The Law Meets the Cloud
Jack Newton – Cofounder and president of Clio 
Lawyers need software in order to run their business. You don’t think they make all those court dates and handle all those filing dates on your own do you? Jack Newton is not a lawyer but this techie has turned the staid world of practice management software on its head with his web based offering called Clio.
Clio has thousands of customers and has been offering its services since the beginning of 2008. I talked to Jack Newton as he was participating in a software as a service summit in Boston.
UL: So, when did you pass the bar?
JN: I’m not a lawyer. I actually have a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Alberta and have really learned everything I know about the law via osmosis. My co-founder, who is also not a lawyer, worked in Canada’s largest law firm, Gowlings, as the IT manager out in Vancouver.
UL: How did it start?
JN: It was one of those right time, right place kind of things. We had actually been consulting with the Law Society of BC and the Law Society saw that it was having a disproportionately high number of ethical and malpractice related issues with solo and small firm lawyers as compared to mid-size to large lawyer firms. They struck out a task force in order to investigate what the root causes were. They ended up identifying two main issues. One was that they weren’t, in a broad context, using technology as much as they should be in order to support their practice and in particular weren’t using practice management software to help run their practice. The large law firms had entire floors of IT people helping them. They had paralegals and administrative staff to help make sure they’re not missing court dates or filing deadlines so they can really just focus on the practice of law.
That’s where we saw the opportunity as solos and small firms have to take care of all of it themselves. We looked at this problem and we wondered why isn’t there a better solution for them? That’s basically where the idea for Clio came from. There is at least a dozen desktop based practice management programs out there but they’re universally hard to use, expensive, with a constant upgrade treadmill and so on. The usual failings of traditional desktop software and that’s why lawyers weren’t embracing them. In early 2007 we’re having this discussion and my cofounder and I saw the explosive growth of cloud computing companies like Salesforce.com and wondered why wasn’t there a Salesforce.com for lawyers?
UL: One of the biggest problems I can see right off the hop would be lawyers trusting you with their data. Was than issue?
JN: That was what we saw as the biggest risk. Everyone we spoke agreed that the idea was great with one potentially large caveat. Will lawyers be comfortable with putting confidential client data online and in the cloud? We couldn’t answer that definitely without launching a product and just seeing.
It was really clear to me that cloud computing and software as a service was the future of the software space and we wanted to build something even if it took the market a little while to get there.
UL: Are you under the radar of the big players in the space?
JN: They’ve realized that this is something they need to pay attention too. Even if they didn’t have their ear to the ground figuring out where the technology was going their customers have.
UL: So is this concept applicable across a wide variety of professional office applications?
JN: Absolutely. The concept applies to literally every industry. One of the last industries to see impact from cloud computing is the legal industry. We’ve seen Salesforce.com and down in Calgary we even have Curve Dental doing web apps. Guys like Matt Dorey have been solving this problem in the dental management space for awhile now as well.
Category: Work
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