For years, Clio has used its annual convention to sign the place the authorized trade is headed and this yr was no completely different. Listed here are 4 key takeaways for solos and smalls from this yr’s ClioCon 2025 keynote by founder Jack Newton.
1. Empowering Solos and Smalls within the Enterprise and Follow of Regulation
For years, solo and small-firm legal professionals have been handled as spectators within the authorized tech revolution — watching as Biglaw invested in pricey, siloed AI instruments. That dynamic adjustments with Clio Work. This new built-in AI workspace doesn’t simply degree the taking part in discipline — it provides solos and smalls entry to capabilities that many massive corporations nonetheless don’t have.
As Newton defined, powered by Vincent, the authorized AI engine acquired by way of Clio’s billion-dollar purchase of vLex, Clio Work unites each side of authorized follow — administration, analysis, drafting, and workflow automation — inside a single, context-aware platform. It attracts on a verified authorized database of over a billion paperwork, together with caselaw, statutes, and secondary supplies, grounding each lead to actual authority slightly than guesswork.
Not like many legacy methods constructed for Biglaw, which separate the “enterprise” and “follow” sides of regulation, Clio Work fuses them. Convergence is the time period Newton used. Clio Work automates shopper consumption, billing, and doc era whereas concurrently powering high-level authorized reasoning. And it delivers all of this at a worth that’s truly accessible: $199 per person monthly. For the primary time, solos and smalls can afford know-how that’s not a compromise, however a aggressive benefit.
2. Context is the New Foreign money
The convergence of the enterprise and follow of regulation can be according to a recent Gartner Report discovering that firms utilizing AI ought to prioritize context engineering (AI that understands a agency’s full image of operations) over immediate engineering. Clio’s new structure merges a agency’s huge trove of follow matter information with the authorized corpus of vLex (rebranded as Clio Library) enabling AI to “suppose in context” — linking analysis to billing, deadlines to drafting, and shopper communications to workflow. For solos and small corporations, this implies a future the place their software program not solely manages their follow however actively understands it, surfacing insights, anticipating wants, and offering help particular to a agency’s method of doing enterprise.
3. Even Whereas Increasing to Biglaw, Clio Continues to Dance With the Ones Who Brung Them: Solos & Smalls
Though Newton introduced Clio’s enlargement into the enterprise market with Clio Function (previously the U.Ok.-based platform ShareDo), he made some extent of reaffirming that solos and small corporations stay the “spine” of Clio’s success. Clio’s story started 17 years in the past with a deal with solos — legal professionals too typically ignored by legacy tech distributors — and Newton assured that focus will proceed.
Whereas the enterprise division will serve corporations with lots of of legal professionals, Newton emphasised that that is an additive enlargement, not a shift in mission. Solos and smalls can anticipate continued product enhancements — and presumably will profit from cross subsidization by diversified revenues generated by the enterprise model.
4. AI is the Key to Unlocking a $3 Trillion Latent Authorized Market — and Solos and Smalls are Finest Positioned to Seize It
Newton cited information exhibiting that 77% of authorized issues go unresolved by legal professionals, a spot that has lengthy outlined the access-to-justice disaster. As we speak, he argued, AI provides legal professionals the instruments to vary that equation by dramatically decreasing the time and value of delivering authorized providers.
At present, the 23% of authorized wants that are served characterize a $1 trillion international market. As AI improves productiveness and affordability, Newton tasks that quantity might quadruple. For solos and smalls, this isn’t only a ethical name to develop entry; it’s a enterprise alternative of unprecedented scale. AI can allow a single lawyer to serve extra purchasers, extra effectively, with out compromising high quality or private contact. The corporations that embrace it early would be the ones that develop with this increasing market slightly than being displaced by it.
The underside line:
Clio’s keynote made clear that AI in regulation is not theoretical or unique. It’s being embedded instantly into the each day instruments solo and small corporations already use, at a worth they will justify, in a method that enhances slightly than replaces their judgment. For solos and smalls who’ve all the time been essentially the most agile a part of the occupation, the message was unmistakable: the way forward for regulation isn’t coming. It’s already right here — and for as soon as, it’s constructed with you in thoughts.
Carolyn Elefant is likely one of the nation’s most acknowledged advocates for solo and small agency legal professionals. She based MyShingle.com in 2002, the longest-running weblog for solo practitioners, the place she has revealed 1000’s of articles, sources, and guides on beginning, operating, and rising unbiased regulation practices. She is the writer of Solo by Selection, broadly thought to be the definitive handbook for launching and sustaining a regulation follow, and has spoken at numerous bar occasions and authorized conferences on know-how, innovation, and regulatory reform that impacts solos and smalls. Elefant additionally develops sensible instruments just like the AI Teach-In to assist small corporations undertake AI and he or she persistently champions reforms to degree the taking part in discipline for unbiased legal professionals. Alongside this work, she runs the Regulation Workplaces of Carolyn Elefant, a nationwide power and regulatory follow that handles selective advanced, high-stakes issues.
