In December 2008, my partner Philip Nelson and I established our boutique legal firm, Slinde & Nelson LLC, in the in the vibrant Pearl District of Portland, OR. Our firm provides a spectrum of legal services ranging from general counsel and business law to construction law and employment litigation. We primarily service clients from Oregon, Washington, and California.

In addition to our law practice, we also operate Carbon Trader, a consulting company that counsels clients on matters involving green and sustainable business strategies, including carbon trading credits. Both the law and consulting firms are housed under one roof, and are supported by the dedicated efforts of three attorneys and four project managers.

Since inception, the growth both firms have experienced has outpaced our most ambitious expectations, which I attribute to a “perfect storm” of circumstances, many rooting from the current economic downturn and the “green” movement. Additionally, the downturn has inspired the legal profession as a whole to rethink the billable hour, something we think will bring much-needed flexibility and innovation to the pricing arena.

As a young, modern firm, we wanted to make use of the latest technologies to support our highly mobile contingent of lawyers and staff, and to offer our clients unprecedented, round-the-clock, and fully transparent access to our legal expertise. We recognized that optimizing our internal efficiency through the use of leadingedge tools was critical to delivering responsiveness, transparency and an exceptional customer experience.

SaaS Making Strides

In early 2009, we began our search for a practice management tool that would support our demanding requirements and the needs of our complex environment. This search led us to consider a number of options, among which were several traditional client/server software packages. Although impressed by their feature richness and complexity, we ultimately elected to consider other products due to the generally high up-front costs associated with software licensing, maintenance, training and implementation.

Wishing to avoid unnecessary resource costs, we continued our search and were pleased to discover that SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) was beginning to make significant advances in legal practice management. Having decided on several other Web-based services to support the needs of our practice (such as Google Apps for Domains), we were already sold on the idea of storing our data in “the cloud,” and were attracted to the reliability and availability inherent to SaaS.

We were looking for something scalable and capable of growing with us as our firm rapidly expanded. We required a low cost of initiation and implementation to accommodate our fledgling budget, rigid security to provide the necessary protections required to maintain client confidentiality, attentive service with exceptional responsiveness and customer care, and sufficient versatility to manage the large volume of information for both the legal and environmental consulting entities.

Our research led to a handful of legal SaaS offerings, including Clio. On the surface, the various offerings looked quite similar, since they offered many of the core practice management functions such as matter management, contact management, calendaring and time-and-billing features. Mobile access from either an iPhone or BlackBerry interface was an option as well.

Clio Chosen

However, as our research continued, we found the interface and several key features of Clio helped separate it from the crowd. Most importantly, Clio offers ClientConnect, which functions as a secure, private Web site (extranet or portal) whereby we could give our clients access to various documents, bills and correspondence we had produced for them. ClientConnect aligned perfectly with our dedication to accessibility and transparency for our clients. ClientConnect allows us to deliver information to our clients easily in a timely fashion. In fact, we feel ClientConnect offers such convenience to our customers that it serves as a competitive advantage for our firm. Hand-in-hand with the ClientConnect functionality is Clio’s document management functionality, which allows us to upload documents to the system and manage versions over any Web connection from home, office or on the road.

In February 2009, we decided to move forward with implementing Clio as our practice management solution. Like many SaaS products, Clio is sold by monthly subscription. For Slinde & Nelson’s staff, three attorneys and two staff members, we pay $49 per month for each attorney, $25 per month for each staff member. There are no hardware costs and there is no maintenance fee — Clio simply runs over our Internet connection. For a young firm like ours, the lack of capital expenses associated with Clio was a major selling point. We were also able to set up and deploy Clio without any IT integrator or consulting expenses.

Since Slinde & Nelson is a new firm, we had the benefit of not having to convert any legacy data over to Clio, although Clio does offer data migration services for firms with existing practice management data. Data migration, technical support and weekly upgrades are included in Clio’s monthly subscription cost. We have our entire firm’s practice management and client collaboration needs fulfilled by paying one, predictable monthly fee.

For the past several months that we have been using Clio, it has performed extremely well for both our law and consulting firms. It fits well into our overall plan to go paperless and wireless in all of our workflow. Clio has allowed us to integrate old and new technologies to give our clients comfort, and to deliver exceptionally good customer service with a high degree of transparency. For a small, agile, and rapidly growing firm like ours, Clio was definitely the right choice.

This case study originally appeared in LJN’s Legal Tech Newsletter, Vol. 28, No. 4 (July 2010). © 2010 ALM Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

We’re honored to be speaking at a range of CLE events over the next few months, and wanted to take the opportunity to point out where we’ll be in case you’d like to catch a session:

June 10th, 2010 – Missouri 2010 Solo Small Firm Conference

How a Practice Management System Can Help You Practice Ethically and Competently
In this talk Rian Gauvreau will describe how a case management system can be used to reduce incidences of *qualifies malpractice and ethical misconduct. We outline the key elements of functionality typically for 1.2 provided by a case management system, including: calendaring, to‐dos/diarizing, conflict MCLE screening, document management, time tracking and billing, and trust accounting. When hours leveraged properly, the above‐mentioned case management functions can greatly reduce the risk of malpractice and ethical misconduct.

June 24th, 2010 – Oklahoma Bar Association 2010 Solo and Small Firm Conference

Cloud Computing for Lawyers
Cloud Computing refers to a company having its data and applications hosted by a third party. Employees log in via their web browser. Clio President Jack Newton will be speaking about cloud computing applications for lawyers. Clio is a cloud-based practice management solution for lawyers. Mr. Newton will be followed up by OBA Ethics Counsel Travis Pickens, who will discuss the benefits and risks of a cloud-based law practice as well as legal ethics implications. Even if you are “sure” you’d never put your practice information into the cloud, you can be sure that some of your small business clients are already doing this and more will be considering it. So learning the basics of this concept is good for several reasons.

July 9th, 2010 - Oregon Bar Association

Half-day CLE Event on Cloud Computing delivered by Jack Newton.

This half-day session will cover three major topics:

Session 1: The Ethics and Security of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in legal technology. Rather than installing and running software on your local computer, your software and data is hosted by a third party and made available over the Internet. While this new approach to cloud computing offers many benefits, lawyers in particular need to be aware of security- and privacy-related “best practices” prior to entrusting confidential client data to “the cloud”. In this talk we will also review recent ethics opinions related to cloud computing.

Session 2: How a (Cloud-based) Practice Management System can help you Practice Efficiently and Competently
A practice management system is a key component of any well-run law office, regardless of firm size. In this talk we will detail how a practice management system can help a law office not only become more efficient, productive, and profitable, but also reduce its risk of malpractice. This talk will review the leading desktop- and cloud-based practice management systems, and will provide a practical “hands-on” demonstration of practice management systems in action.

Session 3: Putting Your Practice in the Cloud
Although there is growing excitement about cloud computing for lawyers, there is ever-growing confusion about which specific cloud-based tools can help a law office run efficiently. In this talk we will walk through the benefits and specific implementation details of several cloud-based applications that can benefit a law office, including Google Apps, Dropbox, Evernote, and Clio. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how these tools low-cost/free cloud-based tools can benefit their practice and how they can be easily implemented in firms of almost any size.

October 21 – Illinois State Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference

How a (Cloud-based) Practice Management System can help you Practice Efficiently and Competently
A practice management system is a key component of any well-run law office, regardless of firm size. In this talk we will detail how a practice management system can help a law office not only become more efficient, productive, and profitable, but also reduce its risk of malpractice. This talk will review the leading desktop- and cloud-based practice management systems, and will provide a practical “hands-on” demonstration of practice management systems in action.

November 11 – MILOFest 2010

Launching Your Practice into the Cloud
Macs, iPhones, iPads and “the cloud” make a perfect combination. In this 60-minute session we’ll do a hands-on walkthrough of how to put your practice in the cloud, covering topics including:

What is “the cloud”?

Security and ethics considerations

How to register your domain name

Setting up a Google Apps account for e-mail, calendaring, website

Setting up Dropbox for file-sharing

Overview of cloud-based practice management tools

Sharing cloud-based data between your Mac, iPhone and iPad

You’ll walk out of this session with a clear understanding of how to set up key cloud-based applications, an understanding of the value they deliver, and how to best integrate cloud-based applications with your Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Watch this blog for more news on where you can learn more about the “cloud” at our speaking engagements.

Unlike our regular weekly webinars which provide a broad overview of Clio’s functionality, our Training Tuesday webinars will provide more of a “deep dive” into specific areas of Clio’s functionality. Our launch lineup for the webinars will cover the following topics:

Intake to Invoicing: Using Clio in everyday practice

In under an hour, we’ll demonstrate how to record a client, generate a matter, record critical information, track time & expenses, generate and modify an invoice, and reconcile payment. This session is designed to provide participants with the practical experience necessary to leverage the features in Clio for everyday practice.

Next Session Date: Tuesday June 15th, 2010 (12pm Eastern/9am Pacific). Click here to register!

Managing Client Funds in Clio

In under an hour, we’ll review how to manage client balances in the form of Trust funds, retainers or pre-payments. From initial deposit to final disbursement, this session aims to demonstrate the ease with which client funds can be accurately tracked using Clio.

Next Session Date: Tuesday June 22nd, 2010 (12pm Eastern/9am Pacific). Click here to register!

Collaborating with Clients using ClientConnect

In under an hour, we’ll demonstrate how leverage Clio’s client extranet portal, ClientConnect, to effectively and securely collaborate and communicate files, correspondence and bills. From the basics of sharing a resource, to more advanced features such as enabling online bill payment, this session is designed to review all aspects of ClientConnect from both the attorney and client perspectives.

Next Session Date: Tuesday June 29th, 2010 (12pm Eastern/9am Pacific). Click here to register!

Extras and Extensions: Using Clio with Other Applications

In under an hour, we’ll demonstrate how to use the many features and tools available to all Clio users to connect to 3rd party applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, and Google Apps. Learn how to use Clio’s desktop time tracking widget Clio Express, the Clio Sync tool, iCalendar feeds, Quickbooks exports, and the many downloadable CSV-based files to receive and manipulate your Clio information outside of the core application.

Next Session Date: Tuesday July 6th, 2010 (12pm Eastern/9am Pacific). Click here to register!

Billing: Beyond the Basics

In under an hour, we’ll dive into the details of invoice generation, bill modification and customization, invoice reconciliation, A/R management and reporting, as well as setup and receipt of online payment. Whether new to Clio, or a seasoned user, this session is designed to provide an in-depth overview of the entire Clio billing module, including steps for performing virtually any function or customization available.

Next Session Date: Tuesday July 13th, 2010 (12pm Eastern/9am Pacific). Click here to register!

If you have suggestions for specific areas of Clio’s functionality you’d like to see covered in a Training Tuesday session, please drop us a line with your suggestion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While we gather information from our users every single day through our toll-free support and suggestion line and our integrated feedback system, this annual survey is a more structured, formal way for us to gather feedback from our ever-growing customer base. We’re proud to share some of the highlights of the survey here.

Would you Recommend Clio to Others?

This is perhaps the most important question we ask in the survey, as it reflects a user’s overall satisfaction with a product better than any other single question. We’re thrilled with the response we received to this question: over 95% of our users would recommend Clio to others.

How did you Find Out About Clio?

In contrast to our 2008 Customer Satisfaction Survey, this year most of our users found out about us via recommendations and word-of-mouth, whereas last year most of our users found us via Google searches and blogs. We suspect that as our user base grows, word-of-mouth and personal recommendations will continue to be significant drivers of new users to Clio.

We’re pleased to see many of our users are happy enough with Clio to recommend it to their colleagues. Lawyers are also great for letting their colleagues and friends know when they’ve found something that makes their lives easier, so thank-you for spreading the word about Clio!

What Practice Management System (if any) did you use Prior to Clio?

The vast majority of users upgrading to Clio from an existing practice management system used either Time Matters or Amicus Attorney. A smaller percentage of users were migrating from PCLaw, TimeSlips, and Practice Master.

How Would you Rate Clio’s Ease-of-Use and Intuitiveness?

We try hard to make Clio an intuitive, easy-to-use product, and over 90% of survey respondents were either “Satisfied” or “Very Satisfied” with Clio’s ease-of-use.

What Areas of Law do you Specialize in?

In our 2008 Customer Satisfaction Survey we found that Clio users were biased somewhat to practice areas such as civil litigation, criminal law, family law, and wills & estates. In the past year we’ve seen Clio’s user base diversify substantially, as we’ve seen significant growth in practice areas including bankruptcy (sadly, perhaps a sign of the times), commercial, real estate, corporate, criminal, personal injury and intellectual property law.

Winners of a $100 Amazon.com Gift Certificate

We thank all the Clio users that took the time to answer our survey, and we’ve randomly selected three respondents as winners of a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate. Congratulations to Georgiana Stewart, Susan Schmitt-Creech, and Jennifer Green!