Blog

We’re excited to announce the launch of our completely revised Clio help and support site available at support.goclio.com. As a part of our continued effort to build an intuitive and accessible support system, we’ve dispensed with the old FAQ-style list of exclusively text-based help articles, and have worked to produce a much more rich and informative support site, complete with helpful walk-throughs, short tutorial videos, and detailed instructions for performing virtually any task in Clio. The new site also serves as an additional channel for users to access the Clio Support Team, and monitor the status of both current and past support inquiries. Whether a new subscriber, or a seasoned Clio veteran, we’re confident all users will find the new site to be a significant improvement over its predecessor, and a valuable educational resource that helps everyone ensure they’re getting the most out of Clio.

In addition to the new support site, we’ll be further augmenting our training resources with regularly scheduled webinars to focus on tips & tricks for using Clio, along with some of the more advanced concepts not covered in the weekly product overview webinar. We invite everyone to submit requests for advanced training topics to support@goclio.com.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the new support site, and hope to see many of you in attendance at one of the upcoming webinars.

The North Carolina State Bar’s recent Proposed Ethics Opinion approving the use of Cloud Computing in a law office has been the talk of the legal technology world. The award-winning Lawyer2Lawyer podcast, hosted by Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams, examines the ethics opinion, its impact on the legal profession, and what lawyers should understand about cloud computing prior to moving their practice into “the cloud”.

Clio’s own Jack Newton and NC State Bar ethics counsel Alice N. Mine are interviewed in the podcast for their thoughts on cloud computing and the proposed ethics opinion.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Today we’re attending the 5th annual Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC) Solo and Small Firm Conference in Toronto, Ontario. If you’re an Ontario-based Clio user attending the conference be sure to drop by and say “hi”!

The conference is welcoming some fantastic speakers this year, including Jordan Furlong, Rodney Dowell, Dave Bilinksi, Dan Pinnington and David Whelan (who may have the greatest title ever: The Great Librarian at the Law Society of Upper Canada).

For those of you wondering, yes, “Upper Canada” is an old – very old – name for what is now Ontario. The LSUC was founded in 1797, almost 70 years before Ontario’s borders were established in Canada’s confederation in 1867.

Just over a month ago at the 2010 ABA TechShow, we announced e-mail integration for Clio. Clio’s e-mail integration makes it easy for your entire firm – regardless of which e-mail program they’re using – to use Clio as a central e-mail and communication repository.

We accomplish this by making a designated “e-mail dropbox” address available for each of your matters. You can BCC or forward any e-mail correspondence for a given matter to its special dropbox e-mail address, and Clio will automatically parse the e-mail, attach it to the appropriate e-mail, and extract and attach any documents to  Clio’s document management system. Clio’s e-mail dropbox system is like having a full-time virtual assistant reading and filing every e-mail your firm sends.

Yesterday we passed an incredible threshold – after just one month of being live, Clio’s e-mail integration feature has processed over 10,000 e-mails from Clio users. E-mail integration is certainly one of our most eagerly-adopted features, and we’re thrilled our users are deriving so much utility from it. If you’re interested in seeing a bit more about how Clio’s e-mail integration works, we’ve put together the following tour of the feature:

E-mail Integration from Clio on Vimeo.

One of the most important factors in user satisfaction with a web application is speed. Google observed, for example, that search usage dropped when it introduces a delay as small as 100ms in returning search results. Amazon.com reports that every 100ms of latency on its website cost it 1% of profit – and for a multi-billion-dollar company, that amounts to a real number. The cloud computing industry has been pushing aggressively on making web applications faster than ever.

Several key developments in cloud computing technologies have allowed web applications to respond to user interactions faster:

• Web browsers are faster. The newest web browsers are more than 100X faster in executing JavaScript – the web’s programming language – than web browsers from 10 years ago. Just yesterday Google posted an update on its Google Chrome blog announcing that the latest Google Chrome beta benchmarks 30-35% faster than the already-blazingly-fast Google Chrome 4.
• New standards such as HTML5 allow for offline storage and caching of data, improving page responsiveness and allowing for offline access to web applications.
• Ever-increasing broadband and wireless access speeds are expanding the bandwidth of the pipe to “the cloud” every day.

Here at Clio we’ve focused on making Clio faster than ever. We have instrumented Clio so that every page load and every database query is benchmarked, and over the past month we’ve been focusing on re-tooling Clio to improve overall page loads. Last week we rolled out the first of these updates, and the graph below reflects the results of those efforts:

As you can see, the average response time for Clio dropped from about 240ms to about 100ms – almost a 2.5X improvement. As Clio continues to grow we’ll focus on ensuring we deliver the fastest – and most satisfying – user experience possible.