Clio Con Clips 2025 - Michelle Dunlea - E08

0:00Welcome to ClioCon Clips 2025, recorded live from Boston and proudly sponsored by Clio, the world's leading legal technology company transforming the legal experience for all. I'm your host, Rob Hanna, and over this special Legally Speaking podcast series, we'll be bringing you exclusive conversations with the brilliant minds behind Clio, the innovators, strategists, visionaries driving one of the most transformative companies in legal tech. Across these interviews, we'll explore how Clio is uniting brilliance across teams, technology, and communities worldwide. From AI and data to leadership, culture, and the future of client experience, you'll hear from people shaping what's next for law and redefining what's possible for legal professionals everywhere.

0:46So whether you're a lawyer, technologist, or leader passionate about innovation, you're in the right place. This ClioCon Clips 2025 is where brilliance meets purpose and the future of law takes shape. Let's get into it.

1:03Welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast, recording live here from Boston for our ClioCon Clips series 2025, sponsored by Clio. And I'm joined by...

1:14Michelle Dunlea:Michelle Dunley, Vice President of Product Management here at Clio. You sure are, and I'm really looking forward to today's chat. But before we get into that, give us a fun fact that people may not know about you here at ClioCom. Oh, fun fact. Weird fact. Oh, I like weird facts. I really hate receiving gifts that I cannot consume. If I can consume them, that's great. Otherwise, I don't like gifts. Favorite gift to consume? Wine. Okay, red, white, rosé? It doesn't matter. Anything. Okay, good, good, good. We can go down a rabbit hole with this one. So let's talk about something super interesting, which is the Intelligent Legal Work Platform, which is one of Clio's biggest launches ever.

1:52And really exciting following Jack's keynote earlier today. So how would you take a vision that large and actually translate it into product strategy?

2:01Michelle Dunlea:So, you know what? It feels like this has been going on for about 10 years. In reality, it's been about four months. So we've packed a lot into the last four months. So, you know, it's but it genuinely is something that we've been thinking about for quite some time. So, like, as you know, Clio is really focused on the business of law up until this point. And what we started to see from our customers was this desire to bring their work closer together in every aspect. They want to bring their intake and their marketing closer to their practice management, closer to their billing, closer to their payments.

2:33And they really wanted that kind of single experience.

2:36Michelle Dunlea:And that extended into the practice of law as well. And, you know, we sometimes go to their offices to observe them working because what's really interesting about that is that you see things that they would never think to tell you about. Yes, yes. And so we see them doing legal research. We see them doing all the practice of law stuff. And that happened outside of Clio. And it was a lot of work for them to pull things together, to carry this cognitive load across systems and platforms. So it's something that we talked about for a long time. In fact, we have a product strategy that has three pillars, three primary pillars to it.

3:15Michelle Dunlea:One of them is doing high quality legal work. And that was the one where we were very thin in terms of what we offered our customers. And so when this opportunity for the acquisition came up, we actually had a very clear vision of what we would do if it were to be successful. And so we reached the agreement to acquire and we got to work like straight away. I think the next week, Vlexus, product people, a couple of their engineers flew to Toronto. We locked ourselves in a room with some of Clio's people and we just started to brainstorm. What was very interesting is they have a perspective that's gained primarily from enterprise, the enterprise space, like big law.

3:57Michelle Dunlea:Although they have been serving like mid-market and smaller customers more recently. And a lot of our reference points and stories and customer understanding came from the lower end of the market. And so the marriage of those two things was quite interesting. But we went through the creative process and it's like rollercoaster cycles. We ended some days completely deflated. Some days we were on a high, like we were starting to figure it out. But what we started to realize was that the value started to come when we took all of the context from the matters that were already stored in Clio and then started to marry that with the AI in Vincent, which has now become the Clio work product.

4:36Michelle Dunlea:And that's where the magic started to happen. And so making very easy pathways between both products. So the transitions are seamless as people are doing their work. And that's really when the magic started to happen. Yeah, and I've spoken to a few Clio representatives around the more you can remove that friction and kind of free it up and make that process. The levels of adoption, the happier clients are, it all just works and Clio really thought about that and you absolutely delivered and you touched on obviously going to offices and observing so going a little bit deeper on that how do you build for lawyers real world needs while ensuring Clio's products stay simple enough and human centered yes there's a lot of thought that goes into this yeah um I mean I think the first part of that puzzle is understanding your customer like that's product management 101 you have to understand them deeply you have to understand the why behind their asks so customers like hundreds of customers will come to us with very specific feature requests over the next couple of days and the most annoying thing that we do which is very important is ask them why why why why to really get to like what is the thing that you're trying to do because the thing they're asking for is often like a band-aid solution there can be way more elegant ways of solving what they're asking for.

5:49Michelle Dunlea:So that's the very first part of it. Secondly, the design and the user experience. We have an incredible design team and we obsess over how can we make this easier? Do you really have to set this up or can we configure something out of the box that will work for 90 % of people so they don't have to do that setup themselves? How do we make sure, especially with the pace of innovation now, how are our customers being made aware of new capabilities without drowning them in pop-ups? You know, there's so much thought that goes into this. And I think ultimately that's what allows us to create these experiences that actually solve their needs, but hopefully do so in an elegant way that actually takes the cognitive load off them and just allows them to focus on their work.

6:34Yeah, and I absolutely hear that. And I want to kind of go deeper on the information overload. And even Jack touched on that in his keynote earlier.

6:43Michelle Dunlea:I get it. My brain is melting at this point. There's so much. But you have a track record because you've led teams through major AI integration. So how do you make sure that innovation always serves and actually doesn't overwhelm the end user? I think it goes back to my earlier point about understanding them. Understanding them, their workflows, the environment they operate in. What are the other things that they're doing outside of the task that you're helping them with? and building those solutions that are thoughtful and taking all of those aspects into consideration. With AI, what I think is quite interesting is that compared to other products like straight up automations, it can often be easier to use.

7:28Michelle Dunlea:Yeah. Especially because one of the principles that we've taken with our AI, Manage AI in particular, is that we wanted to take the onus off the customer for thinking about using it. One of the hard things about adopting any new technology is building a habit. Building a habit is extremely hard to do. A good habit. Building a good habit. Building bad habits are really a case in point. It is hard to build a good habit. And that's why a lot of technology is not adopted. Like if you see, there's some studies that actually show that while AI technology adoption is very high, the impact is low and it's not living up to the hype for some people.

8:06Michelle Dunlea:And I think that that's because they're not building the habits around it. So we've taken a couple of principled approaches in developing our AI. One is that it does whole tasks or whole jobs for customers. And the second thing is that it works autonomously beside them. So instead of popping up as a chat and saying like, you know, what do you want me to do? We're doing the thing and then surfacing it for their review. So all they need to do is say, is this right? Do I need to tweak anything? And off we go. They don't have to have the cognitive load of figuring out what to ask it for what they want it to do next.

8:42Michelle Dunlea:And I think those two things are really important in adoption and making it simple. Yeah. And what I love about everything I'm hearing from this clear, everything is moving forward, isn't it? Everything you're developing is helping move things forward to a system of action, which I absolutely love. Okay, let's talk about Clio Manage then and Draft because they use AI to automate routine work. So how do you decide what tasks to automate versus where the human input matters most? Yeah. So there is a couple of inputs that go into figuring out what to automate. One is what are the tasks that are not fun?

9:17Michelle Dunlea:Like what are the things they do not enjoy doing? What are stressful? What are time consuming? What are repetitive? Yeah. those are the ones or even the ones that they've outsourced or the ones that they have somebody where it's a dedicated part of their job yeah those are the first ones so like you'll see with manage ai one of the things that we do is we parse scheduling orders we calculate all of the deadlines all of the milestones and we surface that for review that's a process that our customers have told us for a dense scheduling order, that can take hours. And if they miscalculate a date, because they're calculated differently in all different states and different jurisdictions, that can be massively impactful in a negative way to the lawyer and the client.

10:02Michelle Dunlea:So this is taking the onus off of them. And they're very grateful for that. Same with billing generation. One of the things that our pilot customers were so excited about was that we do the follow-ups for approvals. So the bill gets generated. You can take a quick look, tweak anything that you want to tweak. Mostly they're not tweaked. I think it's over 97 % of those bills were approved as is in our pilot program. So super accurate. It's attached to the matter and then it's auto sent to the person that's supposed to approve it. And billing managers have told us that their least favorite part of that whole process is following up and following up and saying, can you approve the bill can you approve the bill can you approve the bill we do that automatically at whatever cadence they specify so they don't have to do that anymore yeah um and that's powerful like one of our pilot customers told us that uh it was labor day weekend this year fell on a monday and usually she would have to work because it was the first of the month and that's billing week yeah and she didn't for the first time because she was on our ai pilot and what you know and this is also important i talk a lot about tech for good and actually that improves overall well-being family time you know The whole thing goes into actually improving the overall well-being, lifestyle of being a lawyer and tech being used for good.

11:15Love it. Okay. The whole year and the whole theme of ClioCon this year is obviously uniting brilliance. So what does uniting brilliance look like across your team's day to day?

11:25Michelle Dunlea:Ooh, that's a good question. So product kind of sits at the center of a lot of functions at Clio. Yeah. But in particular, we work very closely with design and engineering. And so we work in what we call triads. So there's a product manager, a designer, an engineering manager, and then a team of engineers. And they go tackle problems and build capabilities. I think for me, when I think about uniting brilliance in my world, it looks like those functions coming together and amplifying each other's brilliance, talents, capabilities, to create the kind of products that you see here today. Yeah, which are absolutely amazing.

12:04It has to be said, and you can get the reaction from the crowd when Jack was reeling them all. And it must give you a lot of intrinsic sort of happiness and value hearing that, you know, actually it's really affecting these people's lives in a good way. And they just love coming to work and tech for good. Absolutely here for it. Okay. How are customer insights then influencing the next generation of product design at Clio? Oh, every day.

12:25Michelle Dunlea:Like it doesn't stop. Yeah. I mean, even last night. Probably now. Yeah. We had a mid-market event last night and a customer came up and he had a list of 10 things that he would love to see the platform do. And we talked through all of them. um i give my email he sent them to me they're in my inbox we're going to start to look at those things and when we get back to the office on monday it's a continuous cycle okay let's work through that example then because you're going to start with why then why then why so maybe helping lawyers who come with feet what should what thinking could they do deeper before coming to you that might be helpful that's a great question like so there is one firm they're out of saskatchewan in canada um and they come to clio con every year their whole team i think there's about 11 or 12 of them.

13:07Michelle Dunlea:And they have a binder. And they have individual product requests on each sheet. There might be 10 pages in this binder. And the way they have it structured is beautiful because they have the problem that they're facing. Like what problem is this causing? Like why is this an issue? What they're actually trying to do. And then their suggested solution. And it is the perfect framing because it allows us to see, well, what would be a reasonable solution for you? but it doesn't we don't get lost in the solution and we still have room to probe the problem and really understand what they're trying to get at because then if we have a better way of doing it like we'll we'll talk to them we'll co-create with them and and that would be my preferred method yeah we'll take all feedback listen i'm not going to be fussy yeah and that's one thing jack made very clear you know you're listening all the time you know ears are on very much so and that's clear in the products you're developing and the reactions you've been getting from the crowd and around the world and the levels of adoption you've been seeing and the growth okay what excites you most about the next phase of Clio's product evolution let me recover from this one um no I think I think with our AI products we're just scratching the surface still um like I said Clio work in particular came together very quickly um and I what I'm really excited about is getting it into the hands of customers and actually hearing how they're using it.

14:27Michelle Dunlea:Like, what are the use cases? Where is it falling down? Where is it really helpful? And we can amplify that. Same with Manage AI, Draft AI, Grow AI. I'm very curious to see what they come back with, because like I said, we're just scratching the surface. And I think that AI will ultimately become a basic part of the infrastructure in law firms. Right now, we talk about it a lot. It's front and center. I don't want to say a novelty, but it requires talking about. I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see it just become invisible a generally accepted way that law firms operate. And I think that will be the next phase of it.

15:03Yeah. And I think, you know, Clio is obviously going to be ahead. You know, they're very much pioneering. Everything I heard from Jack's Energy and from what I've been speaking to, it sounds like a very exciting roadmap ahead. OK, let's zoom back out then. We're at ClioCon. It's my first time actually ever in Boston. So loving my time here. What's been a highlight moment for you thus far of ClioCon 2025?

15:21Michelle Dunlea:five you know what we did a a partner summit yesterday like a little warm-up to clio con for our clio partners and it's a side of the business that i haven't had a lot of exposure to before yeah i just learned so much from these people we have implementation specialists we have developers we have trainers there's all these people out there taking the products that we create and making them work embedding them in processes doing change management at large firms and it was just really cool to get insight into that and also to hear from them what they would like to see us do more or less of and it was a new angle that I'm I'm going to lean into a bit more this year yeah and look I love that you invest so much time and energy in all your partners media partners included and everything that you do and it's been an absolute pleasure Michelle it's been so good getting a chance to actually sit down and chat with you properly and congratulations on an absolutely tremendous year with Clio and I'm excited for what's next.

16:20If people want to learn more about Clio or indeed get in touch with yourself, what's the best place for them to go? Any websites, any social media handles, feel free to shout them out.

16:28Michelle Dunlea:All right. So for Clio, Clio.com, everything you could possibly imagine is under there. And for me, LinkedIn is probably the best place and I'm just at Michelle Dunley. Simple as that. Well, Michelle, thanks so much. Once again, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, but from all of us here on the Legally Speaking Podcast sponsored by Clio, 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 hub, The Legally Speaking Club, over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com.

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