Clio

Finally, being offline doesn’t mean being off the clock! We’re extremely excited to be introducing Clio Express at this week’s ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago on April 2-4.

Clio Express is a desktop application for accessing Clio’s time tracking and expense tracking. Previously, Clio users were not able to track time without access to the web. Now with Clio Express, whether traveling on a plane, or sitting in the office, attorneys and staff can log time and record expenses from the desktop, either with or without an internet connection, using the intuitive easy-to-use interface for which Clio is well-known.

Available for Windows and Mac users alike, the small, lightweight Clio Express application downloads in seconds, installs with ease, and is included free of charge for all Clio subscribers. Visit www.goclio.com for more information on Clio and the new Clio Express desktop client.

In one week the 2009 ABA TECHSHOW kicks off. We’ll have a booth at this year’s TECHSHOW again – be sure to come visit us at Booth #305. We’ll be giving away one free year of service to Clio as part of our prize draw, so be sure to drop a business card off at our booth.

If you’re in the Chicago area you can get an exhibition-only pass for free here: http://www.abanet.org/techshow/register.

Registering for the full conference gets you access to what are sure to be great talks by Dominic Jaar, Tom Mighell, Kevin O’Keefe,  Andy Adkins, Nerino Petro, Jr.,  Catherine Sanders Reach, David Whelan, Eric Mazzone, Dennis Kennedy, Brett Burney, Steve Matthews, David Bilinksy, and the rest of the TECHSHOW Faculty.

We hope to see you next week at the TECHSHOW. We’ll have some exciting announcements to make, and we love meeting existing and future users in person!

Spring has sprung, and Solo Practice University has officially opened its doors.

Back at LegalTech New York we had the privilege of meeting up with Susan Cartier Liebel, the founder of Solo Practice University, and were completely blown away by the scope and depth of her vision for Solo Practice University. It promises to be an interactive, energetic, and information-rich community for solos. Something that, amazingly enough, has not existed to this point.

SPU is all about helping solos learn about running a law practice – and like Clio, it’s completely web-based. Susan has managed to put together a world-class contingent of SPU faculty, including Jay Foonberg, Carolyn Elefant, Grant Griffiths and many others.

Solo Practice University will also be opening a “Co-Op” of products and services of interest to solos – and each will be independently reviewed and approved by members of SPU.  Think of it as an “Amazon.com” for solos, where peer reviews of products of services will help solos decide what would be a good fit for their needs. Clio will be a proud member of this Co-Op when it launches.

SPU has officially opened its doors and you can enroll today. Susan, David and SPU faculty – congratulations on launch!

In our last blog post about Clio ClientConnect Launch Coverage, a reader named Ryan commented he was happy to see all the media coverage Clio is receiving, but that he’d like to see more “how Clio’s working for me” stories from real attorneys. The timing of Ryan’s request couldn’t have been better, as just last week Jason Molder of Molder Legal Group, P.A wrote an in-depth review of Clio based on his own experiences in using Clio in his firm since our public launch in October.

Since Jason and his partner (his wife, Nicole Molder) have been using Clio a daily basis as part of their practice, he is writing the review not based on a quick once-over, but rather from the perspective of someone that has been using Clio day in and day out for over three months:

The Clio home page after login is nothing short of wonderful. It’s clean, organized, and minimalistic. The buttons are easy to locate and are where you expect them to be. The home page is not cluttered with extraneous links that are better located in nested pages. All in all, it is a pleasure to use and to navigate.

And then there’s the sheer power of Clio. We frequently find ourselves checking for conflicts through the contact database located within the program. We simply enter a name and the AJAX-based dropdown box self-populates with relevant hits. If there are none, the box is empty. There are no complicated reports to run. There are no queries to build. The same goes for time billing data entry. You simply go to the “Activities” page, begin typing the name of your client, the name of the matter, or the client/matter number itself and Clio again provides you with a self-populated list to choose from. Enter your time, select your rate from a list of rates that you can customize on another screen, enter the activity’s description, click. Themis recently added trust accounting ledgers to Clio, and trust account management has since become a breeze for us.

One aspect of Jason’s review we especially appreciate is his comment about our openness to continuing to improve Clio based on user feedback:

Simply put: if you want to see a feature added – ask for it. In our experience at least, most likely, Jack and Rian will add it to their to-do list and get it implemented down the road. This was one of Clio’s most important features for us – the ability to get in early and participate in shaping Clio’s growth and development. It’s the closest thing for us to custom application development, but without the programming fees.

If you’d like to help us shape Clio into the most powerful, easiest-to-use practice management system out there, sign up and become part of the ever-growing Clio community.

We encourage you to read the entire review here. If you’re a Clio user and would like to write a review, we’d be happy to highlight your review on this blog – just let us know about your review by e-mail at info@goclio.com or, as Jason did, via Twitter at @goclio.