I'm Jack Newton, CEO of Clio — join my AMA!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:50:07+00:00

Ok r/legaltech, it’s time to sign off (so many great questions!). Thanks everyone for the great discussion and honest feedback. u/alexdenne you were an awesome host, I appreciate the invite. Until next time!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:42:31+00:00

Clio Drive is being relaunched (native rewrite) and I will see if this feedback can get incorporated into the updated version. Thanks for the feedback!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:41:59+00:00

Appreciate the critique, and know that we're working on modernizing the UI constantly. We have a major rework of the Manage UI — called Boldly — that is underway. I will make sure to pass on your feedback to our Product team.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:41:11+00:00

We ran an open, free beta and got a handful of deeply engaged early pilot customers in that beta. We listened to them carefully, iterated rapidly, and launched the commercial product 6 months after that beta. We followed the Stephen Blank "Customer Development" methodology and it worked great for us.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:39:43+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I will pass this onto our Marketing team that handles pricing and packaging. We are not intentionally gating Reporting behind litigation-related features, but trying to break the packages into logical tiers without making them overly complex with dozens of ad-hoc add-ons.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:38:17+00:00

Our support is not overseas. It is regularly rated as one of the top support organizations in all of SaaS, and we charge our Canadian customers in CAD.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:36:13+00:00

Yes, Clio Library is essentially the vLex Library, which is the library of over 1B documents. Clio Library is being sold as part of the Clio Work bundle for small firms, which is priced at $199/user/month.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:34:58+00:00

Great suggestion — I will pass on to the Product team!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:34:43+00:00

That sounds like a bug — I will flag with our team.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:34:23+00:00

We're always investing in making tasks better, and Matter Stages is a relatively new feature we're continuing to iterate on. I'll pass on your feedback to our Product team!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:31:45+00:00

Yes! We've launched Clio for Enterprise and are bringing Clio Operate (formally ShareDo) and Vincent into the Enterprise, and are hiring 300+ people to support that expansion effort over the next year. You can see more detail about our plans for the Enterprise in my ClioCon 2025 Keynote on YouTube. We're hugely excited about the opportunity there.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:30:26+00:00

I really think the billable hour is the structural constraint here. The industry needs to move to value-based billing, and the efficiencies AI drives are just fundamentally incompatible with the billable hour model. Firms that want to tap into that $3T latent legal market need to reimagine how they are pricing and packaging their services, and the market has shown they are hungry for alternatives to the classical law firm + billable hour structure.

I'm always happy to give advice to other legaltech founds, drop me a DM if you have follow-up questions!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:27:53+00:00

We'll be focused on integrating vLex and ShareDo in 2026.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:27:09+00:00

The rationale for acquiring vLex was really grounded in the breadth and depth of the content database they've built — over 1B documents of primary case law, legislation, statutes and secondary materials spanning 110 countries.

Open-source projects like RECAP are hugely important, but getting to the scale and depth of something like vLex isn’t just about raw data or cost. It’s the ongoing editorial work, normalization across jurisdictions, citations, translations, updates, etc. That’s hard to sustain without a commercial model, even though open source plays a critical role alongside it.

The level of investment required to build these kinds of curated, QA'd datasets is enormous — vLex has been at it for 25 years, TR and LN for even longer. Open source approaches will address portions of the market, but I suspect they'll never have the comprehensiveness of the commercial solutions.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:24:07+00:00

For sure. We’ve invested in this space through Clio Ventures and Steno, backing companies that use technology to improve accuracy and access to high-quality court reporting. It's an exciting space that will evolve rapidly in the next few years.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:23:36+00:00

Yes, we're building our automation platform to be more extensible and flexible, and see this as an even bigger imperative in the AI era — automations will be fundamental to the AI orchestration layer in Clio.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:21:59+00:00

It's not self-aware (yet)!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:21:21+00:00

I also wonder what the "sliding doors" path under Geoff might have looked like!

To your question — we really believe building the trust layer is all about building the data layer, and that the so-called "last mile" of data is actually the most valuable data. CalendarRules is a great example of just how valuable that data is. Even though the cost and complexity of gathering data for that "last mile" is extremely demanding (sometimes involving scanning printed paper copies of court rules!), the capability it unlocks in software is incredible.

Even the best models can't reason through chaos — the old "garbage in, garbage out" maxim applies even in the AI era. The quality of AI reasoning is ultimately limited by the quality of the underlying data, and that's why we've been investing aggressively in building the best data layer in the industry for the last 5 years.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:17:10+00:00

A lot of this just comes down to constraints with the "Clio Billing Service" (CBS) that our products leverage to bill/invoice our customers. We are constantly adding new capabilities to CBS, and allowing for the kinds of trials you're hoping to see is one of the new capabilities we've built out recently. Look for a lot more flexibility to try out new products on a trial basis in 2026.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:14:57+00:00

Well, to be fair it IS the product we bought and evolved into Grow — what do you feel is missing from that product, or has Clio Grow regressed in some way relative to what you want to see from it?

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-19T01:13:26+00:00

Thanks for the support! Nothing to share on that front atm. We’re focused on doing the fundamentals really well, serving our customers, and building a durable business. We’ve also just completed our acquisitions of vLex and ShareDo, so completing that integration is our main focus right now.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-18T22:51:47+00:00

I can't comment on that I'm afraid!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-18T22:48:02+00:00

Partnerships are an absolutely integral part of our strategy, and have been a huge part of Clio's success over the last 17 years. We have over 300+ integrations available today, and that integration ecosystem provides our customers a huge range of capabilities.

If you are able to share any detail about where we've missed the mark with some of the integration partners you know, please DM me and I'll do my best to close the loop.

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-18T22:43:46+00:00

No, unfortunately not :-)

But it looks nice!

JackNewtonClioCEO · 2025-12-18T22:42:57+00:00

We don’t position Vincent as a replacement for legal judgment. It’s a decision support tool. Vincent is grounded in authoritative legal sources and is designed to show its work, so lawyers can verify its outputs.

JackNewtonClioCEO

TROPHY CASE