Live from ClioCon, Jack Newton on Clio's 'Refounding,' Its Push into the Courts, and Why Data Is the Only Durable Moat

0:01Welcome to Lonex. This is Bob Ambrogi and I am here on the floor at ClioCon in Boston where I am conducting a number of interviews with Clio executives and other folks here at the conference. And right now I am very happy to be sitting down with the founder and CEO of Clio, Jack Newton. Jack, how are you doing? I'm terrific. Glad to be here. I'm going to ask you to hold tight for just a minute because I'm going to just have a quick word from our sponsors, and then we're going to get to our conversation. So hold on just a second. We'll be right back. Do you specialize in workers' compensation, employment and labor, or insurance defense?

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1:26That's right. And I think you've been to every single one. And I've been to every single one. And I'm pretty sure you've been to every single one. I've been to every single one for sure. That's a good thing. This has been, it feels to me, and you may not agree, but in terms of the announcements and developments that came out of your talk yesterday, your keynote yesterday. I don't remember so much happening in a single show or a single year for Clio. It's been a huge year.

1:57And maybe I'll just kind of throw you a softball because I'm kind of wondering out of everything you talked about yesterday, what struck you as kind of the biggest development, the biggest news of the day? Yeah. Yeah, that's not a softball. That's like having to choose your favorite child because there was a lot of great stuff announced yesterday. Maybe I can get away with answering with two answers. One is what was the most maybe personally impactful, and then I'll talk about what I think is most impactful for our customers. What was most personally impactful was unveiling our new brand identity.

2:36And, you know, our logo identity has really not fundamentally changed in the 18 years we've been around. And when we acquired VLEX last year and started reimagining ourselves as an AI native company, an AI first company, we really decided about a year ago that we needed a new brand identity to help carry that next chapter of the company forward. and it was a really an emotional moment yesterday to number one say goodbye to and retire the brand that we had built for for 18 years but then to unveil this new iteration that I feel is such a perfect fit for what the next chapter of the company would is going to be and so that was a really personally resonant moment.

3:31I had my co-founder at Clio Ryan in the audience, partially because this was a really momentous moment for the company and it was great having him there. And so that was a deeply personal moment. I would say in terms of impact for our customers, I think the concept we talked about a lot over the course of the keynote yesterday, what is the concept of context creates capability. And I think the most powerful manifestation of that is what I walked through with our agentic workflow capabilities. And I very deliberately stayed away from talking about agentic and AI buzzwords too much. But I think the audience, when they saw what is possible when you have agents doing everything from picking up the phone for you 24-7, doing a great job of doing intake, scheduling an initial consultation on your behalf, then moving on to drafting the actual legal work.

4:35But importantly, surfacing that work to you when it needs a review for you before it gets filed with the courts, for example. I think a lot of light bulbs went off for the audience and seeing, okay, all of these buzzy terms I hear about AI and agents and agentic and everything that I think can sound very mysterious and frankly ends up being very amorphous the way a lot of vendors talk about it. I think they could see in that story about Sal and his workshop exactly how this is all brought to life and what a game changer this could be for their firm. So I guess to distill that into one answer, it's how agentic AI and Clio really brings to life the, I think the true and deep value proposition of AI and then shows the everyday firm how they can unleash this technology.

5:29And I think there's a lot of hype right now around, for example, AI native firms. And I think the reality is that every law firm in the world is going to need to figure out how to operate like an AI native firm. And we're giving them the tools to do that with everything we announced yesterday. Yeah. You know, when we were here last year, although the VLex acquisition had been announced, it hadn't been closed. And although you were starting to work together, you weren't actually, you know, officially melding your products together at that point. So it was November last year, like a month after ClioCon that it actually closed.

6:04Here we are, you know, almost a year later. And I think you used the word yesterday, refounding. Yes. To talk about this acquisition and how it changed your company, you know, kind of beyond what you were just talking about in terms of agentic AI and all of that. What did you mean by that? How has that really kind of changed the mission or the focus of what you're doing? Yeah, it's a word I used really deliberately because it so perfectly captures the moment, you know, basically a year ago almost to the day, where the VLX transaction closed on November 5th, 2025, and we became at that moment a new kind of company.

6:46And I described what we were going through to our internal team as a refounding moment with that word really conveying the fact that we were fundamentally transforming what Clio was as a company and reimagining what success looks like as a company. And in bringing VLEX into the fold, we were bringing incredible, you know, both assets in terms of their data assets, their extensive library of legal data. We were bringing their leading edge legal AI platform in the form of Vincent into the company. But we were also bringing an incredible leadership team, an incredible team of people that had really charted really groundbreaking territory in both legal research as well as legal AI.

7:37And I saw this, call it hybridization of Clio and VLEC's DNA as being something that was really creating something net new and something that would be a new kind of company on the legal landscape, a company that is a technology-first, innovation-first kind of company. with the benefit of having really deep capabilities and strength in both the business of law and practice of law. And I saw us being better positioned than anyone else in the world to unleash the opportunity to bring together the business of law and practice of law and coupling that all with AI. And it was something I talked about a little bit in the press conference yesterday was this idea that I see Clio almost being positioned like an Apple.

8:28in that we can vertically integrate in the same way Apple vertically integrates hardware and software and services and can create products as a result that no one else on the planet can. I see Clio being able to vertically integrate the business of law, the practice of law and AI and create products and capabilities that no one else on the planet can. And I think that is perfectly manifested in what we're doing with Clio work, which we announced and shipped very shortly after ClioCon last year and the velocity that we've been able to iterate and build as this refounded company in the last year and the kinds of capabilities that we're able to bring to the market, I think is just so incredibly exciting.

9:14So a year ago, I would say we were in the midst of what was a bet the company stakes transformation, you know, and a bet the company level of bet in a billion-dollar acquisition of Vilex. And I feel like we've come out of that transformation totally transformed and absolutely leading in all the ways we wanted to, both in AI, in SMB, and in enterprise. Yeah. The new branding, the new logo, as you described it, reflects an image of a single pane of glass surrounded by sort of a a universe of applications and capabilities. You know, if I think back to kind of Clio's roots and your origins, it seems like almost 180 degree turn.

10:05I mean, you started as sort of a core platform for practice management with a broad ecosystem of partners and that was really something that you focused on a lot. And now you are continuing to, as you say, hey, make this the platform that can be a single pane of glass. You launch the phone, launch Clio phone, you launch automated timekeeping, DMS in the platform, bringing more and more of it into the platform. And it's interesting because it's at a time when you see a lot of other legal tech companies going in almost the opposite direction through MCPs and integrations. So how do you view that?

10:50I mean, do you see this as an about face or is this a natural evolution for you? It's a great question. I don't necessarily see it as either, actually. I think many of the core principles that we have used to establish our approach to Clio as a platform remain as strong today as they've ever been. We launched the platform approach. We opened APIs to Clio well before really anyone else in the industry did in 2010. Yeah, if people could see me on the camera, there's a room full of partners. Yeah, there's a room full of partners. We've got over 100 partners on the ground here that have thriving products on the Clio platform.

11:34So my goal is to always have Clio as a platform that other people can build amazingly successful businesses on. And hopefully businesses that are so successful, we want to acquire them and bring them into the Clio fold. Our approach with the platform has always been a view. And I think over the years, you and I have talked about this. If it's a core capability that we think 80 plus percent of our customers will need, that is probably something we're going to build or something we're going to acquire and fold into the core platform. And, you know, so things like phones. Most of our customers need to have a phone number and pick up the call.

12:16Probably all of them. All of our customers need to manage documents. You know, like there's things that are so fundamental to how our customers work and where we want to build such deep integration and capabilities that we feel like that is best on the platform. Now, we also really operate in what I would describe as a bit of a meritocracy in that we are not protectionist about those things. So we have our own document management system, but we integrate with NetDocs, with iManage, with Google Drive, with Box. And again, if that is a better fit for our customers, we'll let them integrate those systems with us.

12:56So our North Star is always what serves our customers best. And if that is a competitor in some facet of what Clio does, we will welcome them onto the platform. So I'd say that fundamental approach remains today. And we're now connecting with the next generation of platforms like Claude and ChatGBT and Perplexity with MCP connectors to enable, again, entirely new types of workflows. So we're still very open and very integration oriented. We have today more than 300 integration platforms on the ecosystem. So we're still very much taking that approach. What I would say has changed in the era of AI is maybe the evolution you're alluding to, is we see certain kinds of capabilities, especially in the AI era, needing to be so deeply integrated into the platform to unleash their true value that we're building those from the ground up.

13:57So phones is something where we felt like, look, if a phone was just about about picking up a call and recording the time. That's something that we don't, it's not enough value add to integrate in the platform. But when we look at what happens in a phone call and when you reimagine that phone call in an AI native way, now you're extracting action items. You're orchestrating agents to start doing work on what's happening in that phone call, maybe in real time. You're tracking the time that came out of the phone call. You're assigning tasks out of that phone call. So the richness and the value of integrating that into the platform becomes exponential.

14:33And that's where we got a lot of conviction around phones should be part of the platform. All the messaging data feeds the AI. Exactly. And that whole through line from yesterday, context creates capability, is something that we're really doubling down on in investing. And again, if somebody would prefer to use an alternative phone provider, they're free to. But we know for a lot of customers, that value out of being integrated in the platform is going to be something they choose to go with Clio phones. Right. And DMS, the same is going to be said. Exactly.

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16:00So I'd love to hear more about why you want to move into that area and what the thoughts are. Where does that go? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, as you pointed out last year, we have a lot on our plate. And the pushing of the judiciary was a function of a few things. One, when you look at all the AI transformation that's happening and the way that it is enabling consumers to pursue legal work in a lower friction way. We talked about the agentic flood hitting the courts yesterday with consumers being able to more ably file complaints and other kinds of actions on their own. We're seeing AI obviously provide a ton of leverage to all the lawyers out there.

16:45And that some of those two things are going to result in a tsunami of demand for the judiciary that is going to put a system that is already in crisis into, I believe, a mode of just collapse. There is no way that the courts, as they currently operate, are going to, frankly, be able to service the existing demand, never mind the demand that is going to come as AI capabilities and AI penetration continue to accelerate over the next few years. And our mission statement at Clio is to transform the legal experience for all. And if all the transformation is happening for consumers and for lawyers, but leaving the judiciary untouched, we're just going to have a massive choke point at the end of the justice journey.

17:40And when you look at what AI is most capable at today, it's many of the tasks that judges need to tackle, whether that's synthesizing large amounts of information, testing for inconsistencies in data and arguments, detecting hallucinations, helping them understand the complex dynamics of cases often with a lot of documents that support them. AI is great at this and judges should be leveraging it. As Pablo will tell you, there's many judges that don't even have a clerk supporting their work. And it's just an unreasonable demand being put on most judges to be synthesizing, again, what is this ever mounting demand without some of the superpowers that AI provides them.

18:30And what I found in Pablo was somebody that was very passionate about this cause. And he was a perfect fit for the person to quarterback this from a product perspective at Clio. And in Bridget, we saw someone that Pablo already had a relationship with that we believe would be the perfect fit. Again, there's nobody better on the planet likely than Bridget to help bring these new capabilities to the market as well. And then, of course, we've got Shlomo and the Learned Hand team that have built some of the products and some of the relationships with some of the biggest courts in the country with their product.

19:13So we really have this amazing triumvirate of learned hand, Pablo and Bridget to go after this, I believe, just profoundly important, you know, both opportunity and cause to transform how the judiciary works. And maybe my last comment on that will be there's many fundamental technologies when we talk about building judiciary grade AI. Yeah. Which we trademarked. Is that right? Which we did. We said that almost in a joking way internally and said, that's got a great ring to it. We can't imagine a higher bar than judiciary-grade AI. And when you look at what we're building for that bar, it's things like hallucination detection.

20:01Momo just walked by. Oh, is that right? Is that right? I'll need to wave hi. The bar is exceptionally high, and then we're able to then propagate that technology to other parts of the product. You know, Clio Work will benefit from those same hallucination prevention technologies as our judiciary products as well. So we see, again, when we talked about the tagline of legal runs on Clio in our brand reveal yesterday, we really mean it. We think about the legal, the operating system for legal, which is something we've talked about for years being Clio. And we're just piece by piece bringing that vision to life.

20:45Yeah. Do you see the judiciary as a business, as a good business move, or is it more altruistic in terms of wanting to go after that market? I would say it's, I mean, look, it's not a huge market. There's 33 ,000 judges in the United States. It's not a massive market. We're not pursuing it from a purely capitalistic perspective. We really see this as being a couple of things. Number one, as I mentioned, very much in service of our mission and necessary if we're going to see the transformation we want to see in the legal system. And we know there's a broader halo effect around the tools that judges use being respected by lawyers, whether they're in a small firm or whether they're in an AMLA 10-4.

21:34And as Clio tools start to get adopted by judges, we believe that will have a really positive halo effect on just helping build the trust and frankly, awareness of the Clio brand in the parts of the market that were maybe a bit less known or a bit less established. Yeah. Just one other question I had on the judiciary side of things. You know, I've had since Pablo and since Bridget have joined, they've both been on this podcast, and I've kind of talked to them about this a little bit. But, you know, as you point out, one of the biggest challenges facing the judiciary is that the fact that the spigot has been opened in terms of self-represented litigants just pouring into the courts.

22:21AI is driving possibly more, not possibly, I think the data already shows, driving more new case filings than ever before. Is there, does any part of this start to focus on not just on helping the judge's side, but on helping the self-represented litigants side of the equation? That's a piece of the puzzle that I think we will inevitably start taking a run at. And again, I think to really solve some of these problems, you need to look at things from a systems perspective. You need to think about the entire system and how it's operating end to end. And the reality is that if we imagine a justice system a decade from now, it having all of the same interfaces and all of the same steps that exist today really doesn't make a lot of sense.

23:13I think the way we're going to end up ultimately addressing that problem is from each side transforming independently. And then really, I think that will force us to really examine the interfaces that need to be reimagined in the era of AI. And again, as capabilities start to really explode on the AI front, we may find entirely different ways of resolving disputes and resolving some of these issues that didn't exist just two years ago. So I believe we will see a more fundamental end-to-end transformation. But I think the first step of what we're saying is like, look, the consumers are being equipped with a whole new set of tools.

23:57The judges dealing with this agentic flood are dealing with the same tools they had five years ago or 10 years ago. How do we equip them with some of the same superpowers AI can provide both consumers and lawyers and allow them to better service this demand? Yeah. I was at a conference this weekend of a lot of law professors talking about the impact of AI on legal education. And I'm wondering how you think about, as you put more and more of these capabilities into the Clio platform, do you think any of that is kind of a threat for younger lawyers? The whole question of whether they're getting the skills they need and whether they're learning how to be lawyers in the first place, if AI can do everything for them.

24:42What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it's a profound question. And I think it evades a simple answer. But I do believe that law schools need to be doing more to train lawyers on AI and how to use these tools and what the leading edge looks like. I've seen some law schools take an approach that looks kind of like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand saying let's let's pretend it doesn't exist uh and um and and there's others that that are taking what i would see as a much more progressive approach saying no that you know this is like the the word processor this is going to become part of every law practice and everybody needs to understand how to how to leverage this technology but importantly how to use it responsibly and and and how to use it to better accelerate your capabilities rather than delegate your capabilities.

25:38And I think Ethan Mollick this morning, you know, made a great point talking about the power of AI. If you're just delegating tasks to AI, you're not going to improve yourself. But if you're leveraging AI in a way that it is testing you and pushing you to become better, that's where you will move from being good to great. And I think that's the framing that law schools need to have in terms of how they're introducing AI, how they're teaching lawyers to use AI in a way that is, here's how you can use AI to challenge your thinking, to help prepare you to be a better lawyer when you run into opposing counsel in the courtroom, for example.

26:15Here's how you can anticipate the arguments they will make. Here's how you can bolster your arguments before getting them out into the wild. And again, how can you sharpen people's skills faster using AI rather than them, frankly, getting lazy and trying to delegate those skills to the AI where you just won't improve. The last comment I'll make on this is, you know, we have brought on, you know, Phil Rosenthal from VLEX, who is now quarterbacking our academic access program and our bar association relationships, reinventing those. We brought on Kenton Bryce, who is focusing on our academic relationships and reinventing our our academic program and we've we've we've now brought on a number of law schools to our new combined uh clio work clio manage academic access program where we're we're giving them access to these these tools in law school to learn how to utilize them and how to best take advantage of them and and you know clio is now giving away something on the order of 33 million dollars a year worth of free software access to academic institutions around the world where they're being used everywhere from academic environments to legal clinics and other scenarios where we're creating access to justice like Mike Simanchek's Innocence Center.

27:36Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in the past year, we've all heard the word moat more than we've heard it since the Middle Ages or something as the frontier models have moved into legal and a lot of the big legal tech vendors are saying, well, our moat is this or our moat is that. What's your moat? What keeps Clio as an essential tool as people can just do more and more of this stuff in Claude or whatever? So I really think our moat is how tightly integrated our platform is. And the moat is really ultimately the richness of the context we're able to create between the business of law and practice of law.

28:21And the real key difference is you made a comment earlier about, you know, a lot of vendors talking about MCP connectors and this AI product. canal connect to LexisNexis or whatever via MCP. And the reality is that when you talk to users about how some of these integrations work, the reality of how well they work is dramatically less than what you might think from the press release. And the idea that you can just plug Claude into 10 different systems and have something that approximates what a customer can do and what I talked about in the keynote yesterday, end-to-end within Clio, is frankly a bit of a pipe dream.

29:07And if you got it working, it would feel like a Rube Goldberg machine kind of contraption that is fragile, is brittle, and probably doesn't deliver the results you want. When you look at what Clio is able to deliver between the unbelievable richness of the operational context that we have by virtue of having built out this operating system for legal for the last 18 years, together with the practice of law data, the billion legal documents coming to us from the VLX acquisition, spanning 110 countries around the world, an additional billion documents coming through the Clio docket product of live feeds of what's happening in virtually every state and county level court in the country, this is an enormously powerful data moat.

29:59And something I commented on, I think, in our interview at ClioCon last year was, I really believe one of the only durable moats in any AI company is data. And again, the model capabilities are advancing so quickly and the competitive landscape on models is changing so quickly. our fundamental North Star at Clio is with the best context, ultimately with the best data, we'll be able to unleash the very best capabilities of any model in the world, whether that's the latest model from Anthropic or OpenAI or one of the new open weight models. We'll be able to surround that model in the very best context possible, coming both from the business of law and practice of law, and deliver exceptional results for our customers.

30:51But importantly, in a really seamless feeling way, you know, the demo I walked through yesterday, the day in the life of demo at the end of my keynote, I think one thing that so many people remarked on to me afterwards was, number one, that's incredible in terms of the capabilities that you're unleashing, but it's also seamless and that's all happening in the single pane of glass that we talked about. It's all happening in one system. I think the other thing, maybe my last comment on this is I think one of the risks of this loosely coupled system of 10 different applications and MCP servers and so on is governing your data and governing your data security is extremely challenging in that kind of scenario.

31:38And another thing we hear from everyone from our solos to our mid-market to our enterprise customers is the fact that our AI and all of our data is staying within Clio's platform, a secure, governed, highly auditable platform is a massive value add and lets them sleep at night. And I think we're going to see a number over the coming months, some real risks come out of some of these more loosely coupled approaches that just see your data living in a bunch of different places being processed by, in some cases, dozens of different data processors before it gets back to you. Yeah. Well, I want to be respectful of your time.

32:21Is there anything else that you'd like to point out that we haven't talked about in a couple of seconds we have left here? Well, like you said, it was a big day yesterday where the product velocity at Clio is faster than it's ever been. I think it makes ClioCon more important than ever in the sense that I think at the keynote, I'm unveiling a lot of stuff that is frankly overwhelming people to degree but then they've got two days to kind of synthesize and digest and talk about it go to our product lab and so on so um you know for the people in the media we were all overwhelmed so I can imagine how the customers yeah exactly but it's an exciting time I mean I would just say I've never been more excited about the trajectory Clio is on I feel super energized by what we've been able to accomplish over the last year.

33:10And I feel like in a lot of ways, we're just getting started. And, you know, we talked about this refounding moment for the company. You've been able to see Clio through our entire journey. And, you know, even from our, actually, one last aside that I'll make is I was speaking to Catherine Marino-Riesman, our very first customer ever last night. And I never actually asked her this question. I said, do you remember how you found out about Clio in those early days? And she said, I read a blog post on Bob Ambrosi's... Was that raw? Yeah. I did not know that. So she wrote, she read that very first blog post of yours, I think from March of...