CEO and Co-Founder of Clio, Jack Newton, kicked off the fifth annual Clio Cloud Conference with the launch of “New Clio.” LexBlog CEO, Kevin O’Keefe, caught up with Jack to discuss the conference, Clio Apollo and more.
Kevin: I’m here at New Orleans with Jack Newton and good kickoff I’d say so far wouldn’t you?
Jack: Thank you. It felt good to me, got a lot of positive response from the audience that seemed to be liking what they’re hearing and the kind of roadmap were mapping out for the next decade, I think they’re excited about it.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, you get excited by just walking in the room. And every year it gets bigger and bigger. So if you come in…
Jack: Yeah, the energy level’s pretty high.
Kevin: Yeah the energy level’s high. I mean you said okay, who has been here for, you said the fifth year?
Jack: Fifth year, that’s right.
Kevin: Who’s been here since the first year? People raise their hand, you go that’s probably the 200 that were there.
Jack: Exactly…exactly.
Kevin: But it looked like a really small group, those 200 because we’re sitting in a room that probably had closer to 1500 people.
Jack: That’s right, it was a very full room. It gets electric, you know. It’s really fun.
Kevin: I’m sure it’s electric for you. I mean you put up the picture of you and Ryan sitting there side by side at what looked like a card table. And you’re sitting up on this stage, I mean how’s it feel? You walk up on this stage, that big a room, huge screens on both sides, your Clio name is in lights. What’s that mean to you?
Jack: Yeah, I mean it makes me really proud for one. It feels surreal, so I feel like I need to pinch myself sometimes. If you went back and told the Jack and Ryan of 2008 that Clio would turn into this, I don’t think either of us would have believed you. You know, certainly a success beyond what our wildest ambitions were. Both on the software side, you know the product has become so big, but also with Clio Con. You know we never really thought of doing a conference until that lightbulb moment five years ago where we realized, we felt like the legal industry kind of needs something like this where we get together with our customers and help invent what the future of law looks like together and I’m really over and above what we’ve achieved with the product. I’m really proud of what Clio Con has turned into.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, we’re sitting in the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans. Long before you were born these were the Taj Mahals, and you’ve got signs for Clio at all doors. It’s like I come back from a run this morning and I’m coming in the back door, ” Is this the right place?” Oh yeah, I guess it is, Clio Con.
Jack: Right. Yep. Oh you should have come with me and Ed, I didn’t realize you were running this morning. We’ll go tomorrow maybe.
Kevin: But you’ve got the signs everywhere on the outside of the hotel, on the inside of the hotel. You’ve taken over the place. You said something that was pretty powerful today. Dovetail into what you’re doing in the, I don’t know if it’s called the Innovation Fund or Developer’s Fund, but that legal tech innovation, legal tech development will run through Clio. What do you mean by that? Powerful statement.
Jack: What I mean by that is that what Clio provides to our customers and to the legal space as a whole, we want to be a foundation upon which other legal startups and legal innovators are building on top of. With a view to you know one, helping them accelerate their product development so that they don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to basic things like matter management and time in billing.
But also, it’s a huge benefit to our customers in that they get access to this innovation and wealth of development resources being delivered to them in this tremendous way that wasn’t available to them in the past. And I didn’t talk about this in the keynote, but the third benefit is to actually the developer in the sense that finding your initial customers is one of the hardest things for any startup, and with Clio we’re able to say, “We have a community of a 150,000 sophisticated, cloud-savvy, technology savvy legal professionals that you can tap into through Clio as a channel”, and it’s another Flywheel.
I talked a lot about Flywheel. It’s another virtual cycle where we’ll start seeing the most innovation happening on the Clio platform, we’ll get more customers on the platform thanks to that. Then we’ll have even more developers and resources building solutions for Clio customers in the virtual cycle just continues.
Kevin: And it’s critical that this go on, when we’re talking about legal tech start ups. I have started one company. Sold it to LexisNexis, and I hate to say it, but it feels like that’s where technology goes to die. The development just doesn’t get to continue to be done in that type of environment, it doesn’t attract the developers that you can attract.
Jack: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah.
Kevin: I met your new head of engineering that came in from Shopify …
Jack: Shopify, that’s right. Yeah.
Kevin: Coming in from Autowood, Shopify who’s expanded cross country after spending its time with you, hooks its tremendous advantages. And I just don’t see the traditional legal technology company being able to land that type talent. I think that’s impossible, and then when you have to get something right, when you and Ryan were starting it, you don’t have the alternative to blow it.
Jack: No, you just get it done.
Kevin: You’re sitting here doing everything, you have to get it done. You get it done, you get an attitude going, that’s hard to compete with.
Jack: It is, it is. Very much so.
Kevin: I want to talk to you about that. So your idea of the, let’s talk about the development fund that you’re starting with. Another way to help these legal tech entrepreneurs. Talk about that for a second.
Jack: So, we thought we’ve seen success with the platform to this point, but the question we ask and one of the terms we use at Clio a lot is “How do we 10x this? How do we take it from where it is today and make it 10x bigger, faster, better, whatever dimension you want to move. But how can we 10x the platform?” And we said, you know one of the ways we could do this is doing two things: we launched a fund, the Clio developer fund, which you’re referring to. It is a million dollar fund where we’ll be able to deploy capital to innovative technology companies, innovative legal tech startups, in a very tactical way.
That could be a way of equity investment, that could be non-dilutive, non-equity investment, where we just say we love what you’re doing, we think that’s strategic, here’s some money, keep doing what you’re doing. It could be co-marketing funds where we bring them to market and help support them raising their profile in trade shows or maybe its Google AdWords or whatever the case might be. So really its kind of a Swiss Army Knife investment vehicle that we can deploy to help the people that we think are strategic to our grand vision.
And the second piece we announced today, an entirely separate fund or a prize fund, rather, is the Launch Code competition, and with the Launch Code competition the starting pistol went off in the keynote and the year from today at the Clio Cloud Conference 2018 we’re going to announce the winner of $100,000 prize for the developer that builds the best new integration against the Clio platform using the new API version 4 toolkit. So between those two initiatives, we think that this is already receiving an unbelievable amount of interest even from the partners that are on the floor here in terms of how they participate in that. And I have every confidence we’ll come back next year feeling like we did really 10x the platform thanks to that investment.
Kevin: I mean, you used the term platform. I’ll lay it down for my team and I’ll say this is a puzzle. I mean you’ve got your female ends, you’ve got your male ends. We just want people to be able to clip onto this with GPI’s, plug-ins, whatever it might be. That idea of, investing like you just described it in multiple ways with other technologists, you’re right, is going to increase your platform 10x. Think of all its traditional values coming to your customers by what other people are doing. You can’t think about all that stuff, every day. You cannot think about, oh gee, what is this payment system that they’re going to use over here, what’s this publishing that they can use over here, what’s this other system that they can use over here. Everything in a practice of law, you’ll be able to plug in legal research and that type of thing. It’s fascinating what you’re doing. It’s very impressive.
Jack: It lets us focus on the core Clio experience that benefits all of our customers and let this unbelievable ecosystem tackle the various needs that customers have that aren’t part of that core experience. Look at examples of what’s launching today. We have no intentions of ever building any e-discovery directly into Clio, but we’re able to have an incredible company like Logical build on top of the platform.
Kevin: We were talking about Apollo, I mean before we get to Apollo completely, we look at Clio and say, gee all these people are going to have to intake their information through a web chronicle. Gee we should, one way we can contribute to Clio at this fair is we’ll work our shop at the core. Let’s build plug-ins. We’ll build a plug-in that people can put this on their websites, blogs, whatever that can bring the information into Clio.
Jack: Absolutely, yeah.
Kevin: And so, people will come up to me and they’ll say “Well don’t you sell this?” And I go, well why would we sell it? It’s an ecosystem that we’re making our platform more valuable by getting their things out there where it can be retrieved in environments where we are already operating. This could become, you could be quite a magnet.
Jack: Well we hope it’s a game changer. And again, a part of that grand vision of transforming the practice of the law for good, is we’re going to need some friends to get there. And the platform’s a great way to do it.
Kevin: Let me talk to you about Apollo for a second. And I could relate to it because we were doing things in a way that probably couldn’t scale forever. And it was our tech team led by Josh Lynch that said we’re going to have to redo the entire thing, and just basically build a new entire platform, and for me I didn’t understand fully the impact until we were about 3/4 of the way through which probably scared the hell out of those guys because they were thinking about the amount of money and manpower we could invest in it. I got to visit with you a couple of weeks on Apollo and it sounded similar but a much larger scale base that you have. Tell me what the vision was behind Apollo and what your drive is with Apollo.
Jack: So, we’ve been building and iterating on Clio for nine years, and one of the comments I made in the keynote was that software ages in dog years. Nine-year-old software is like a sixty-year-old man or woman for that matter. And you need to kind of do a pretty big reinvention of technologies that are available today, simply didn’t exist nine years ago. The kind of user experience we could build from the ground up if we’re rebuilding Clio today were game changers. From a user experience standpoint.
So there’s the technology side of things where we said there’s a bunch of new technologies we need to pull into Clio and that requires some pretty fundamental re-engineering, what the tech guys call re-platforming. That means basically rebuilding the back end, rebuilding the front end of Clio and creating a whole new technical stack that we’re using to build the product and that’s a huge investment on its own, but has dividends in that we should be able to iterate faster in the future.
The second piece of Apollo that was above and beyond technology stack was looking at nine years of feedback we received from customers, and we’ve received a lot. And while we’ve been continuously integrating that feedback into Clio over the last nine years, there are some things that require kind of stepping back and saying, you know what, this is going to be more of a down to the studs type renovation. This isn’t us just adding a new button or a new checkbox, or tweaking the way a feature works, but really reinventing how certain parts of the application work. And that was the second piece of what we accomplish with Apollo, which is the reason we talked about it as a reinvention of Clio and the thoughtful reinvention of Clio in that we’re incorporating really important aspects of technical advancement as well as this ground-up rethinking of how features work into the Apollo project.
And that’s what we announced today with the new Clio experience, and customers are already accessing it and already sharing a lot of excitement over what they are seeing. You saw some of the responses in the keynote. I heard a few hallelujahs, I saw a few people punching in to the air, there’s a lot of excitement.
Kevin: Here’s the older features, the new, and the person in front of me jumped right out very excited about just that. They struggled with the previous experience and you talk about the speed and I know exactly what you mean. It provides you a platform to build on so you have that platform to continue to grow and to grow on Apollo without working with something that could present a lot of technical debt. Now it’s very cool what you’ve done. The core name of the company is Themis, named after what?
Jack: The Greek god of truth and justice.
Kevin: Okay, and what’s Clio?
Jack: Clio is the Greek muse of history.
Kevin: And Apollo?
Jack: Apollo is the Greek god of light and healing. So I’ve got it all down. I’m a Greek mythology fan so we’ve got code names for every project you could think of with appropriate Greek gods and deities, and muses is a rich well.
Kevin: We have a CTO that’s a fan of a donut chain, so we have things like Apple Fritter, and Chocolate Fritter, so I’m very intimidated compared to Greek goddesses of trying to put donuts next to these things on the screen, and I’m saying I don’t know how it works.
Jack: So, well hey, even Google names their code names after candy bars for androids so, you’re not alone. You’re not alone.
Kevin: Hey, this was great. I appreciate your time.
Jack: Well thanks for having me.
Kevin: I mean, like I said, you guys have taken over this place. And it’s an amazing thing to realize what you have going on here. Cause right now there are other technology conferences even going on and I’m very glad that I’m here.
Jack: Well thanks for being here.
Kevin: We will miss the audience that even should be here, and was being talked about on Twitter. Liked the enthusiasm, I mean it’s very contagious and could be felt by that community as well.
Jack: Well I’m glad to hear that.
Kevin: Thank you very much.
Jack: Thanks, Kevin.