Horizon Legal Group
Why This Queensland Conveyancing Firm Switched to Clio
-
2022 Year founded
-
8 Number of staff
-
2025 Started using Clio
-
Caboolture QLD, Australia Location
When Penny McCreery took over Horizon Legal Group in 2022, she was clear on what the firm needed: a cloud-based system that was simple to run and wouldn't tie the firm to expensive hardware upgrades. As the firm's Principal and Practice Manager, Penny wanted simple trust accounting and a settlement process any of her team could run. She found Clio in 2025 and hasn't looked back.
Horizon Legal Group ran successfully using LEAP for years:
When I first became a solicitor, LEAP was the bee's knees of it all. It was the premium product, and everyone who was anyone used LEAP. And that's the way it was for many, many years.
What changed was the technology around it and what settled it was the hardware. Keeping the firm’s existing system running meant there was a deemed necessity to upgrade the hard drives across the firm's computers, a significant cost for an eight-person practice, and one that wouldn't get them anything new. Penny couldn't justify spending that money to stand still, so she decided she'd rather put it toward a system that, in her view, could grow with the firm.
1. Settlement statements in 30 seconds
Penny's team used to work settlement adjustments out by hand, about 10 minutes on a simple matter and closer to 15 on a complex one. With the previous system:
It was a separate document that you'd have to go in and pull up the calculations for. You'd manually enter the figures, put in the date ranges, and the system would calculate the maths on those parameters.
Clio's Settlement Financials tab pulls the figures straight from the search instead.
When we look at what Clio has just released, it's literally a drag and drop. You just drag the search over, drop it into the settlement financials, and it does it all for you.
For Penny, the greater benefit is for the staff she trains.
I have new staff that I'm teaching conveyancing to, who understand the calculations that need to be done, but can sometimes get themselves tripped up and get the actual maths wrong. Clio will take away that confusion that they otherwise had.
2. Client intake that runs from the firm's website
Enquiries from the firm's website land directly in Clio Grow.
My favourite part of Clio is the client intake section, where we can link it all straight to our website. Clients can book online, the leads come straight into the Clio Grow inbox, and my reception team can action it immediately.
Workflows in Clio Grow then carry the enquiry forward on their own.
The whole thing can be pushed through with automatic workflows. The client is given all the information they need at a timely point in the matter.
A new enquiry no longer waits for a lawyer to pick it up. Doing the same with their previous setup would have meant adding separate tools, a costly exercise compared with having everything in the one package with Clio Grow.
3. Trust accounting made simple
Penny points to the accounting side of the firm as one of the clearest changes since the move, and trust accounting in particular, which has a reputation among lawyers for being complicated. Penny's view is that the reputation is deserved, which is exactly what makes the change worth noting.
We as lawyers have this idea that trust accounting is difficult, it's complex, and it is... Clio just cuts all that away and makes it simple.
It was simple enough that Penny's team needed time to adjust, having expected the process to involve more steps than it did.
For my staff it was hard to get their head around. Actually, it doesn't need to be complex and hard. It can be simple.
4. One process that rolls through every file
The change Penny values most as an owner is that she builds the process for a practice area once, and every new matter in that area then runs through the same stages and tasks.
I can create the process that I want in that practice area, and it then rolls through every single file that comes into that practice area. So I have greater oversight of where people are at with things, whether they're using the process correctly, whether things are being done the way they're supposed to be done.
It's created a lot of efficiency, particularly through our intake process, and the automations that are available.
Book A Demo
Conveyancing in Clio
Built for conveyancers
See how Clio helps you run settlements faster, from contract to completion.