At the Clio Cloud Conference, Building Momentum for Better Legal Practices

“Momentum is the driving force that turns short bursts of energy into sustained success.”

With those words during his opening keynote that has been become a signature event of the Clio Cloud Conference, Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton explained why the conference chose “momentum” as its theme this year.

It is an apt description, because the two-day Clio Cloud Conference – or ClioCon as it often called – is indeed a short burst of energy that seems, year after year, to propel the legal professionals who attend towards sustained efforts to improve their law practices that continue on long after the conference concludes.

“Energy alone isn’t enough to really take your firm to the next level,” Newton said. “What you need is momentum – a force that keeps you moving forward faster, with less friction and more impact that builds over time.”

Even as Newton discussed momentum as a driving force propelling successful law firms, he acknowledged that the word applied equally to Clio itself and to its conference, for which this was its 12^th year.

“This is our biggest and best ClioCon ever,” he said, “with over 5,000 people at this year’s ClioCon, bringing incredible energy to this event that just keeps building momentum year after year.”

Of those 5,000 attendees, 2,600 were physically present in Austin, Texas, where the conference was held, and another 2,400 attended virtually. Attendees came from 42 countries, he said, including Brazil, Norway, Tunisia and the Philippines.

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If momentum drove the biggest ClioCon ever, it also drove Clio’s most momentous year ever. In July, the 16-year-old company raised a financing round of $900 million – the largest ever by far for a legal tech company. Also this year, Forbes named Clio to its Cloud 100 companies, Deloitte chose it as one of Canada’s best-managed companies, and it became the official away-jersey sponsor of its hometown hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks.

But because of that growth, ClioCon was forced this year for the first time to move from a single-venue conference to one with its programming in a convention center and its attendees spread among multiple hotels.

I, for one, was worried about this change of venue. Within the Clio-verse, my claim to fame is that I am one of only five people who have attended every one of the 12 ClioCons. (And two of those five are Newton and the person who has organized the conference since its inception, Lauren Sanders.)

The first ClioCon was a cozy affair of just 230 attendees. I remember attending it and being thrilled to discover that it was like no other legal tech conference I’d ever been to. There was a unique sense of community, a shared interest in innovation, that was energizing to be part of.

Over the years, as the conference grew in size and stature, it was largely able to maintain that sense of community and energy. Two years ago, as I wrote at the time, I felt that the choice of venue – the sprawling and byzantine Gaylord Nashville – detracted from that sense of community, but last year, it seemed to come back together, even though it was again at the Gaylord.

Resetting My Frame of Reference

So I feared that an even larger conference, dispersed across multiple locations that included a cold concrete convention center, would be so far removed from that original ClioCon as to severely dissipate those characteristics of community and energy.

But at some point during this year’s conference, I realized that I needed to reset my frame of reference. This is no longer that intimate conference of a dozen years ago and it never again will be. This is no longer that still-nascent startup that Clio still was a dozen years ago and it never again will be.

Rather, ClioCon is now a major, global technology conference put on by one of the largest legal technology companies in the world. For me to evaluate it through the nostalgic eyes of something I attended over a decade ago would be to fail to acknowledge what I was experiencing in the present moment.

Because my time at ClioCon is always so harried, I ask other attendees, as often as I get the chance, what they think. This year, I was particularly interested in the opinions of anyone I could find who was a first- or second-time attendee – for whom, in other words, this conference was a new experience, not a 12-year accumulation of experiences.

What I heard consistently were people who talked about the sense of community and the sense of energy and the sense of shared interest in innovation, much as I’d first felt all those years earlier.

What was to me a conference that has grown more than 20-fold in size over the years was to those seeing it for the first time a conference they were thrilled to be attending.

Embedded deep in my brain are nostalgia neurons that will forever miss that smaller ClioCon. But the fact of the matter is that the momentum driving the growth of ClioCon, the momentum driving the growth of Clio itself, is a force that signifies that the legal industry is getting closer and closer to the kind of meaningful and lasting change those original 230 ClioCon attendees could only imagine 12 years ago.

In his keynote, Newton reminded attendees that Clio has defined its mission as “transforming the legal experience for all,” calling it a mission that is “deliberately audacious, inclusive, and ambitious.”

“It’s about redefining how we deliver legal services,” he said, “and ClioCon is our annual summit to bring all of you together with so much of our team and co-create what that future can look like. In past years, I’ve called ClioCon a movement, and that’s more relevant this year than ever with this year’s theme.”

(If he’s called it a movement, I’ve gone so far as to call it a cult – but a good kind of cult, a “cult of innovation.” )

So, no, this year’s larger, multi-venue version of ClioCon was not that smaller, more intimate ClioCon of years past. But neither are the legal tech industry of today or the law firms of today what they were 12 years ago. And that is all for the better.

Newton talked in his keynote of the business concept of the flywheel, a concept he learned from author Jim Collins.

“A flywheel is significant in that it doesn’t start spinning on its own – it takes effort to get it going, it takes momentum, and it gains momentum over time, making it easier to maintain that speed,” Newton said. “And this self-reinforcing growth, this perpetual motion machine, is something that every law firm should strive to build.”

The momentum that ClioCon and Clio have built is impressive, and they reflect the momentum that has driven change across the entire legal industry over the past decade. As much as my nostalgia neurons might miss those more intimate days of ClioCons past, I am glad that legal tech and legal innovation are gaining momentum and becoming a movement.

The fact is that innovation in legal is a party at which the more are the merrier. And, after 12 years and 20-fold growth, ClioCon still seems like the one party anyone interested in legal innovation should attend.

A Couple Side Notes

So far in this post, I have said hardly anything about the substance of the conference. When it comes to the basic ClioCon model, Clio has developed a winning formula and it stuck to that formula this year. Elements of that formula include:

• Strong programming that mixes Clio-focused sessions of interest to customers with sessions on broader topics of interest to anyone building and operating a law practice.
• Thought-provoking and motivational keynotes from well-known speakers and authors.
• Parties each night, one free and one paid, in fun venues with good entertainment.
• Multiple opportunities for networking among people with shared interests.
• An exhibit hall that grows larger every year of companies who provide products and services that integrate with Clio or support its customers.
• Hands-on training and demonstrations on Clio features and skills.

Possibly the most unheralded – at least publicly – source of momentum behind all this is Lauren Sanders, manager of special events at Clio and the person who has been in charge of organizing every one of the 12 ClioCons.

Someone I spoke to during ClioCon who has herself been involved in organizing multiple legal tech conferences commented that, in her opinion, there is no better organizer of legal tech conferences than Sanders.

It is a momentous job and she pulls it off virtually flawlessly year after year.

As a member of the media, I also appreciate that Clio’s media relations team makes it effortless and enjoyable for reporters to attend the show. This year, similar to past years, a section of the exhibit hall was set aside for reporters, with tables for us to set up podcast equipment, comfortable seating areas for conducting interviews or writing, and someone always available to answer questions or track down a source. Thanks to Pamela Smith, Clio’s director of corporate communications, and Mesila Malltezi, manager of PR and communications, for making our jobs easier.

I was particularly grateful this year for the invitation to present our Legaltech Week show as a live session in front of a full audience. Usually, we broadcast this show every Friday via Zoom and also distribute it as a podcast and on YouTube. But this is the first time we’ve been able to get most of our regular panelists all together on stage in front of an audience and do our shtick It was enormous fun, and it all came about at the suggestion of the aforementioned Pamela Smith, to whom I owe a huge thanks.

If I have at all sparked your interest in attending this conference next year, it will be in my neck of the woods, in historic Boston, Mass., October 16 and 17. It was originally scheduled for a second year in Austin, but apparently the city has decided to tear down and rebuilt its aging convention center. Austin’s loss is Boston’s gain.

Newton, citing one of this year’s keynote speakers, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, talked in his keynote about Clear’s concept of the aggregation of marginal gains – the idea that if you make just a 1% improvement every day, you will see outsized and compounding impacts over the long term.

“If we embrace this momentum mindset – think about how we deploy these incremental changes – we will be able to leave ClioCon in two days with actionable takeaways that we can implement in our law firms starting on Wednesday, and maybe even while you’re still here at the conference.”

It seems a safe bet that many of the 5,000 ClioCon attendees took that to heart, returning to their practices with fresh ideas on how to make incremental improvements that will build momentum for lasting change.