The 2025 Clio Conference in Boston made one thing abundantly clear: we’re standing on the threshold of a new era in legal practice. You’re probably thinking, “sure, I’ve heard that before,” and you’re right. You have. This time, however, the message felt different. The keynotes and sessions focused heavily on AI opportunities and solutions…yet the problems people shared with us at our booth remained, for the most part, entirely human.

We asked hundreds of people what their biggest pain point was at work. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be analyzing what we discovered and sharing it with you (see the picture!) but it’s safe to say a lot of people identified very human issues.

Can AI solve some of these? Probably. Will it solve all of them? Nope.

Nevertheless, here are a few highlights of the AI-centred vision coming out of the conference.

Clio’s founder and CEO, Jack Newton, started the event by unveiling his vision of an agentic AI workplace that promises to transform not just how lawyers manage their firms, but how they deliver legal services. And Richard Susskind, one of the leading thinkers on the future of law, challenged the profession to think even bigger, beyond automation and efficiency toward entirely new ways of meeting client needs. It was a lot. We'll cover Jack's talk in this Part 1, and Richard's in Part 2, next week.

This year’s event wasn’t just about new features. It was about redefining the nature of legal work itself.

Grab yourself a coffee. This is going to be a longer article than usual…but it’ll be worth it.

Jack Newton’s Keynote: Clio as an intelligent legal work platform

Jack began by announcing several incremental but powerful updates to the Clio ecosystem: cross-firm calendaring, automated workflows, integrated e-filing and e-service (in very limited jurisdictions), receipt capture in the mobile app, and better client and conflict management across Clio Grow and Manage. Clio Accounting and Payments continue to expand with bookkeeping, reconciliations, cheque printing, “text to pay,” evergreen retainers, and subscription options.

It’s still not clear to me that Clio is going to improve the way it handles flat fee arrangements, but I am hopeful…because with everything else it’s doing around AI, the hourly rate model is becoming less and less appealing.

From LegalTech to Legal Intelligence

The real headline was Clio’s transformation from a system of record to a system of action: it’s becoming a platform that doesn’t just store information but acts on it.

The centrepiece of this transformation is Clio’s $1-billion acquisition of vLex, the largest acquisition in legaltech history. vLex brings with it over a billion legal documents from 110 countries, creating what Jack calls the most expansive legal database ever assembled. With it comes Vincent by Clio, a generative AI system capable of reasoning across jurisdictions, drafting documents, analyzing contracts, summarizing depositions, and even proposing negotiation strategies, all from within the Clio environment.

This is not the typical “assistant AI.” It’s an agentic system. Think of it as a network of AI teammates that can act autonomously to move work forward. Embedding AI into many of Clio’s existing point solutions, and pulling them together into ClioWork, you’ll be able to draft motions, prepare bills, screen leads, update clients, and manage calendars all from within the Clio ecosystem, with enterprise-grade safeguards to minimize hallucinations and protect confidential data.

ClioWork is going to give you a personalized, AI-powered workspace that synthesizes research, extracts claims and timelines, surfaces similar matters, and creates contextually aware strategies. It’s what Newton calls a junior associate in the cloud.

Magic and Unicorns?

Is this all magic and unicorns? Maybe. There’s amazing potential, but how much of it is actually ready for prime time remains to be seen.

A bigger concern for me is Clio’s decision to target the largest firms. The shift to enterprise practice management is massive. Jack assured us that it won’t detract from Clio’s core services to smaller firms. Again, we’ll see.

Putting aside that concern, the integration of AI across the platform is going to have a huge impact on how lawyers work but most importantly, in our view, how they value their services.

When the “work” of law becomes automated, traditional hourly billing becomes unsustainable. The firms that thrive will be those that redesign how they price, deliver, and communicate value to clients.

This shift also creates a new challenge: time and strategy. Many small firm owners are already stretched thin. Implementing these technologies—let alone rethinking their business models—requires deliberate planning and vision.

That’s where we come in: helping lawyers carve out time to evaluate, prioritize, and integrate AI in a way that aligns with their firm’s goals. If you want help creating a plan for your firm, book a free strategy session and we’ll get you started.

Jack closed with a provocative question:

What is the role of lawyers in a world where AI can do so much of the work?

He suggested that AI could multiply each lawyer’s capacity fourfold, enabling the profession to tap into the 70% of legal needs that go unmet. Maybe. But to us, that future raises a deeper question: Is it what lawyers want?

Do you really want to become a high-volume, lower-value producer?

The coming years will reveal whether AI becomes a multiplier of legal expertise or a commoditizer of it. The opportunity lies in using these tools not to do more work, but to do better work.

So that was how the conference began. To be honest, it left a lot of the audience shell-shocked. You could feel it in the room. The pauses Jack had built into his talk for cheering and applause were filled with an apprehensive silence. People at our booth told us they weren’t sure how they were ever going to find the time to implement everything now available to them. They were, in their own words, terrified.

The conference ended with Richard Susskind’s talk, How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Legal Profession. I’ll share the highlights of that talk next week, but his central theme was this:

The market will show no loyalty to our current ways of working if AI can deliver the results clients want better, faster, and cheaper.

How’s that for terrifying?