommendation, based on what it's seeing, right? So it's coming back to you and saying, based on what you're, what your document says or what your case type is or what your— it had multiple ways of grabbing this data. That's just one piece of it, Steve.

Yeah, yeah.

It's marked and redlined documents. It will highlight things that you need to pay attention to.

It does the redlining too?

Obviously, you have to go back in and do your work, right? Like we do nowadays. I mean, you want to go back and double-check all of this. But the fact that it's What I see is a change in administrative support.

Yeah.

Happen in firms right away. Somebody who's really good at doing a certain level of research, they're going to have to learn to prompt and figure out what that—

Exactly.

Validation.

Exactly.

That's what I see.

Love it.

Yeah. But there's the viewpoint that Lynda was talking about, that 50-foot view. You've got the legacy firm that they're bringing in that's not old, They've moved with modern times. They just have the data component, the research, and the way that they showed us the value of that partner. They not only talked about where we stood previously in history, not that long ago, to the value of what this partner was doing and how it intertwined with their story and where they're going.

The key thing is they're pulling from data. That's what they want to pull from. They're not pulling and getting the hallucinations because they're going to pull it in. And when it pulled it and it cited all the different law, which would be applicable to the person falling down the soccer field. So, and then they could click the link and it will bring them to the actual document, which will help them write the, you know, write any of their words or whatever they're gonna do— closing arguments, opening arguments. All of that can all be pulled from— and how they could lay out the case, and it pre-laid out the case. So it's like, it makes me wonder, you know, it's such a valuable tool to an existing attorney who's been doing this, you know, the quote-unquote old-fashioned way, because we don't have all that, you know. I didn't have all that up until now. What will it look like in the future? Because just, we were, I think I can't remember who I was talking to, we were talking about the old days of learning accounting and we used to have to, I remember that we had calculators and my teacher said, of course this is a long time ago, you know, you can't add it up. I don't want you using the calculator. I want you to know how to add 8 and 5 and, you know, 7 and 6. I want that in your head. So that you know when something's wrong. And then since then, I'm sure they've let kids use calculators and then now spreadsheets. And then—

Yeah.

My grandson can't do homework at home anymore because they don't want the kids using AI. So that's how much the world's changing. How many skills will be lost? You still, to be an attorney, your job's not gonna be taken away by AI. It's gonna be enhanced by it, but will it be enhanced As you're, if you're new and you come out when AI is fully cranking, will you have the same skillset as somebody who came up through the ranks with it that's had to do old school of reading, searching, reading, writing it out, mapping it out, right? They won't have to do any of that anymore, which is great. I mean, yay for technology. But I often wonder that what, how much less brain you're gonna be using because you don't have to, but maybe it's more skills Sure. Different skills, right? It might be just different skills and worrying about nothing.

With this, it feels harder to under— like, parts of what we've seen because we've grown so quickly in technology since I first saw the Apple Macintosh computer. Right?

Remember that?

Yeah. And all the—

Oh, it was so cool.

The Lisa.

The Lisa. Yeah.

I think it'll change. This one's just harder to see because it is so big, right? It feels bigger. The one thing he did say, and I wanted to share this because I happened to land on this, the words exactly on the screen were executing practice of law tasks from within business of law application. And I thought that that was an interesting identifier because they—

Yeah.

—themselves in that space of practice of law with business of law. So, Steve, I think it'll be interesting later on as you get to absorb some of this afterwards. And I think I'm going to go back and review some of it. It is crazy. But there's pieces to what Lynda, you just said. We saw a keynote later on in the day that impacted us emotionally, all of us. I'm sure everyone in the room.

Which they do a great job, Cyrus. This is kind of a repetitive theme, but they touch upon things. Attorneys, first of all, are like one of the highest occupations for alcoholics, and they have something in place for that. Such a high-stress job, family law, high-emotional job, and they touch upon different segments of that. So it's not all heady and lawyer-y and all that. It's kind of intermixed with a lot of things that overall, I think there's so much that anybody there can pull from. I mean, we're there as accountants, right, and bookkeepers, and we could pull from some of the topics and sat there and listened to the keynotes. And the one, Sarah, the one with the gentleman, um, JJ, who had been in jail wrongfully—

That's the one I was referencing, yeah.

Wrongfully accused in Sing Sing in New York, was in there for 24 years. He got released, he got exonerated, didn't do it, never did it. Got exonerated and they still didn't let him out. And they finally let him out, they put him on parole with the ankle bracelet. Like, he didn't do it. Why did this system— clearly it's a broken system. And the man, he definitely— the fact that he goes back into that prison after all of this and has now created— he created a way to help others in jail. Like, he— It changed his life, and he created a system to help everybody in jail and make it, like, livable. And it's— hopefully he's able to, on the outside, change a lot more on the system, because the system's broken. I mean, clearly, it's broken. And the whole— his whole story, I mean, we're all— all of us were crying. Thankfully, somebody had tissues. I don't know who had them, but we kind of passed around the tissues My bet would be Myrna. Oh, yeah.

But I think the biggest part in tying it with AI is there are human elements to this that cannot be seen in an AI format. Dateline had this covered. It was a Dateline story at one point, and the producer visited him over 255 times in the time that he had met him to the time that he had been freed. The human element, the changes, just the pure conversation. You could tell someone's life change moment in this thing. And this is what I think AI is doing to us. But in this life change moment, he thought it was strange that people were talking just randomly. He didn't realize AirPods had been invented.

Yeah, he wasn't around when they were invented. He's looking at people talking to themselves going, why is everybody talking to themselves?

What happened?

Wow. 20 years difference. You're seeing this change, this evolution mindset. And that's what we're seeing. And that's what we're going to be seeing, but there are studies out there already about how less of a brain activity you have when you're using it. So we're gonna have to find a way to like counterbalance it. And I'd say even as it is, the tools inside the tools, I'd still look at, you'd still have a skillset to understand at our maturity, all the three of us, we can see books in a different way than we see our staff coming up through the ranks.

Well, while we're on that, let's open the gate and go down that road. What's going on with Clio Accounting?

It wasn't much that we learned other than—

Not much at all. Because we wanted them to come on the Law Lab, and he just said, let's get through the end of the year and we'll talk. But it's— Okay. Yeah, quarter one. We'll get to next year in quarter one. And just didn't sound like— and we talked to some of the top—

It didn't sound unpromising. It didn't sound where we could be.

We met a colleague that that's all they're using. In their client base is that, that little tiny micro client?

It's not all they're using. It's a segment that they're adding and that they had to be onboarded and then they'll work with them. However, that particular client specifically said, I only do small firms. I only—

Okay. Yeah.

Very, very unique firms. So maybe 1 to 2 partners at the most with one maybe one contract worker, right? So, but to your point, Lynda, I mean, it wasn't a conversation that was— it didn't go anywhere. It didn't go high or low. It's just, it's there. It's still happening. And there have been some product improvements to it, but—

He did show us the new three-way, but we never really got far with him because it's just not—

It happens.

It's not there for our clients, and it's not there for even a small firm that's growing. That's not a product for them. So I'm sure maybe next year at Clio Con it'll be better, but it sounds like they've ran into some issues. It's not easy to build a GL.

Yeah. No, it's not. Not a one-size-fits-all GL. I mean, it's just—

How many apps recently have tried to, they've asked us questions and/or tried and Lynda and I are both like, "Mm-hmm." I think, what is that, Patriot Payroll tried, Digits tried. Digits, yeah.

There's been a few that have tried it. They're very rudimentary when you do see them built out. They don't do a heck of a lot and you have to be okay with that, I guess. I don't know. I just don't think with the way this one sits right now, I mean, you can't— still can't add payroll. So it has to be very, very, very tiny. And then you're stuck in it. You can't get out of it. I mean, it doesn't flip a switch and become managed because it's not—

KPIs that you two love and gloat about. So I highly doubt that there's enough data inside of that product right now to even produce even remote to what you're—

I mean, we love the people that are, that are working on it. Yeah. So we want them to succeed. But yeah.

Yeah. Also, it sounds like they made the right choice to bring in the AI side that, that we were just talking about. And, and with the case, you know, the case studies and the information, I, I, man, I'd be all over that. I, I think that's so exciting because I worked in law firms back when we would pull the— they would pull— and this was only 15 years ago, they would pull the books off the shelf and go and study and, you know, and reach out to Thomson Reuters and say, gosh, I hope I'm getting all the data I need. And, you know, wow, I'm impressed.

If you're still watching Suits, they have a whole library.

Yeah.

I know, right? You know, you think about it, I mean, think about it, the— and I actually said to Sarah, I had this one of our attorneys, I'd like to write to him because I know he's in Clio and I know he's proactive. Active. And I'd like to write to him and say, hey, this is happening in your software. Doesn't have Clio Duo, which is now the— that name's gone. It's the AI. But I think for him, he wants to be cutting edge. He wants to be ahead of everybody else. And I think for him, he'd be really one that really should hop onto the AI train. I think everybody should because really, if you're in a product, I mean, you, you're gonna give this a couple of years and if you're not in a product that has that kind of AI, Right. Clio has the money. You know, Clio's been around a long time. You're working with a product that's not fly-by-night or it's not something that's kind of been patched together. I just think that it's really, it's the product to go forward with if you want to be that person ahead, because you are going to save, they are going to save a lot of time. I mean, it didn't show much for us saving time, but it was very much geared to the attorney. That's the buyer of this product and the things that they're doing for the AI. I think it's really going to help them. We saw—

This is gonna help.

—how the product lab too. We did go in the product lab. Our whole team did. And we all kind of like marched in like a group and everybody went off to there and hit up the whole place. Like, here comes the proper trust. And we just kind of marched in, went to each person and told them what things we would like to see in it. 'Cause that's from the accountant's perspective. And they love it. Sarah signed up for—

It's a group. That they are going to— where they want to beta test or be involved in product reviews. And so they have what they're— sounds like what they're trying to do is build like a community. And they'll probably vet you out because there was a lot of—

Like an accountant's counsel. You had to answer a lot of questions.

There was a lot of questions to answer. But it's the other thing that's nice too is, Steve, from your perspective, when you had worked in a firm, it's understanding how an attorney or a paralegal works with the activity section of it, how notes are being drafted, how phone calls are being recorded. Exactly. Emails, all that massive time that gets lost.

Productivity. I mean, that's what's running through my head is productivity. And the business of law is going to benefit from this so much in their fee structures, their hourly or flat fees, their, turnaround of product. They're being able to answer their clients more efficiently. I can see all kinds of benefits here. I'm like, I'm ready to go to law school.

So there is a, there is a product, uh, there's a couple products that Lynda and I strategically ended up visiting, uh, their booths. The, the way the layout was, it was a little wonky. It's hard for them. I know it's their first year, so I don't want to be overcritical. It was just the way the layout was.

It was kind of like they took the vendors and put them in all the hallways. Yeah. So they weren't in one pooled, like, room, like before.

Oh, okay.

They were kind of scattered everywhere.

And some weren't in a room.

And yeah, I don't know how that did for flow, but I can say that we did talk to one that backs up Clio and a whole bunch of other software. So that was a good one. You know, you don't think about backing up your Clio, but what if— hey, we just had Amazon servers broke, right, at 3 o'clock. Morning. Yeah, where's your data? And you don't want— you don't want to have like, where's your QuickBooks? Do you want QuickBooks backing up your QuickBooks? Probably not. You want it to be someplace else because if it goes down, it goes down. Um, and then we also— yes, this one, Point One. I would love to have them.

I, I happen to have this from last year. Oh wow, I kept it because I knew every time I opened it, I was like, I like them.

I really like them.

I really like them. I'd love to have them on as a guest because their product is It's intelligent.

Yes.

I just wanna say it's super intelligent. It's super today, here and now. And it goes beyond just Clio, but Clio is the core product. It's a young creator inventor. I'm sure there's more people behind it, but any event, Lynda Artesani.

It helps track.

Yeah.

So if an attorney's like, you know, taking a phone call, or actually people don't take phone calls, but say they're doing an email over here to a client and then they hop in at the in Clio and they see working on the client and then do something else for the client, they pull up some research for that particular case, it watches everything you do and it tracks all the time.

Wow.

Yeah. And the best part, which Sarah and I found out at the very end, like, this is like—

At the very end.

So cool to begin with because we're like, we want to— we want you to make that for us too, for accountants. But the biggest mind-blowing piece, which was almost like an afterthought as we were walking away, they said we can also— if you sign somebody up and they really should have had it 2 or 3 months ago, or 2 months ago, they can pull all that data out of the computer.

Wow. 2 years.

2 years.

2 years.

2 years.

So they can backtrack and get your missing time, because that's money, right?

And that's on the Clio product though. I should— we should specify that's on the Clio product. So if you've got this intelligent bill review, auto— automatic timekeeping, which there's a lot of things that Clio had released as well, but this as a core product to be integrated with, it was something I've been wanting to see for so long.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, it's incredible. So, and this individual happened to, 'cause they're on the Y Combinator group, and so they have a lot of core people that we know from the accounting side, financial side that they knew. So I think that was the last one that Lynda and I saw. We were definitely impressed. We walked away, we're going, wow.

Yeah. Wow. Because it was cool. They showed us how it worked and it was really, um, it's like your dream product. Like, couldn't they make a product to do that? And it actually has it. And they're, they really want to make their product better. And I, I was really impressed by both of those gentlemen. One was an attorney, I guess, former attorney, and he's now consulting. And then the young, young kid who's probably 30 or 40 and looks like he's 12, but he, um, very, very smart young man. And, um, I, we want to make this product for you all too. And Yeah, he was very smart and I think it's a really good product to maybe look into. And if we can get him on the podcast, that would be great.

That would be great.

The software was called PointOne. And I said, I really like your name too, because, you know, some software has silly names. This one was pretty cool.

This one was right on the nose. So it was a lot of fun.

My largest client was at Clio Con. So I texted her, I think it was Friday, and I said, how's it going? And she was like, there's so much information here. She was just— I could tell she was so glad she went.

Yeah. So it's pretty remarkable and I can't wait for you to attend next year. Let me just see.

You guys better go again next year.

Better.

There's a lot of walking, Steve. Wear your sneakers 'cause if you—

I will. I'll be ready.

A lot of walking. We got no problem getting our 10,000 steps in every day.

Awesome.

But there's ice cream. Well, I didn't hear that. We couldn't find the mamas. They found the ice cream, so.

Did they? Well, it was funny because it's a lot, but these two mamas that are sitting over here to the side, they're super excited that you'll be attending. Yes. Good morning, mamas.

Well, this is a great conversation this morning. I'm so excited. Yeah, thank you. That's wonderful.

It was good. It was really worth going. If you have Clio, you should go. If you're thinking about getting Clio next year, you should go. It's in Boston again. So—

It is. That's the nice part. We already know the format. We know We know what we are expecting. It's just a little bit later in the calendar month, which is for us actually. It's probably nicer for us given that our tax extension deadline dates are on the 15th.

And I'll pack my wool coat. Yeah, I wore my mittens the first day in class inside, so I was that cold, but they warmed it up the next day. It was colder the first day. But yeah, so awesome. Awesome.

Well, thank you.

Thank you.

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Awesome.

Thank you, everybody.

Yeah. And I'll make sure to grab this keynote because it's got a lot of views. So I'll make sure—

Yes. So I'll have to get it. Great. Thank you, Sarah.

Absolutely. So thank you. Bye, everybody.

Bye-bye.