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Artificial intelligence didn’t find its way into Clio CEO Jack Newton’s opening remarks until around 59 minutes in. And yet the Clio Cloud Conference 2023 motto “amplify your impact” stared at you from massive, pulsating screens the whole time providing a prominent “a” and “i,” foreshadowing the inevitable.
It requires a special kind of swagger to soft sell artificial intelligence in 2023. As lawyers find themselves bombarded on all sides by artificial intelligence pitches making big promises, Clio waited for almost an hour to unveil a tool that’s just… simple. It’s a straightforward assistant that isn’t going to become an AI associate or anything, but it’s going to save attorneys 5 to 10 minutes here and there throughout the day. And Clio possesses the confidence in its customer base to announce a subtle tool and know that they will see the value.
There’s a story about Steve Jobs leaning on his early Macintosh team to pare 10 seconds off the boot time by telling them “Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day… over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes.” That’s a useful frame for Clio Duo.
In the demo video shown to attendees, a user asked the tool about her schedule for the day and Duo spit back that she had a scheduled client meeting coming up… and then offered a short summary of the matter and a refresher on recent developments and current status. That’s not a robot lawyer, but it is a use that nestles easily into an attorney’s natural workflow. It’s that sort of assistance that nets a lawyer another 5 minutes where they didn’t have to open more emails or dig into the DMS to figure out what’s going on so they don’t look like a disheveled mess at this meeting.
That’s not to say the tool completely avoids unmistakably legal tasks. The product can perform standard summation and generation of simple legal documents. Even the most powerful underlying model isn’t drafting a 200-page merger agreement anytime soon, but throwing together a demand letter based on a template and key details — and providing that draft with the variable terms highlighted for ease of attorney review — is doable and a crucial time-saving feature for a practice that generates a lot of these simple documents. Indeed, after the conclusion of Newton’s remarks, the first customer request asked of the tool at the exhibit hall demo station was something along the lines of “how do I politely tell a lawyer to f*#k off?” prompting a kinder, gentler statement. Which is its own time-saving application. To borrow from Mark Twain: “I apologize for such a mean-spirited letter — I didn’t have time to write a respectful one.”
But given that this is a Clio tool, the use cases that stood out the most revolved around practice management. Examples like providing telling the lawyer exactly which deadbeat clients are behind on their invoices and throwing together draft bills with a simple request spoke to the souls of the small firm and solo practitioners in the crowd.
In the first generation of Clio Duo, legal professionals can benefit from:
● Personalized recommendations to help prioritize efforts for maximum task completion and work efficiency
● Reminder prompts for pending bill approvals and overdue tasks
● Bill generation based on activities related to a specific client
● Document summarization and generation of simple documents
● Matter overviews for improved client communications
● Conversations with Duo to gain insights on the firm’s business performance, or to better understand Clio’s product capabilities
As the industry grapples with the ethics of artificial intelligence-driven lawyering, Clio Duo jumps at the opportunity to bring AI to the comparatively less ethically fraught space of lawyering as a business. Why tie ourselves in knots hypothetically regulating legal research when small law lawyers perform any number of mundane, time-consuming tasks that AI can address right now? Preparing bills and helping manage a lawyer’s time-allocation throughout the day may not be as sexy as some of the promised (but still ultimately undelivered) pledges being made out there, but it’s the proverbial 10 seconds upon 10 seconds that Steve Jobs championed.
Clio customers attending the conference are, admittedly, a self-selecting group of legal tech believers, but it felt as though the room appreciated an honest AI pitch that didn’t stray from promising exactly what this generation of AI can deliver with enumerated use cases that resonate with a small law practitioner.
Like, you know, politely telling opposing counsel to f*#k off.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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