New From Clio: Legal Practice Management Including Legal Accounting

Episode Notes

Transcript

Adriana Linares:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m your host, Adriana Linares. I’m pretty excited today to have two members of the Clio family on with us to discuss Clio’s new accounting package module add-on that they have recently released because I think a lot of us have been waiting for this, so we are going to talk about it, but if you are not a Clio user or yet you’re not, or if you are using another one of those great case management programs on there, please do stay on and listen because I’m really going to try to make this conversation useful about accounting and practice management systems and best practices and good features that you should be looking for. If you don’t yet have an accounting package or a case management system with me are Joshua and Hemant. I’m going to let them both introduce themselves and tell us what they do and who they are at Clio. Why don’t we start with you, Hemant.

Hemant Kashyap:

Thanks, Adriana. Super excited to be here. I’m Hemant Kashyap. I’m the chief product officer at Clio and really excited to be talking about Clio accounting today.

Adriana Linares:

And are you the chief product officer for all of Clio? Like holy moly, we have a heavy on this podcast or specifically for accounting

Hemant Kashyap:

For all of Clio.

Adriana Linares:

Oh my gosh, guys. Whew. I did not roll out the red carpet. I had no, well, thank you so much. I can only imagine how busy you are feeding that giant baby. You guys have been growing for a long time, so I very much appreciate your time. And Joshua Lennon, one of my dearest oldest friends, you’ve been with Clio almost since the beginning of time and also very busy. You have a lot of roles and I want to thank you very much for your time. But remind listeners, in case they’ve not heard of you or heard you on my very own podcast before, what you do for Clio.

Joshua Lenon:

So thank you Adriana. It’s actually amazing to be on the podcast again with you. And I still remember you showing me all around New York City and taking me to some of your favorite restaurants and places. So I look forward to doing that again soon. So I’m Joshua Lennon. I’m the lawyer in residence at Clio, which is my made up title. And really I provide weird legal scholarship around compliance, the practice of law and the use of technology in the practice of law, both internally across various teams at Clio but also externally to the greater legal community. And you’re right, I’ve been with Clio now for, it’s going to be 12 years this October. That’s amazing. It actually has been amazing. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been really fortunate to work with some of the smartest people in the industry and I continue to be challenged every day. So I’m one of the luckiest lawyers out there.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah, I think that’s actually very true and they’re very lucky to have you. So about, I guess it’s been a month or six weeks where in the middle of August now, Clio surprised the world said, Hey guys, we’ve got accounting now and I think there were a lot of customers of yours and those of us who support and Clio very, very happy to hear that. So what I want to start with real quick is just asking you how that came to be for years as a technology advisor to lawyers, I always said, well, I don’t think Cleo’s got that baked into their roadmap. They’re going to leave that to QuickBooks. And for a long time we just always said, you’re just going to add a little layer to your technology stack of products. The tech stack as we call it. And I want to remind listeners, the reason this is a big deal is because we probably have a lot of younger attorneys who don’t remember the old days of when the entire genie was in the bottle.

Let me take a little stroll down history lane, and that is about 15 years ago. And prior case management systems for lawyers which lived on a server were harder to maintain, were harder to update. They actually did everything you guys, believe it or not. They had time billing, document management, email management as email sort of evolved and accounting you could cut checks from, you could pay your electricity bill through these products. And so everything was all in one. You would pay for one product and everything was there. Interestingly, a lot of law firms would only use one component of the product, so they would pay for the whole product, but they only used the time and billing or they only used the calendaring or they only used the accounting. It was kind of funny how we used to do that. And then the internet was born and cloud-based practice management systems were born from that, the internet begat case management systems.

But the model at the time sort of took the genie out of the bottle and you had case management in one place, you had to have accounting and another maybe you had sophisticated document management over here. And we had to start sort of building that tech stack, putting things back together. And as I have always said and continue to say as a consultant, integrations, integrations, integrations. So that’s one of the main things that we didn’t have baked into the original, the first versions of case management systems. So here we are now, Josh, I’ll ask you, since you’ve been with Clio for 12 years, what was the impetus finally for deciding to bake accounting into Clio? And I’m going to guess that your answer while you work for Clio is likely going to be a smart answer for any other product out there that’s legal specific that has accounting baked into it today. Modern, not our old, what I call the traditional practice management systems.

Joshua Lenon:

We call those on-prem or on-premise. And you’re right, these on-prem solutions had a really vast array of functionality and they kind of had to because they were charging ridiculous amounts of money, like tens of thousands of dollars for you to get up and running with these. And so they really had to kind of bake everything in because that was the impetus to buy them. And when Clio launched, we instead focused on what are some pain points that are universal across all law firms? What are some of their needs? And quite frankly, what could the internet at the time handle?

Adriana Linares:

Good point there. Yeah,

Joshua Lenon:

We didn’t have vast amounts of wifi and everybody with a smartphone with good apps at the time, Clio launched. And so we really built for the technology at the time. But as we continued to develop, we’ve been listening to our customers and learning about our customers and definitely accounting was one of their needs. If we look at the 2021 Legal Trends report, which is our annual research report that we publish, everybody can download it at Clio dot com slash trends, and in our 2021 report, 7% of lawyers told us that they felt law school prepared them to run a business and only 23% said that their bar association is providing any type of adequate business training. And so over the years, lawyers who have come to Clio as they’re modernizing their firm or as they’re opening their firm have been asking us business related questions, not just software related questions.

And we’ve been listening and learning from those questions and trying to provide as much good guidance as we can, but there’s still a lot of functionality that needs to be out there. For example, in that same study, only 42% of attorneys told us that they really knew what their law firm was spending money on, but 80% of that same group told us they were spending strategically. So they’re like, we don’t know what we’re spending but we’re spending well. And that really was a moment where we’re like, we need to come up with a way to help law firms not just manage their cases, not just manage their expenses and their trust accounting, but really get a handle on the business side of law. And that’s where this has been a multi-year product. Our product team has been working incredibly hard to roll this out, but Clio accounting is our first step into not just helping lawyers practice law well, but also run their law firms as a business growing and sustainable. And we hope Clio accounting is what will give them the tools and the insight to do so.

Adriana Linares:

I want to just make two quick remarks. I didn’t want to interrupt you and anyone who listens to this podcast knows I’m an interrupter. I want to say when you said these old services we’re charging thousands of dollars, I want our listeners to know that there is no better time to be a lawyer and use technology well and affordably than right now. Because when that transition happened and we went from sort of a lot of on-prem services to Cloud-based, I would say before that, actually lemme put myself before that. When an attorney called me and they said, okay, I’m going to launch a small law firm, what do I need? I’d say, well, you’re going to need a small business server. You’re going to run small business server from Microsoft on there, you’re going to need a human to care and feed for it. That’s going to cost you a minimum of eight to $10,000 just for that just

Joshua Lenon:

To get up and running,

Adriana Linares:

Just to get up and running. So for you lawyers today that don’t want to pay 70 to a hundred dollars a month for case management system that does all that, I want you to know that 15 years ago, I would have to say to an attorney, you’re going to need eight to 10 just to get those doors open today. You barely need 800 to a thousand to launch. And that’s like I’m giving you the whole kit and caboodle at 800 to a thousand to launch. I mean, I’m giving you all my extras at that point. The other thing I wanted to say is I don’t think you focus strong enough on how important those legal trends reports are. So listeners, if you’ve never downloaded a legal Trends report from Clio, they put them out every year. You do not need to be a Clio user to appreciate the information and the data that you get out of these. So please go and get the last latest version. Josh, you mentioned the one from 2021, there’s newer ones, right? Yeah,

Joshua Lenon:

Our last version came out in October of 2023 and our 2024 is due out this next October. Oh, great. We’re working hard on it right now.

Adriana Linares:

Awesome. I just want to make a point about, and by the way, other case management systems and companies also do these. When you all see that these are available in a tweet, in an x, in a thread, in an email, in a article, please go download them. They contained really important data and information that helps you be a better business owner, which I think what Josh was saying and reminding us all of is that you’re business owners, you’re lawyers, you’re running a business, these things are important. So Hammond, let me turn my attention to you and thank you again for coming on as the chief product officer. So you’ve watched Clio develop and change and you’ve been a part of this accounting piece. Can you help us believe in the accounting package from Clio? Tell us what information you took, what kind of experts you used, how this product truly addresses the needs and the services and the features that attorneys need today. You must have been there front and center for all

Hemant Kashyap:

That. Yes, absolutely. As Joshua mentioned, this has been on our roadmap for quite a while and we’ve always recognized how important it is to have accounting integrated into the legal practice management solution. And so we took a very thoughtful approach. One obvious path is to meet with our customers and understand their workflows and their needs and how they think about accounting and use accounting software. But the other path that we also took that really helped boost our confidence in what we’re building and making sure that we’re building the right things for our customers is partnering with our CCCs or the clear certified consultants, if you will. And so that was really important because they’re also going to be users of this product and it was very important to get their perspective because they’re the ones that are setting in many instances, setting this up for the customers and making sure it’s all working well and the accountants that are actually managing the books. And so we took a really holistic approach to this, made sure that each of those stakeholders are personas, if you will, their needs are properly understood and we built this product from the ground up, making sure that each one of those archetypes are taken care of.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, I’m so glad you mentioned your CCCs because we have had a couple of them on my podcast and specifically I want to mention a podcast that Peggy Grenke did, and I’m sure Peggy Grenke who is an accounting and finance specialist, was one of your biggest contributors to what we needed to see in this product in order for the CCCs to be happy and to make accounting and bookkeepers happy. So I just want to remind everybody that we have an episode called Oh the Messes. We see where Peggy was my guest and it was a great episode about do’s and don’ts of finance and accounting, so please go back and listen to that one. And also another episode we did with one of my dearest friends, Amanda Moore, who is a CPA did a money management 1 0 1 for solo and small firm professionals. So those are a couple of past New Solo episodes that you can go back and listen to if you’re still trying to figure out how to manage finance and accounting, if you’re a new attorney or if you’re a New Solo or you’re just looking for reminders and tips about how to make sure you’re doing your best practices.

Those are two important episodes to follow up on or to go back and listen to. That’s great. So thanks you guys. That’s very, very helpful. Both of you mentioned how important it is to have accounting built in, and I’m just wondering could you each give me one good reason for that to encourage attorneys to think about why accounting is important, the types of things they should be aware of and look for and why having a product that might have the accounting built into it is important? Josh, let start with you.

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah, it’s tough to give a short answer to why accounting is important to law firms. My answer is two part, and I can expand on those later. The first of which is accounting is what keeps your law firm sustainable, and that’s not just important from your kind of take home perspective. Are you making enough money but also on behalf of your clients? If you’re not managing your workload and your firm’s expenses, your firm will close and your clients will be left high and dry. The second reason why legal accounting software is so important is legal accounting is not like any other business accounting out there. We have our own very unique rules and responsibilities and most software unfortunately doesn’t account for those.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent. And Hemant, I know you have an answer prepped because you had the extra time, but I want you to talk about how, if you could just very quickly including in your answer is Clios had trust accounting basics built in, so that had been there, but if you could talk about how that folded into Clio accounting as you developed it and why that was important that I think would be helpful for us.

Hemant Kashyap:

Sure, yeah. We’ve had some basic trust accounting functionality, but the feedback that we were getting was it was, as I said, basic and our customers needed a lot more functionality there. The other thing was on the accounting side, when they were using horizontal products like QBO or some of the other products out there that was not built for legal, and so it was very easy to make mistakes, errors. Also just having to switch between two systems is problematic. That leads to all kinds of potential issues. The other thing is you don’t have that level of automation that you can have when everything is in one place. And so with Clio accounting, it has a full view of when you generate the bill, when you’re tracking your time, when you’re draining the bill and sending the invoice out and then getting paid and making sure all of that is reconciled in the right way. You really need that built into the product and make so that it’s fully integrated and made sure that the no errors are happening. So those are some of the big drivers for why we built a clear accounting and had that really works really well with our managed product.

Adriana Linares:

That’s great. Well, that’s a good start. Let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors and we’ll be right back. We’re going to talk about when we come back, I’m going to ask these guys about the first main features that they, I use the We Royalty, the Royal Way, what were the first main features checked off the list that we knew we had to have? And for our listeners, that’s going to be a broader idea of what they’re looking for if they’re shopping, the types of questions they should be asking when they are looking at legal specific accounting systems. We’ll be right back. All right, everyone, we are back and I’ve got Hemant Kashyap and Joshua Lennon from Clio with me. We’re talking about Clios new accounting package and how excited the Clio users must be to have that as part of an option.

And for those of you who are either still choosing or looking for case management system, we’re going to talk now about the main features that they started with and what you should be looking for, whether you’re choosing to look at Clio or something else, these are top things that your accounting package should do when it’s baked into your case management system. But the first question I ask, which I think is going to be very important for everyone to know is will we still need QuickBooks online or QuickBooks or some attorneys are out there using I think Xero and a couple of other things. Do we still need that detached accounting package as part of our tech stack when the accounting module is built into the case management system?

Hemant Kashyap:

Our vision is no. When Clio Accounting has all of the functionality, there will not be any need for you to have another accounting product. Obviously Clio accounting, we’ve just launched it, and so we still have a pretty robust roadmap of a number of features that we want to add. But as I mentioned, we are building this for legal practices. There are a lot of things in QuickBooks online, for example, that are not that important or not necessary for legal practices. And there are things that it doesn’t have that we are really focused on building. This is built for legal and we believe that there will not be a need for QuickBooks online over the long term.

Adriana Linares:

Eventually, right now, we still need it.

Joshua Lenon:

I wouldn’t say you need it and we’re not going to cut it off. Cleo’s software philosophy is designed to be modular and let law firms use the best tool for each law firm. And so it may be that a law firm out there prefers QuickBooks online, and that’s a perfectly valid choice, but we’re hoping that the legal specific features, the direct integration between Clio Accounting and Clio manage actually make it a better fit for more law firms and we’re willing to put it in law firm’s hands and let them make that decision.

Adriana Linares:

If you are not using QuickBooks, and this is just in general, and I think a lot of case management systems out there, don’t use don’t require you to have QuickBooks. How do you work with your CPA? What do you give your CPA either quarterly or at the end of the year to do your taxes, your payroll, your accounting? How do we work with those professionals when it’s not baked in, what do we give them?

Joshua Lenon:

So what we found is a lot of CPAs and bookkeepers out there are coming to us and saying, you need to provide a tool to law firms because without it, it’s quite frankly the shoebox of receipts, some bank statements, and that’s not enough information for really adequate tax preparation and planning for these law firms, especially when you consider the complexity of things like work in progress, which is unbuild time, but is still potentially an asset. The capital contributions that you have between partners, the disbursements of profit and the quarterly payments that need to be made in anticipation of that profit to the IRS in the us, there are lot of tax questions that if you’re relying upon a spreadsheet and your email, you’re just not going to be prepared for. So a good accounting software will actually help you track the money coming in, the money going out in a wide variety of different types, like I talked about work in progress, capital contributions, but it’ll also make it easy to work with your bookkeeper. What we see is most modern accounting software actually has a bookkeeper license where you can securely share access to reports from your bookkeeping software and they can help you prepare the software for your taxes.

Hemant Kashyap:

And just to add to that, Clio accounting does come with one free license for your accountant.

Adriana Linares:

Can you tell me now, let’s go back to what I really wanted to get to in this segment, but of course I always get sidetracked. What are the top five features that we’re looking for that you built for first that customers and those accounting professionals were asking for that just have to be a part of legal specific accounting hamoth because you’re the chief product officer, I’m going to ask you to start with that one.

Hemant Kashyap:

Yeah. First we start off with some of the basic things that every accounting system software should have. So your deposit accounts, being able to track all your money and money out, as Joshua mentioned, and then obviously the three main statements that any accounting software should be able to generate for you. So that’s really important. The next layer on top of that is the trust accounting functionality and making sure that it’s really tied in very tightly with the LPM and the billing that you’re doing in the LPM. So that was really important so that you have a level of automation around it. The third piece of that was being able to connect your bank account so that you have that.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah,

Hemant Kashyap:

For sure. So yeah, you can connect your bank account. You’ve got the bank feed coming in of all the transactions, and you can easily classify those transactions. And we are layering in more automation there so that it remembers how you’re classifying certain expenses and it’ll just do that automatically for you next time. And that ends up being a big time saver. And then the next piece of it on top of that, the fourth piece is the reporting piece. So all the financial reporting so that you’re getting those financial insights, you have a good sense for about the financial health of your practice. What does your cashflow situation look like? So what does your accounts receivable look like, accounts payable, all of those things is really important to get that full picture of your financial health. And then the last phases adding in some of the additional functionality that we know our customers will really benefit from. For example, one of those is check printing, as you mentioned. Being able to do that from within Clio accounting, the review workflows, approval workflows at the larger mid-market firms is going to be really important. More roles and permissions related functionality around who can see what more advanced functionality with tax profiles and firms that have more complex tax needs. So we continuously think we’ve laid this out in a thoughtful roadmap with different phases, and we’re just going to keep layering on more and more of the functionality that I just mentioned.

Adriana Linares:

Those are great, and I’m going to recap them in a second, but you mentioned those three important reports that lawyers should be asking for in a regular basis. And if you go back and listen to the episodes that I did with Peggy and Mandy, they both say the same thing. And the three that you are talking about are an income statement, a balance sheet, and cashflow statement. So attorneys, it’s very important that if you are not doing your own bookkeeping, that you are regularly asking for those three reports at a minimum, those three reports to make sure that you know where your money is, where it’s coming from, where it’s going to. Those are very, very important. This is like accounting 1 0 1. So you mentioned the three statements need to be able to be produced among other reports connecting to a bank. Super important, very helpful. Of course, being able to cut checks and then having role-based access, which role-based access is something that law firms don’t do very well. A law firm likes to give everybody access to everything no matter what because it’s a lot easier to just say, here are the keys to the kingdom everybody. So being able to make sure that the right people have access to the right information is important. So I’m very glad to hear that it was an important feature that you guys included.

Hemant Kashyap:

The other area that we invested a lot in is in the initial setup, accounting software can be quite daunting. And then especially switching accounting softwares is even more complicated.

Adriana Linares:

So much room for

Hemant Kashyap:

Error, a lot of room for error, but it’s also an opportunity for you to take a fresh look at how you want to set up things for your business. And so when you think about the chart of accounts and making sure the chart of accounts are set up the right way, sure, you can set it up exactly the way you had it in your previous software, but it’s also an option to maybe think about how you want to set up those chart of accounts. We really put a lot of thought into the number of steps in the setup flow, how do we make it easy for them, how do we get them value sooner in the process, but at the same time, making sure that things are being set up the right way, the bank accounts are being connected the right way, all of that so that you don’t end up in a situation where you have messy data and messy numbers.

Adriana Linares:

I think that’s such an important and helpful point to remind listeners of the death of your law firm will begin when someone starts saying, well, that’s just the way we’ve always done it. So taking the time, hiring a professional if you needed to help you sort of call that chart of accounts, make sure it makes sense is just such a great opportunity. Especially if you’re launching new everyone, new solos out there, this is the time to get it right. You will never have the time again to set things up correctly than when you’re launching or there’s some major shift that’s happening in your law firm. You’re introducing a new way to do accounting. Josh, did you have anything you wanted to add to this segment so far as important features to look for? Think about?

Joshua Lenon:

I do want to highlight the easy onboarding that Hemant was talking about is so key when it comes to accounting because a lot of lawyers out there, because we don’t have that traditional business school training, look at this as kind of like a mystery, something that’s really hard to wrap our heads around. And so I was really encouraged when I got to work with our accounting product team and we were testing various onboarding approaches, right? Okay, let’s walk through setting up a law firm this way. Does this make sense to you as a lawyer? And we went through several rounds of that.

Adriana Linares:

I’m sure many times y answer was no. That makes no sense to me as a lawyer. I have no training in this.

Joshua Lenon:

Well, and that was part of the learning process. I kind of know what you’re talking about here, but I’m not sure what the answer should be as we’re setting up the software. This would be a really good place for a tip or a better explanation, right? And that kind of stuff should be baked into your accounting software. You want something that’s making it really easy for you to adopt and learn as you go, rather than just kind of throwing you in the mix and hoping you figure it out.

Adriana Linares:

Do you give us a basic chart of accounts to start with?

Joshua Lenon:

We do have recommended chart of accounts items, but we know not every law firm will have those. Right?

Adriana Linares:

Gives a place to start. Okay. Well that’s great. Let’s take another break. Short break everybody. Hang on. We’ll be right back. We’re going to keep this conversation going, talk about a little bit of ethics, why this stuff is important, the do’s and don’ts and best practices of accounting. We’ll be right back. Welcome back everybody. Josh, you’re the ethics expert at Clio. So making sure attorneys don’t commit malpractice is an important part of your job. I mean in general, but also specifically when they’re using case management. And you and I have done a lot of legal technology education together. So I think what we want to focus on here, everyone, is that when it comes to ethics issues, there are two types of malpractice claims that are made substantive ones and administrative ones. And I always say when it comes to substantive malpractice claims, there’s certain things technology is never going to help you with.

You decide to sleep with your client, technology can’t help you. You decide to steal money from your clients, technology is not going to help you. As a matter of fact, it’s probably going to work against you. And those are the substantive types of maybe character errors that people make where technology can really help is in reducing administrative errors, supervising others, bad math, losing data and information. So Josh, help us just from that perspective be reminded of why proper accounting. Maybe you can mention trust accounting, which is always the number one administrative claim that is made oftentimes the other side too. But administratively, we make a lot of mistakes with trust accounting. So maybe you can give us some tips on why getting your accounting baked into your case management system can help reduce those errors.

Joshua Lenon:

You got it. I think there are three areas of ethics that are really applicable when we look at law firm accounting. And number one is trust accounting. You’re absolutely right. How we handle the fiduciary trust that is placed on us as lawyers with other people’s funds is something that we have to get right. There’s just no room for error there. And so you do want software that enables you to quickly and easily assign every penny to a client or a matter to be able to track the deposits and disbursements into and out of your trust accounts and all the generated reports that need to be made. So not just your client ledger and your bank account, but also your reconciliation. Am I able to take my bank records easily, compare them against my client ledger and my account ledger and make sure there’s no unaccounted for funds these are coming in or going out. And technology actually makes that so much easier now because we see that we’re shifting now to electronic payments in most instances. So we see that the computers are just generating the records for us. An eCheck comes in, it creates the deposit in my account ledger, it tracks it to the client in the matter, in the client ledger, and then my accounting software pulls in my bank records automatically, and I can compare those one to one just straight down the line. Well, and it’s something that just didn’t exist several years

Adriana Linares:

Ago. To the penny,

Joshua Lenon:

To the penny. But I also think there are two other areas of ethics that are where accounting comes into play, and the first of which is actually diligence. So comment two under rule 1.3 of the model rules of professional

Adriana Linares:

Conduct. So nerdy, I know I’m so nerdy, so nerdy even knows the numbers

Joshua Lenon:

Tells us that a lawyer’s workload must be controlled so that each matter can be handled competently. And so it’s telling you you have to balance so that you can help all of your clients. And if you are letting one client fall behind on their payments, that actually makes it really hard for you to help all your other clients. And so diligence isn’t just about making sure the rules of civil procedure, but also that you’re running your law firm in a way that you get to provide the best legal services to all of your clients. And so accounting love that gives you that insight. The last one that I think we have to keep in mind when it comes to accounting software is confidentiality. And so Hemant brought this up with role-based permissions. What we’ve seen in a variety of ethics opinions that focus on things like collection agencies is that you can’t expose your law firms finances in a way that also exposes confidential information.

And so as we look at legal technology accounting software, we have to make sure that we’re designing it and that people are able to use it in a way that they get the maximum benefit of their internal and external experts, their bookkeepers, but at the same time, they’re keeping the client files separate. And so the law firm finances and the information around that isn’t necessarily the confidential information, and we have really good divisions between the two. So having integrated legal accounting software with your case management, it’s actually a really good idea because it gives you a division between your confidential work and your financial aspects of your law firm, but it still connects the two together in a way that gives you that 360 degree view. You need to keep your workload balanced and to help all your clients.

Adriana Linares:

That’s such a great concept, and I have to tell you, I’ve never thought about that and I don’t think that I ever knew such a rule existed. Like workload balance.

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah. Isn’t that weird? We talk about mental health for lawyers. It’s based into our rules and nobody thinks about it.

Adriana Linares:

I have never thought about that in my 25 years, so thank you. By the way, I’m sorry clients, you are about to get a mouth load of this from me. So thank you Josh for making me a better consultant. I want to ask you about back to the roadmap a little bit as we get ready to finish up here. We alluded to the fact that Clio accounting is not fully baked. You’ve been working really hard to get the most important features out there. So can you tell us right now, who is Clio going to work the best for? What size firm, if there’s a practice area that’s going to be most beneficial, and then give us an idea of the roadmap of what we can look for?

Hemant Kashyap:

It is definitely a stronger fit for the smaller firms between the solo and up to maybe a 20% law firm that’s

Adriana Linares:

A good size firm. So that’s a lot of law firms are going to fit into that bucket.

Hemant Kashyap:

And in fact, we’ve received interest from firms that are bigger than that, that want to be on clear accounting, even with all the feature sets that it has today. And we’ve told them that, yeah, we know you need check printing and a few other things, and they’re saying, that’s fine, we still want to be on it. So I think even mid-market firms, upper mid-market firms, there might be a few there that it might still be a good fit for even today. But certainly if you’re a law firm that’s 20 to 25 users and below, it’s a pretty good, we believe that it’s a strong fit.

Adriana Linares:

And what do we see coming in future months as you develop it? What don’t we have yet?

Hemant Kashyap:

As Joshua mentioned, some of the role-based permissions, certainly that needs to be layered in more integrations for Clio accounting. We would like to integrate the payroll provider that they’re on. There are other softwares that we know our customers use that they want to see a direct integration with. Clio accounting, more advanced reporting,

Adriana Linares:

Always the reports man. They are always bitching about those reports,

Hemant Kashyap:

Deeper financial insights. So those are some of the things that we plan to work on. There’s also the international aspect of this for other markets, but certainly for the US markets, we a very strong fit today.

Adriana Linares:

Can you talk to me about pricing and the models and how it fits into the tiers of payment or subscriptions for Clio?

Hemant Kashyap:

Yeah, so it’s priced per user license today. So it depends on the number of users that will be using Clio accounting. And like I said, it comes with one free license for the accountants.

Adriana Linares:

So if I have five users, I don’t have to pay for five accounting licenses.

Joshua Lenon:

It depends on if you want them to all have access to Clio accounting,

Adriana Linares:

Right? But that’s what I mean. So my part-time legal assistant, you don’t have to pay for

Joshua Lenon:

Them to have access to Clio accounting if you’re not going to have them in it. So it’s $39 per month per user with a discount for annual purchases. We always like having that month to month option at first so that people can really try the software out and not feel like they’re locked in. But then you buy the licenses that your firm needs for Clio accounting. They don’t have to be the same number as for Clio manage.

Adriana Linares:

Okay, that’s great. That’s actually what I think I was looking for. Very, very helpful. Okay, well, before I let you go, is there anything else we want to make sure we mention and talk about in so far as Clio accounting or accounting in general?

Joshua Lenon:

Accounting doesn’t have to be hard, but it does have to be done very

Adriana Linares:

Profound. That should be a bumper sticker.

Joshua Lenon:

The legal industry has a lot of its own unique setups when it comes to accounting. We’re specifically exempted from certain types of accounting rules when it comes to tax calculations. There are other tax benefits that apply to partnerships that you have to have the proper accounting to really seize. And so if you want to really structure your law firm to get every benefit you need legal accounting software.

Adriana Linares:

Awesome. I love that. And you really need an experienced CPA. I want to remind everybody that when somebody calls me and wants to launch their law firm, what do I need to do at the top of my list is get a bookkeeper. Now, a bookkeeper does not equal your accountant in your CPA, necessarily a bookkeeper. You’re going to pay a lot less money to on a monthly basis, to reconcile your accounts, to keep an eye on things, to deliver those reports to you on a regular basis while A CPA is going to do your taxes and maybe help you with payroll and stuff. But those are incredibly important partners that you have, whether they’re in-House or contracted as part of your law firm. So thank you for reminding us of all those things. Joshua Lennon, you are all over the place, but I still want you to remind everybody how they can find friend or follow you if they would like to ask you any further questions. And I do want to remind everybody or let everyone know that we have a link in the show notes to where you can book a demo for Clio Accounting and see how it’s working. So that’s going to be in the show notes, and we’ll also add contact information as far as these gentlemen want to give us in there as well.

Joshua Lenon:

Absolutely. So yeah, I do try to be everywhere. So one of the best places where people can reach out to me is actually on LinkedIn. It’s Joshua Lennon, L-E-N-O-N, at Clio. And I’m also becoming really active on a newer social media network called Blue Sky. And so it’s Joshua Lennon on the blue sky if you want to try and find me there. And lastly, I can be emailed at Joshua at Clio dot com. That’s CIio.com.

Adriana Linares:

Hemant, what about you? How can everyone keep an eye on what’s going on with the chief product officer? I’m still so honored at Clio.

Hemant Kashyap:

I think the best way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a message.

Adriana Linares:

Okay, well that’s great. All right, everyone, thanks so much. I hope this was helpful to you, learning a little bit more as we always try to be better business owners as lawyers, to remind you I’m not a lawyer. And learn more about Clio accounting and accounting in general. Joshua, your information in keeping us on the straight and narrow is always incredibly helpful. Hemant, I very much appreciate your time. So thanks everybody for listening to another episode of New Solo and we’ll see you next month

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