Clio Cloud Conference 2017: Day and Key Highlights

Written by Teresa Matich5 minutes well spent
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Day two of the 2017 Clio Cloud Conference has now come to a close, marking the end of another phenomenal event with plenty of informative and entertaining talks. Attendees certainly left buzzing with energy and plenty of new ideas to take back to their practices.

Catch some of the magic here: In addition to highlights from day one of the event posted yesterday and an overview of Jack Newton’s keynote, we’ve got some key highlights from day two, some essential overall takeaways, and some critical information for anyone thinking of attending next year.

Day Two sessions

Day two opening keynote: Haben Girma

Haben Girma has earned recognition as a White House Champion of Change, Forbes 30 under 30, and BBC Women of Africa Hero. The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben advocates for equal access to information for people with disabilities. Based in San Francisco, she travels the world working as a disability and inclusion consultant and public speaker. Haben combines her knowledge of law, sociology, and technology to teach clients the benefits of fully accessible products and services. Her insights help to expand our thinking, creating lasting, positive change among people and communities.

Because of her disability rights advocacy she has been honored by President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, and many others. Haben is working on a memoir that will be published by Grand Central Publishing in 2019.

Combatting cognitive biases

Julia Shapiro, CEO and Co-founder of Hire an Esquire, spoke about how lawyers can use data tools to overcome cognitive biases in the legal industry.

As she explains, The human factor in making hiring decisions had led to a legal industry with a long track record of class, race, and gender bias. Where these inequities were previously a product of industry-promoted explicit bias, they now remain difficult to overcome due to a lingering implicit bias.

Research proves that diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams, and injecting data into the hiring process can help law firms to eliminate implicit their implicit biases and succeed.

Best practices for getting paid

According to the 2017 Legal Trends Report, Lawyers are still losing out on billable hours. Aside from working a low ratio of billable to non-billable hours each day, many don’t bill as much as they work, and worse, don’t collect on all they bill.

To help, Robert Froment, CFO of Clio, and and John Porter, CFO of AffiniPay (the parent company behind LawPay) offered a few best practices to help lawyers get paid, and get paid fast.

LawyerSlack: Building a community

Keith Lee is a lawyer in Birmingham Alabama, as well as a writer and the founder of Associate’s Mind, a popular legal blog. He’s also the creator of LawyerSlack, a 200-strong, 15,000-message-per-day community of lawyers. At this year’s Clio Cloud Conference, Keith talked about his experience building a community online through LawyerSlack.

Closing keynote: Preet Bharara

Preet Bharara isn’t just the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he’s also one of the nation’s foremost experts on public corruption, civil rights, white-collar financial crime, drug trafficking, and anti-terrorism.

This year’s Clio Cloud Conference closed out with a heartening closing keynote from Preet, in which he used his experiences to illustrate how he handled complex prosecutions while maintaining the highest standards of personal and professional integrity.

Given Preet’s impressive tenure at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, his keynote was definitely one of the highlights of the conference.

Other interesting speakers from days one and two of the Conference included:

  • Colonel Chris Hadfield, Canadian Astronaut, Commander, CSA & NASA Colonel, and RCAF Fighter Pilot
  • Michael Semanchik, Managing Attorney at the California Innocence Project
  • Chris Trebatoski, Founder of Treblaw LLC
  • Andrea Evans, Intellectual Property Attorney and Principal at The Law Firm of Andrea Hence Evans, LLC.

Key themes and takeaways

This year, the Clio Cloud Conference once again covered a range of topics organized into different educational tracks to help those in attendance get the most out of the conference. This year’s event included the business of law and legal technology tracks, as well as two Clio University tracks that gave attendees the lowdown on the new Clio experience.

Here are a few key takeaways:

  • Legal technology is moving faster and faster, and those that move to the cloud quickly will have an advantage.
  • Accepting credit cards helps lawyers get paid faster.
  • Lawyers need to find new clients more efficiently so that they can spend less time on business development and more time on billable work.
  • Social media can be extremely helpful for building community and trust with potential clients—when it is done right.
  • Chatbots are more useful for your practice than you might think

The Reismans winners announced

The Reisman Award | Clio

The winners in Clio’s first annual customer recognition program were announced at this year’s Clio Cloud Conference! We’re so incredibly proud to work with all of the lawyers and legal professionals who choose Clio, and it was an honor to showcase just a few of their stories this year.

From technology advocates fighting for work-life balance for busy lawyers, to community champions fighting for fair representation for LGBTQ clients, there were plenty of inspiring stories to take in.

Read about the winners

New from Clio

Of course, a key part of any Clio Cloud Conference is the range of new and exciting updates announced for Clio users and the legal industry. This year’s conference took the cake—just look at this roll of announcements:

  • Jack Newton announced the imminent release of the new Clio experience, a ground-up redesign of Clio featuring 220+ improvements and an interface that is even more intuitive and an order of magnitude faster.
  • The 2017 Legal Trends Report was released, featuring an even more in-depth analysis of trends than were covered in its flagship year
  • Clio’s new App Directory was launched with 70+ integration partners, including 12 new to the Clio family.
  • Launch//Code and the Clio Developer Fund were announced, showcasing Clio’s commitment to helping create more useful tools for lawyers, and making sure they work with the central practice management platform they already use.

At Clio, we’re on a mission to transform the practice of law, for good. And we’re just getting started.

Clio Cloud Conference 2018

The 2017 Clio Cloud Conference just finished, but we’re already getting excited for 2018! Each Clio Cloud Conference is bigger and better than the last, and you won’t want to miss our second tour of the Big Easy.

With plenty of talks from those on the leading edge of legal tech, the Clio Cloud Conference will always leave you with plenty of ideas for improving your practice.

Get your passes early and save big!

Categorized in: Clio

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