Hello sun listeners. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Ryan Bankston with C and today I want to talk to you about why I chose CLIO to run my tech practice even though I’m not a lawyer.

But before I get into that, a big thank you to the Pinellas, Florida association of Women Lawyers. Pride was wonderful and our float rocked. Thank you so much for letting me join you.

A couple events coming up I want to tell you about the association of Legal Administrators. We have an expo coming up in Tampa in August. It is penciled in for the 27th venue to be announced, but do keep an Eye Ala Suncoast members on the group and LinkedIn on the website and on your emails.

Tracy should be announcing that soon and I hope to see many of you there. Renee Thompson of the Solo and Small Firm section of the Florida Bar and a former guest of this podcast is going to be partnering up with me for a CLE in September, that is on September 24th at noon, we’ll be comparing output from three different popular AI tools that a lot of your fellow legal associates and attorneys are using to draft documents and query questions about case data. Right now I also want to tell you about
three episodes I have coming up with three of my favorite clients.

Of course, all of my clients are favorites, but three of my favorite clients at CIO Legal, I’m so happy that they’ll be joining me over coming months talking about their practice areas, their career journey, and the work that we do together. So keep an eye on sunleaderspodcast.org and Ryan Bankston on CIO Legal, where you’ll find those episodes posted in the coming months.

When I first launched my tech practice, it took me a little bit to decide how I wanted to process online payments. Like many folks starting out in business, I just got started right away was taking payment in checks. But I knew that if I could take card payments online, do something maybe slightly more sophisticated than just Venmo payments, I’d probably do a lot better and it would be a lot more convenient for my clients.

So initially I decided. I don’t really know why, but I decided that I was going to use Shopify to run both my website and my payment gateway. I still think there’s a lot of reasons why I like using Shopify for my website.

It sure is pretty cool not having to maintain it myself and relying on the platform to keep everything update and secure. But I’ve decided to move away from it for my payment gateway and move it to Clio. But initially it was a pretty good system.

I kind of wrote some code of my own, found some add ins and integrated it with jira, which I was using to manage my projects and layout, project outlines, kind of organized tasks and assignments, delegate work, things like that. It was working pretty well for me. But I discovered Clio pretty early on in my first year of my solo legal tech practice because they’re just giant in the market.

I didn’t hear a ton about, about them before I launched my own business. Kind of in ILTA circles and working with big firms, it’s just you don’t see a lot of CLIO in big firms, at least not when I was there. But they’re everywhere with small firms, with solo firms, and certainly with a bunch of different bar associations.

So as I start engaging with more and more of those type of clients, I started hearing a lot about Clio and I got really excited about what I was hearing. I reached out to them and found them to be so warm and welcoming. Embracing me as a partner, training me, putting me through some pretty rigorous training to certify me as a, as a trainer, as a partner, and, and then engaging with me often to co market, to send cookies to some of my clients and some of my favorite folks in my community to, to co
sponsor with me a section of the Florida bar, to look at some conferences and some ads that we ran together and then certainly the passion that they brought to clients.

As I was signing up folks, working with more folks, I found more and more that were on Clio and there wasn’t a lot of horror stories. There were stories about the support they got, about the features that were empowering them to do more work, to do better work. And gosh, I’ve decided, you know what, CLIO would be an awesome way to run my systems.

I should be on Clio. And I talked to Clio about this. I’m like, hey, I’m not an attorney, I don’t run a law firm.

But I’m a legal tech consultant, legal tech practitioner and I’m going to run my practice through clio. Do you see any problem with that? They’re like, well, it’s not really, not really designed for that, but I don’t see why not. And well, I’ve been doing it for several months and I am not turning back.

I tell you what, several things I like about it. And first and foremost, one of the most popular things among solos, starting it’s month to month, you can quit any time. And that’s awesome.

When you’re building something and and you’re kind of taking, you know, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. And it’s a lot easier to, to get involved with that thinking, okay, as I evaluate the plethora of other systems out there and maybe make a different decision and migrate, at least I could start building on Clio now. And that’s, if nothing else, a great reason to go with them.

I mean, some of the other systems out there want like a three year commitment and that’s huge when you’re first starting out. So going month to month, that kind of gave me a little sense of security, at ease, some of my worries. And I was able to just jump in and get busy and start building.

There’s a lot of features that come with Clio right out of the gate that I really, really liked and jumped on right away. Of course, online payments, but also payment reminders. I used to sweat every single month doing my invoices and all of the anxieties and worries that would come around how I communicated those invoices, how I reminded people that their invoices were due.

It was hard for me to keep it simple, but Clio kept it simple. When I’m generating an invoice, when I’m putting my bill together, reviewing it, approving it, it has the reminders built right in. It automates that.

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In the first month I used Clio, all of my invoices were paid on time and that hadn’t happened in months because we’re all busy. It’s hard. And honestly, it was my fault because I couldn’t keep it simple.

But Clio did and that made it easy for my clients. It could make it easy for yours as well. Some of the other tools that I liked and used right out of the gate.

Client portal and co counsel. Co Counsel is huge for practicing Attorneys. And chances are, even if you don’t use, if you’re a solo practitioner, even if you don’t use Clio yourself for your own practice, you’ve probably used co counsel or you’re using co counsel for somebody else that you’re working with, right? There’s a lot of cases that need more than one attorney on it.

Solos tend to work together on those. And when you’re bringing in a contract attorney, being able to add them into a matter and co counsel, being able to manage tasks there, being able to track time that’s going to go straight into the bill when you’re doing your monthly bills, it really saves a lot of time and power hours. Collaboration allows you to both work smarter, to focus on the documents and the work product, the review, and to not spend a bunch of time troubleshooting software trying to
get something that’s built on Windows to work on a Mac, what have you.

You’re just getting right, right in there and the gains from just being able to track time all in the same place so that it shows up when you generate your bill. I mean that saves a lot of attorneys several hours every month. Because when everybody’s having to track those in their own Excel sheets and what have you emailing them to somebody, that person’s putting them together, double checking them, somebody else has approving that, that can be really cumbersome.

And when you’re using Clio, it makes it simple and it integrates with QuickBooks. You can reconcile with your accountant, make sure your trust accounting is, you know, perfectly managed so that the bar is proud of you and you feel good about your practice. It makes it all very easy.

Another thing that I jumped on right away was Clio Grow. Now this is an add in Clio. Like many SaaS products, many Cloud based softwares out there, it has a lot of add ins, it has a lot of great features built in with that base Clio managed product.

But there’s other modules you can buy like Clio Duo, their generative AI product, which I have enabled in my demo account. If you reach out to me, I can show you what the AI product of Clio looks like, what you can expect if you put it on your Clio. But one of those modules I bought right away was Clio Grow.

Now this is their CRM. It’s kind of the front end of an intake process. And I really liked the intake forms.

There’s really simple features of the intake form that I embraced and wanted right away. So I bought Clio Grow for those features. I customized my intake form.

When I’m talking with somebody, whether it’s a referral or somebody that found me online, I can start a form and I can start filling it out from that initial contact, from, from that email, from that phone call, text, what have you, that conversation at a bar event. And I can start plugging in some of those fields. I can save my progress.

I can email it to them to finish up like, hey, this is my intake form. You know, I want to make sure I’m prepared for our call next week. I got a good start on it.

Can you fill it out, let me know when it’s done so I can look over and make sure I’m using our time well? And again, it’s just Clio keeping it simple with those features and really helping us just get right to the work. And I can automate reminders on that intake form as well, because again, we’re all busy. And if that email I send you comes in while you’re on a hearing, it can be a little tough to get to it or maybe it’s going to take a couple of days.

So a reminder will just help make sure that when we do connect next week, we’re not going to spend half that call filling out the form. I really encourage you all to take a look at clio. Certainly, if you’re not using a practice management system, if you’re thinking about a practice management system, if you’re about to launch your firm, if you’re thinking about launching your firm next year, CLIO is a great place to start.

And if you’re not an attorney, hey, I’m not an attorney and I’m using Clio. Maybe we should talk. And your practice could benefit from it as well.

Essentially, whether you’re doing flat fees or you’re tracking your time and charging people for your time, CLIO could really automate a lot of things for you and make it a lot easier, not only for you to manage your task and your time, but simplifying your billing process and making it a lot easier on your clients. And when it’s easy for your clients, they’re going to be a lot more excited to talk to their friends and colleagues about you. So empower yourself.

Reach out to me at CIO Legal and as I said, keep an eye on someleaderspodcast.org I’ve got a lot of great episodes coming out from some of my existing clients talking about their practice and the work we’re doing together. There’s other SunLeaders, year’s hosts that talk about some very interesting topics, from business to health to all kind of interesting things.

I think Jordan, the wonderful sound engineer here at Naming Creative, and I might have to talk about throwing disc at the disc golf course soon because we’re blessed with a couple of good courses here in Pinellas county and I need to get out there and throw. He was just telling me he threw par at Coachman and almost part Cliff Stevens. It’s been a while since I’ve been out there.

I’ve only got three disc Jordans, so by the end of it, I’m probably going to be borrowing some of yours because I always lose a few in the water when I throw a Cliff Stevens. If that sounds like fun to you, let’s go throw. Come find us at SunLeaders.

We do networking, we do events, we do fun leaders, which is where we just get together and have a good time, whether it’s looking at manatees or throwing disc in the water at Cliff Stevens. Come find us and I’ll see you out there. Sam.