Clio & Scorpion: The Strategic Partnership Powering Law Firm Growth with Clarity & Precision - S9E25

30:13And so the marrying of our website product with our, we have lead intake tools, not like matter intake tools like Clio Grow. we just want your website to convert really well. And so when we focus in our lane and we really did that product mapping exercise, it became very clear. I'll never forget walking out of the room. We had several people from the Scorpion team and the Clio team there. And all of us were like, this is really clear. What we care about is driving net customer acquisition or net client acquisition. What you all care about is how is that converting to a case and how is it being managed after that, how it's being billed, et cetera, and all the operating procedures in between research, et cetera.

31:01And so I think doing that diligence is so important, but also just for anybody that wants to do partnerships or pursuing partnerships is like to really think about what that other business is doing and how you can actually impact them and go prove it first. Like you don't get to have conversations like this if you don't have substantial mutual customers where you're proving it day in and day out. that's just kind of all talk. And so you do get hit up a lot around, oh, we should go and do this and we're going to change everything. And you're like, that's great. Can you share one common customer or two common customers and the workflows that they're experiencing?

31:37And usually you get a response of like, well, I haven't found that yet, but I know if we work together, it'll be great. So, um, you know, I think for, for us, just, it was a really exciting kind of workflow there. That, that was the moment that I walked away from going, all right, this is going to happen. There's a lot of stuff to figure out. Um, that's going to take us, I mean, that meeting was 11 months ago, give or take it was in the fall of, of last year. So end of summer of last year and, and getting all of the kind of product and R and D and row and, and, and row and excited about it and understanding their part in this, um, opening up, I think that's another piece that's really challenging.

32:21You got Harsha and I like championing something, but you've got to get your product teams to open up and know that they can trust another company and kind of lay out what they care about and what we care about. And so as soon as you get over that hurdle, you just start to see magic happen. And we've watched it play out now for the last year and kind of ideating what three months from now and six months from now and 12 months from now will look like from a product perspective. But that's probably the thing that gets me most excited because it's not the impact we can have today. It's how do we iterate and how do we really deliver to the market for our mutual customers, but also for new customers.

32:55And that's really exciting for, I think, the partnership on a go forward basis.

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33:42Harsha Chandra Shekar:Terms and conditions apply. Now back to the show. It's exciting hearing the journey and just the level of due diligence and strategic thinking and mapping and rationale. And you talked there about as well, the mutual customers. And Clio has always been client-centric. It's something I've admired about the organization from the early days of partnering with them. And I love Jack's book as well about the client-centered law firm. I think it's fantastic. But you want fusion, don't you? rather than confusion. And obviously with this partnership, there is clear synergies and it's offering tons of value.

34:14Harsha Chandra Shekar:And it leads to my next question for you, Harsha, which I can't believe we're already sort of half an hour into a show and haven't mentioned the words AI. But of course we have to, because with tech, obviously there's a lot of growth opportunities. So when you actually pair Scorpion's AI-powered marketing with Clio's obviously legal operating system, what becomes possible for the more growth-minded law firms that wasn't necessarily there before? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And the way to think about it is, historically, marketing has operated kind of in its silo and practice management has operated in its silo.

34:57And there's a lot of manual work involved in syncing data from all your leads and marketing to practice management if you don't use an integration, right? So this advanced integration actually takes out a lot of manual work, but more importantly, it also unlocks a lot of the data that's sitting within a customer's Clio Manage that can actually tie back into their marketing software and help drive significantly better decisions. Because today what happens is you have your marketing spend and you kind of make rational assumptions and guesswork around the business that each lead is driving and therefore try to come up with better marketing decisions.

35:50But you're still operating off assumptions. Whereas in this new world, the disintegration, you're actually tracking things a lot more granularly. The two systems are talking to each other, which means it's taking out the entire guesswork from trying to figure out, okay, which part of my marketing is working, which one's not, right? There's that. The second piece is, in the world of AI, data is the fuel. And because Clio Manage has all this timekeeping, billing, and payments data around each matter, now you can actually score your leads in a much more effective way just by knowing that a similar looking lead with similar attributes as net-to-due X million dollars in payments.

36:36And that's really where the magic happens because Scorpion has that proprietary AI for scoring leads and Clio has all this data around not just existing cases but past cases as well that a law firm has done. And pairing the two is really supercharging the power of the AI.

36:56Harsha Chandra Shekar:I want to stick with you, Kirby, on the AI with purpose, particularly because you know you can get flooded with leads and a lot of them can be pretty pretty useless a lot of time within organizations so with the sort of ai that you've got at scorpion how are you ensuring then building on that that law firms are going to be attracting far better leads not just getting a higher volume yeah i i think probably the biggest thing there is understanding what's happening um post that initial conversation or post that initial form fill or post the initial engagement with the firm. And so I think what we usually run blind to, and historically, you would have a marketing manager here at Scorpion, and they're having their weekly call with a firm.

37:44They're talking about how many leads they've received. That firm says, but they're all crap. We have to go back and manually try to figure out what that even means. And then a lot of times we'll find that, hey, there were some really quality cases in there, but your intake process was terrible. Or, hey, there's a lot of quality cases in here, but they're in different practice areas. We should probably adjust your campaigns so that you're not getting these leads anymore. Those conversations, though, play out over weeks. There's manual research that would go into there. And then you have this delay, which ends up with marketing waste, right?

38:24And so We're both taking out the time that's required for us to analyze campaign performance, marry it back to matter outcomes, while in tandem making our system smarter. and so as we pull this back and right now this is where we're spending a lot of our time as it relates to our common customers is pulling back as much of the information as we can to build logic and build a strong understanding of this is a perfect case type and we want to go get a hundred more of these and this is the average cost and this is what your spend should be and here's the revenue that you'll see from this. So I think that flywheel is really, really critical.

39:10And what you're seeing and really the whole premise of the relationship is we got to create that flywheel. The only way to do it was to marry a marketing platform with an operating system, practice management. There's no organization to do that within Clio. And I think that really changes the game because what's going to happen, as I shared earlier, we're going to learn over the next month, three months, six months, and you're going to be able to see really powerful use cases of, wow, we eliminated 30 % of waste and ad spend because we made campaigns more efficient. Now, it doesn't mean that the firm's going to spend 30 % less.

39:52It means that we're going to help them grow 30 % more, right? And that we can actually use more working dollars. And so I think that's what gets me really excited about how AI is layered into our systems is, you know, we have experts here, they've been doing it for a really long time and supporting their clients, they've been doing it manually. And when I have conversations like this with them, I know they're like besides themselves on, oh, man, I'm actually going to be able to do marketing strategy and not data analysis. it's just a really fantastic conversation to have with with our team um but we can't do it without kind of marrying those product teams together and then um you know being able to pass it back i think something unique to scorpion is uh we have our own ad product so we're managing your budget directly in in one ad platform so it gives us the ability to iterate and manage campaigns at scale and pass data back and make tweaks at scale and you just can't do that and then if you go out and look around the market like you can't do those things um and so i just think that that's really exciting for us and we're only going to get better and learn with the information that we're getting and then uh we want to super super power all all the growth that we can for our clients and that want to do that yeah and honestly making your marketing more efficient really has a lot of downstream effects and benefits for all parties involved.

41:17Of course, the law firm now can keep the same marketing spend and drive 30 % more revenue, for example. And for us, that also means that we need to help that law firm become more productive through use of our AI assistants like Clio Duo, through use of smart AI tools like Clio Draft, so that now the law firm with the same size can still do 30 % more work and it also drives more payments which definitely does help Clio as well so it's really creating a win-win situation and the one thing that doesn't come out that much that I want to talk about is also that it's not just Clio, Scorpion and the law firms that are winners here it's also a lot of the other digital marketing agencies because essentially what we're doing today is we collaborate really deeply to create the best-in-class experience, which means that we are improving ClioGrow's APIs.

42:20We are building net new endpoints, and we are testing it out and piloting with Scorpion. But a lot of those will then be out their funds developed for other digital marketing agencies to use. So it's really transforming the experience for all the DMEs, right? So I think that's a bigger cause that we're working towards as well.

42:45Harsha Chandra Shekar:And that just fits so nicely, doesn't it, into Clio's overarching mission with regards to transforming the legal experience for all. And I always say collaboration is domination. I've admired the way Clio has absolutely gone about that in terms of collaborating and, you know, building and building the ecosystem, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. One thing I want to touch on, and Kirby, you're touching on as well as revenue, and we've been kind of flirting with it, but I want to get a little bit into the deeper parts of it. The ROI, does it speak for itself? I talk a lot about actually the COI, I think that's really important that organizations get stuck with, which is the cost of inaction, actually over focusing directly straightly on the ROI.

43:20Harsha Chandra Shekar:But in terms of some of the early stages or success stories or statistics following the partnership, Is there anything you can share with us that might be inspirational for some of our listeners? Kirby, anything you would like to share? Yeah, I think, well, we've gotten feedback from a lot of the early adopters of the integration that they're just really excited that they can see what's working and what's not. And they're no longer talking to us about lead quality. They're talking to us about their revenue targets. And that is just a fantastic conversation for everybody involved. I'll quote some of them like we can be more strategic we can focus on our company's culture we can focus on being lawyers again like we've had some really really good anecdotes come out of kind of the early adopters of the integration I think the other piece is you know we're starting to and I'll we talked about earlier we'll have to do a follow-up at ClioCon but we're starting to pull back, you know, the efficiency.

44:22So that's an ROI conversation and happy to share more of that as we have more aggregate data to share. But it's been really exciting just to watch our clients response to being able to see that in their products, in the reporting, and then focus, change the conversation from a CPL conversation to truly like, what is my return on my advertising spend what's my return on my marketing spend and uh and be able to have educated conversations with them a lot of a lot of times we're proving them wrong too in certain ways and or we're learning and we can make decisions faster and we can figure out what's not working um and i think that's like what's fun is like we're all human and there's so much pointing fingers as as harsha mentioned like it's very fragmented space um and there's so much like black box and conversations that happen and we're just throwing money out the window.

45:19And we're kind of removing that entire dialogue because you can go and look exactly where this came from. We attribute all of them and we can show you all the way into when that client was signed, when that client engaged with you for the first time, all the way to when they're transacting with you, even if that takes one year, two years, three years, or a week. and I think that's really powerful for clients and that's the feedback we're getting thus far. Yeah, and if you're getting similar feedback, in fact, if I were to think of the feedback that we've received, it's drawing two themes. The first one is strategic where they are like, hey, we always had a hunch around, you know, what channel was netting out, what ROI, but now we don't have to guess.

46:06We really can make those bold decisions knowing that our hypothesis was right in the first place. The second one is more operational, where a lot of firms have said, hey, this would have been a nightmare for us to inject all the lead data into our law practice management system without this integration. And in the past, that's what they were doing. And with an integration, it's a lot more streamlined and it takes out hours and hours of an intake specialist's work. So these are two broad themes, but overall it's been extremely positive. And we've had a lot of customers actually coming in saying, hey, you know what, we want to get ClearGrow because ClearGrow and Scorpion are so well integrated.

46:54Harsha Chandra Shekar:And it's talking to when we had from Piers Linney from Shark Tank Dragons then over here in the UK come on the show. He talked very openly about a value pyramid, if you can imagine that, in terms of technology is coming in and it's filling up the pyramid. and you as the human service provider, it can enable you then to do, like you were talking to before, Kirby, to be the lawyer again, to do that strategic thinking, to do the work that you perhaps enjoy doing and free up the time and all of the mundane roles that are happening. I think it's also providing real-time, high-quality data to make better informed decisions, to enable you to be more client-centric and do great quality work.

47:28Harsha Chandra Shekar:I love it. Okay, Harsha, sticking on this sort of streamlined conversion then, sort of from an interest to actually instruction, because law Law firms, you know, there is the lifeblood. They need to ensure that they're retaining work, getting new work in. So how are you removing a lot of that friction between the lead generation and the client onboarding specifically? And what's changing and how law firms actually close new business from what you may have seen a few years ago? Yeah, so what's changing is really that we are doubling down on the integration between Clio Grow, which is the intake management solution, and Scorpion.

48:03And to set the context here, if you remember the legal trends report, I think it said that most law firms don't respond to 67 % of the calls that they received. Right. So there is a fundamental breakpoint between your marketing and lead generation to lead intake. and really like tying Scorpion and Clio Grow through a deeper API integration is going to make sure that we have a lot more robust lead capture process and a much better reporting between the two buckets. The other thing that's changing is we are working together to see what additional Clio Grow API endpoints do we create. For example, I spoke about Matter Stages.

48:59Similarly, can we predict the value of a matter and therefore the value of a lead? How do we use AI on the data to better serve the prospective value of a certain lead? So those are some of the things that we are really working together on. And some of that is even work in progress as we speak. Our development teams are building out those APIs. but as we deploy them i think that's really going to change the way the law firms are making those decisions yeah kobe what would you add here yeah i uh i just like being able to have a conversation with a you know managing partner and say hey you know you you've got 150 matters that are coming into your firm on a monthly basis this is how many are flowing through these channels this is how many phone calls it takes to close this.

49:55And by close, I mean, you know, move them into the managed process, moving from Clio Grow to Clio Manage, and be able to have a really foundational discussion that's data driven, no emotion around how their firm is structured, how many people they have doing intake, should they hire somebody to do intake for the first time? What, where is the leakage in that? How bad is their after hour call center or what have you? And being able to truly point with real data to what's working and what's not. And so I think what's really transforming is, you know, we've had for years, you could do a, you know, a lead push from, you know, an online form into an intake solution.

50:42And that was like, baseline, that's great, no more duplicate entry, We solved that problem. But now there's so many other steps that happen post that that need to be accounted for, need to be part of a thought process and operationalizing an effective firm and to also get more efficient with your spend. Is that a case that you can take? Is it in the right practice area? Is this a referral that should be transitioned to another firm? And then how long do each of these steps take so that you can build a business? And so we think of this at Scorpion around like we want people to be able to think about their firm like a business.

51:28We want them to have the same conversations we have around how we grow. And I can guarantee you we never have conversations without any data to back them up. at Scorpion. We know how many leads it takes to close a deal. We know how many we need on a monthly basis. We have capacity that we think about, and that's what structures our entire business. That's only fair that we can provide a small business with five, six, seven, eight employees, relatively similar insights. And I think what you'll see over the next year and two years and three years is much more maniacal focus on operational excellence.

52:05There's a lot of coaching groups that have popped up that are talking about these things. And what's interesting for me is obviously strong background on the home services side. And you've seen this. It is a machine nowadays between their operating platform, their marketing, their coaching, their manufacturers, their distributor networks. And they all have these really defined metrics on how every role in the business operates. And I think we're really close to that in the legal market. And that gets me really excited because I just want people to, again, they can focus on what they do best, but they can also know how to scale their practice if they want to.

52:47Harsha Chandra Shekar:I like that you really drilled down on the data point of view. And look, facts are important as a lawyer as well. You need to have the right facts to make the informed decision. And I just love the strategic mindset of everything that's involved with this partnership and the way it's going. And there's just real exciting energy behind it all. Harsha, I want to talk about the Clio sort of broader evolving ecosystem. So it's been a hell of a year. You've come out of the blocks post Series F with obviously the Sharedo acquisition, with Vilex, with obviously with Scorpion. And I'm sure there's going to be lots more exciting things down the track.

53:22Harsha Chandra Shekar:But what does this partnership signal specifically for the broader Clio vision and how does it reshape perhaps what users can expect from your ecosystem moving forwards? That's a great question and yes like Clio's had an amazing year right we started with the Series F about a year ago then the Shado acquisition that really helps us win in the enterprise space and now with Vilex we are actually in the practice of law as opposed to being in the business of law. And this Scorpion partnership is actually a really big milestone for us because it's signaling to the ecosystem that, hey, Clio has a very strong build, buy, or partner muscle.

54:07It's no longer that, hey, we're just going to build everything or buy everything, but there are going to be areas where it is the strategic move to actually partner deeply. And that's the piece that this tells us. And there are going to be other areas as well where we are looking to make some really deep partnerships. And that doesn't mean that we are moving away from our stance of still being a very open ecosystem with a lot of integrations. I think that's a very key part of what Clio is because Clio is the most developer-friendly law practice management platform that's out there. We have 300 plus app integrations.

54:51But there is always space for some really deep strategic partnerships where you're actually getting the two R &D teams to sit together and co-create solutions. You're getting the two go-to-market teams to sit together and figure out, okay, how do you go to market and what customer problem do you solve just through your deep collaboration.

55:13Harsha Chandra Shekar:I love all of those insights. And again, collaboration is something we're super passionate about here on the Legally Speaking podcast. Kirby, you teased a little bit about sort of some maybe deeper insights or some new tools. Is there anything you can lift the curtain on slightly in terms of things that might be coming down the track? And what are you building that maybe might surprise the legal market? Yeah, I think the biggest piece that you'll see is just around like true pipeline, like full funnel management. And as Harsher said earlier, like where we live is above where they're living in that client journey.

55:56And what Scorpions like built our entire business on is just being fantastic at getting consumers to services in their time of need. Like that's what we think about every single day. every single market they have consumers that need a service in that moment and usually it's pretty critical how do we get them there effectively with the best customer experience and so um i think from us it's how do we get those consumers problems solved faster if you're a scorpion client than if you're not and and that part is i think a really fantastic like lead into this full funnel visibility of where do these clients exist in that pipeline?

56:42Where are you dropping the ball as a firm? And being able to be strategic partners with our clients and solving those problems day in and day out with visibility in real time. And I think those, I think you'll start to see roles in businesses that, in firms that are much more correlated to like operations than you see today. I think today it's usually an office manager that's mostly thinking about like hiring an HR in the office. And then I think you're going to see those roles evolve to be kind of experts. You see like the Salesforce administrators and businesses, but I think you'll really start to see roles be created in firms that are thinking about how do do I leverage these insights and make the right decisions to effectively grow our practice or be more efficient or lower our cost to serve, you know, and so on and so forth.

57:37And I think you'll see that across the legal market, especially with the introduction of like VLX and, and tools and marrying things like that with, you know, Clio Duo. And like, if you look at the Clio product stack today, there's clear evolution to, um, to helping attorneys operate faster. and so I just think that marrying those two things together is what you'll see and we don't even know what else we could do together yet I think that'll continue to evolve and I guess that's what's very

58:05Harsha Chandra Shekar:exciting about the the partnership and again the focus on sort of data and you know insights driven decisions because I remember very early on when a mentor said to me when emotions go up sometimes intelligence decisions can go down so the fact that you could be so focused on utilizing data and utilizing these insights to make strategic highly credible and valuable decisions to ultimately be better services for your clients, which has been the good nucleus of this discussion. Harsha, anything you would add to that before we look to close or any sort of final points you would like to add regarding the partnership?

58:35Yeah, no, I'm really excited about this partnership and so are our customers. And that's because this is creating very tangible value for them. And I'll tell you this, like the moment you bring up any partnership opportunity to our leadership team, the first question that comes up is, what's the benefit for the customer? And in this particular case, we actually had really strong data to show how when a Clio customer is using Scorpion, they're a lot more productive and their earnings are significantly better than an average Clio customer that is not using Scorpion. And I'm very excited that, we are unlocking this functionality to help our customers make more money.

59:25And historically, Clio has been this great platform that made law firms a lot more efficient. But now Clio is becoming this platform that's not just making them efficient, but also making them a lot more money because A, we have partnerships like Scorpion and B, we have tools like Vincent and VLX that's coming on our platform pretty soon, which will actually help them do their core work in a much more effective and efficient manner, leveraging AI. And that's really changing the way customers are going to perceive Clio.

1:00:01Harsha Chandra Shekar:And it's not just about satisfying clients with Clio. And what I've admired watching the journey, it's about delighting. And everything you said there is going to be delighting, isn't it? Clio existing clients and future clients in terms of, you know, all the amazing tools and efficiencies that you're going to bring. This has been a wealth of information and really rich discussion. I've enjoyed learning more about the whole deep thought process, the time and just the effort and everything that's been involved in terms of making this wonderful partnership happen. If people would like to know more, coming to you Kirby in terms of Scorpion or Indeed updates, is there any way you would like them to go?

1:00:40Harsha Chandra Shekar:Is there a particular website or handle you would like them to visit if they're interested in learning more about scorpion yeah go to scorpion.co um slash cleo there we go um harsha from your perspective is there anything you would like to add before we wrap up or anywhere our listeners would like to go or to get any more information you think might be useful clear.com slash scorpion simple keep it simple exactly thank you both so so much really enjoyed today's discussion it's been an absolute blast having you on the legally speaking podcast wishing you lots of continued success with this partnership and indeed lots of future pursuits.

1:01:17Harsha Chandra Shekar:But from now, from all of us in the show, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com for the link to join our community there. Over and out.