Back in 2016, in the recesses of the Radisson Blu in Chicago, I joined a group of 500 or 600 attendees for the fourth Clio Cloud Conference. The company unveiled the Legal Trends Report, the Texas Law Hawk talked about legal marketing, and I already realized that this conference operated on a different level than the rest.
That show had already nearly tripled in size from the 200 or so that made it to the first installment. Last week, that same conference boasted 5,000 attendees with around 2,600 physically in the convention center. That’s quite the explosion in attendance.
The theme this year was momentum. “Momentum is the driving force that turns short bursts of energy into sustained success,” said CEO and co-Founder Jack Newton, in an appropriate nod to Newtonian physics. And while he was talking about the legal industry generally, as someone attending their ninth iteration of this show, Clio seems to have a lot of momentum itself.
Newton remarked that Clio — even as a $3B business — still gets a lot of its business from word-of-mouth. Its army of existing users providing a strong grassroots referral network. And while Clio has devoted customers based on product alone, Clio approaches its annual conference as a vehicle for strengthening that community. “I want our users to come into the conference as users, as customers, but leave as evangelists. And evangelists not just about Clio, the word of mouth about Clio, but there’s a new way of doing things.”
Philosophically, Clio aims to build that evangelist mindset by placing the technology — its actual product — as one piece in a larger conversation.
“Building cool technology and building cool products was, I realized, maybe even less than half the battle,” Newton said. “What we were trying to really do with lawyers is catalyze a different way of thinking about the world. Being more client-centered. How do you become more responsive to clients? Thinking about how you use technology, not to just get 10% more productive, but how do you actually transform the way you’re interacting with clients?”
But first, the company needs to get clients to make the trip. Ever since Newton first pitched holding a conference to the company’s event mastermind Lauren Sanders, Clio’s seen the role of its show a little differently than most. “I’d been to a couple of dozen different legal technology conferences that were pretty grim affairs. like in the basement of convention centers, windowless rooms, like obviously very low budgets, and an energy that was so focused around CLE, like just compliance, as opposed to real education, and as opposed to helping lead legal professionals into what the next part of the journey is going to be about. I thought we can do better.”
The numbers don’t lie… they can do this better.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
