Clio Con Clips 2025 – Joshua Lenon – E10

Transcript

Robert Hanna  0:00  

Welcome to Clio con clips 2025 recorded live from Boston and proudly sponsored by Clio, the world’s leading legal technology company, transforming the legal experience for all. I’m your host, Rob Hanna, and over this special legally speaking podcast series, we’ll be bringing you exclusive conversation with the brilliant minds behind Clio, the innovators, strategists, visionaries, driving one of the most transformative companies in legal tech. Across these interviews, we’ll explore how Clio is uniting brilliance across teams, technology and communities worldwide, from AI and data to leadership culture and the future of client experience, you’ll hear from people shaping what’s next for law and redefining what’s possible for legal professionals everywhere. So whether you’re a lawyer, technologist or leader passionate about innovation, you’re in the right place. This Clio conclips 2025 is where brilliance meets purpose and the future of law take shape. Let’s get into it. The John, welcome to the legally speaking podcast recording live here from Boston for our Clio con clips 2025 series sponsored by Clio. And I am joined by name, title and organisation.

Joshua Lenon  1:13  

Joshua Lennon, lawyer in residence at Clio. And it’s an

Robert Hanna  1:17  

absolute pleasure to welcome you back on the show. It’s always great to be talking with you, right back at you, and this year’s Clio con has been another level. But before we get into that, could we get a fun fact from you, Joshua, that people here may not

Joshua Lenon  1:28  

know about you? Yes, actually. So I’m dual citizen, American, Canadian. I’m a New York licenced attorney, and while Cleo is headquartered in Vancouver. I actually live just off the coast of British Columbia, on a tiny island called Bowen Island, 4000 people, just about as many deer, one mountain lion, that’s having the time of its life this summer, and on a good day, I can sit on my deck and watch the whale swim by.

Robert Hanna  2:03  

And is that the deck you made yourself? I think I saw some images of you doing some good DIY,

Joshua Lenon  2:07  

yeah, because it is an island, you have to get really handy really quickly, because there’s there’s no hardware store, there’s no supplies. You got to bring it over the ferry. And if you don’t have it you do without you step up. So it sounds a lot more off the grid than it really is, yeah, but no, I’m really fortunate to get to do this. And as somebody who grew up in Missouri, of all places, to now have mountains and ocean just be a part of my day to day is honestly like the funnest fact about me? Yeah, visit, yeah,

Robert Hanna  2:43  

absolutely. I’d love to. And I guess you know, this year it’s been incredible for Clio and Clio con, but this year’s legal Trends Report, which I found super interested, included neuroscience studies. So you know, the first of its kind in law. So what did you find most surprising about the results?

Joshua Lenon  2:59  

So we always talk about how law school teaches you to think like a lawyer. Yes, right. And honestly, having gone through that process, I felt that shift like in my brain. And so the fact that we as an industry talk about lawyers having a different brain is always something that’s been top of mind, yeah, but one of the things that I’ve been concerned about in the last several years as we talk about the rise of generative AI and the use of artificial intelligence in law firms, is we always talk about how it’s going to take the the easy work, the tedious work, the grunt work, away. And I was like, Okay, but how are, how are lawyers going to deal with a day being filled with the hard work, yes, that AI can’t do, right, that the hard decisions and judgement and expertise that people go to lawyers for, right? Those are all incredibly valuable, but it’s also tiring, draining. It can necessitate breaks. Yep, right? And so we needed to ask, like, if we’re letting AI take over the easy stuff, can lawyers handle an increased volume of the hard work? Yes, and so we partnered with this organisation called neuro insights. A company called neuro insights, they specialise in testing the electromagnetic activity of the brain. Yeah, they often are looking at it on behalf of marketing and advertising agencies. But with us, what we wanted to do was run a controlled experiment. Yeah, how do lawyers brains operate using kind of the standard, traditional tools that have been around a long time, versus an experiment group that’s using Clio technology, including artificial intelligence? Intelligence, we measured four areas of activity in the brain. Visual activity, how much am I having to like, direct my attention into multiple places. And obviously that takes energy in your brain to do that. Active focus, how much am I having to like, force myself to pay attention to complete something, right? Emotional intensity? Yep, am I feeling emotion? And neuro insights taught us that in order to generate memory, there does need to be emotion attached to it. Yes, right? And so I think we’ve all read like an email from somebody, and then, like, five minutes later, be like, what was that? Yes, I didn’t remember anything about that. And it’s because when you were reading it, you weren’t feeling anything, right. And then the last one is memory demand. As I’m actively going through a task, right? How much am I having to, like, commit to memory in order to complete that task? And honestly, this is the one that I most resonated with. I have struggled for years in reading contracts because I want to be able to, like, flip back and forth between the pages, yes, and, and I have, like, contorted my hands to like, Okay, this is the first page. And now I can flip and then I can flip back, yeah. And that’s a memory demand compensation. Yeah, right. I can’t memorise every defined term, but I can, like, know where I’m going to have to turn back. And that became, then a visual impact that we talked about before. So we measured these four things with them with 63 legal professionals, all who practice private law. 77% had never used Clio before, and we put them to the test with four different tasks. The control group was using spreadsheets and pen and paper for these tasks, and the experiment group was using Clio, Clio grow, Clio manage and manage AI. And what we asked them to do was intake a client from an introductory email, create a matter from again another email. The third task was, give us a work in progress report. Tell us how many time entries you’ve done. What was the amount? That’s the total for it. And then the last one was, I pulled an actual six page will from the will repository of the state of Massachusetts, where we are right now, which is a fun coincidence. And then we asked questions about certain things that were stated in that will, right, yeah, but it was only six pages long. And so the one group had the PDF, and the experiment group had Clio manage AI look at the PDF, and so as we put them through the test, what we found is that the lawyers and legal professionals who were using the Clio tools, Clio grow, Clio manage, manage, AI actually had a 25% less strain on their cognitive capacity than the lawyers who were doing things with Excel and spreadsheets and pen and paper. It took less or the same amount of visual impact to use a spreadsheet than it was to use Clio tools. Then that really surprised us, because again, like 77% had never seen Clio before, yet they were able to jump into this. And they didn’t have to, like, where am I going when it came to active focus, especially on the work in progress report, yeah, and I think a clear example of what’s the difference here, they were able to just hit a button right, and the report just came up. You didn’t have to like, now I’m adding this column, and now I’m adding this figure, and now I carry the one right, and that’s that’s an active focus moment, and it showed how you could be productive have the same exact outcome, but a lot less strain from it. When it came to emotional intensity client intake, we saw a reduction in emotional intensity, but an increase. When it came to the work in progress report and the will document summary. And we dug into that because honestly, it was not our preferred outcome right to see this jump in activity and in intensity, but what we found was measured was not a negative emotional strain, but instead positive emotional excitement. Yes, yeah, the work in progress report, they’re like, I clicked a button and it’s done. The document summarization, they’re like, oh my gosh, this is a really neat tool. And so we found that the Clio experiment group were feeling 47% felt excitement. 47% also felt happiness. 6% felt tenderness, which I just love thrown in there. And. Had no negative emotions recorded at all. So yeah, there was this bump in emotional intensity, but it was actually a positive memorable Association, yes, yeah. And then when we hit the memory demand, we saw a reduction as well, especially in the will summarization, like answering questions about the will, but while it was an 11 point drop in memory demand, you didn’t have to memorise as much to get things done, what was actually really exciting was we also saw 130% increase in productivity and a 40% increase in accuracy by the people who were using the AI tool, so they were faster, they were more accurate, and they left feeling both excitement and happiness and with greater capacity to go on to the next task. So it was a really exciting look into the brains of lawyers, like how we think, but also how we can think better using these tools.

Robert Hanna  11:02  

Super exciting. And this just shows the level of due diligence and care Clio does as a tech forward, pioneering company to do that level of, sort of, you know, really pioneering research to

Joshua Lenon  11:11  

produce. We’re the first ever in the legal industry to do this. Yeah, and that’s exciting. I just

Robert Hanna  11:15  

want to dive a bit deeper on a few of the stats you mentioned there. Because, you know, the research showed, as you mentioned, 25% reduction in cognitive loads when lawyers were cognitive loads when lawyers were using Clio. Yeah. What does that actually tell

Joshua Lenon  11:25  

us about the future of work and law? So as we’ve talked about, right, if we’re automating the easy stuff, right? What’s it going to take to do the hard stuff? And the answer is that we can find a way to handle this hard work in a way that isn’t harmful to lawyers, yeah, or at least less harmful, right? It’s a 25% reduction. There’s still, there’s still some cognitive strain, yeah, but our own survey of legal professionals, and we talked to 1700 legal professionals this year, all came back, and we’re very highly rating the benefits of using artificial intelligence in many ways. And while a large percentage were saying there was a reduction in tedious work, there was an equally high number who were saying they felt empowered to do the complex work now, and we’re also reporting a reduction in stress, a better work life balance. And even a large percentage were like, I actually want to stay in this job now.

Robert Hanna  12:24  

Yeah, and that’s important. You know, improving the overall well being, happiness, good for retention, just genuine overall satisfaction, really important. And thank you for highlighting that. And again, the legal trends reports continues to reveal, though, the gap between what clients expect and what lawyers deliver. Yes. So what’s one mindset shift you think lawyers must make to bridge the gap, particularly in this AI era,

Joshua Lenon  12:46  

we still see that not as many law firms as we would like are including client satisfaction in their decision making process. Okay, so one of the interesting bits of study we did this year was a longitudinal study over the financial performance of law firms over the last five years. And this is the second time we’ve done this. So we did it first in 2019 looking back five years. Now 2025 looking back five years, and we found that there’s a group of law firms that we label growing that are increasing their revenue over that five year period greater than 20% and then there’s a stable cohort, they kind of fluctuate, but neither higher or lower than 20% and then a shrinking cohort, who see their revenue actually decrease at 20% or more. Growing law firms are reporting a higher focus on client and employee satisfaction when they’re looking at using technology, yeah, so they’re they’re not just looking at a tool and be like, Oh, that saves me time. But actually, this is good for my team, and here’s how it helps my clients. And so AI is a part of that, but we’ve also seen they’re applying that same kind of approach to things like email automation, client intake, using like online forms to help speed up that process, client scheduling, electronic payments. I think there’s one other you’ll have to read the report to find out the one more absolutely

Robert Hanna  14:20  

and it’s the most comprehensive report you will find in the market. I know the amount of work that goes into that, so we really appreciate the work that you do and that goes into it all. I guess one of the things that needs to be considered, though, in this AI automation world, is ethical consideration. Oh, yeah, and how the industry can actually keep front and centre. What do you say to that?

Joshua Lenon  14:40  

I think they’re actually the same concerns that we’ve always had ethically speaking around relying upon third parties to help us practice law, whether it be an employee, whether it be a service provider, whether it be a technology vendor, we have to remain committed to professional. Extended judgement to being responsible on behalf of our clients when it comes to the confidentiality of their data, and to be responsive as much as technology will enable to meet the growing demands of our client base. And I find something really encouraging in some of the data we published this year around that we saw actually a bump in legal consumers wanting law firms to disclose if they’re using AI. Okay, right? That seems problematic, because it seems like they might not be trusting law firms that use AI, but our data actually shows we’re not seeing a growing distrust of law firms using AI, but they just want to know if you’re using AI, yeah. And this is why we asked those same consumers if they’re turning to AI to ask legal questions. And 53% of them said they either are or they’re open to it. 14% already have and what I think they’re telling us, between those two facts, is I can go and ask AI for help, yep, but when I’m coming to a law firm, I want to know it’s the lawyer that’s helping me. And that’s actually really consistent with some of our past research on how clients want, like face to face communication, especially when it comes to discussing their case, conveying their story, learning their options. I think we’re seeing that same kind of desire for like expert help carrying now through into the AI era. Yeah,

Robert Hanna  16:35  

and that leads nicely onto what else I was going to talk about in this data and AI driven world, which is access to justice, and something that Jack spoke very passionate about in his keynote, which is absolutely phenomenal, has to be said this year. Yeah. And so how does data driven insights help close the global access to justice gap that still exists today?

Joshua Lenon  16:54  

Cleo can only help in one small aspect of that, to be perfectly honest, and that’s, can we help make access to legal representation more available? And the reason I frame it that way is because we work with people who are providing legal representation right, law firms and lawyers and paralegals, those are our customer base. So we can’t solve every access to justice problem, but the legal Trends report actually exists to help law firms know how to create affordable, sustainable, mutually beneficial legal services and where technology can fit into that mix. So one of the things that we can publish, and we do every year, is what’s the average hourly rate for lawyers and non lawyers, and also, where does automation help contribute to a law firm’s financial performance? Our longitudinal study showed that the more you’re able to kind of delegate administrative work and focus on legal work, the better your law firm does. And what we see is firms that are making those investments are actually being chosen by the public because they offer a legal representative experience that meets clients where they are and gives them a wide variety of options for communication, for scheduling, for payments. It continues to go on there. This isn’t this year’s legal Trends report, but an example is from our 2023, legal Trends report, where we looked at four years worth of electronic payments, yeah, paying by credit card, paying by BAC back, yep, all right, yeah. And other other methods like that has that helped a law firm’s bottom line. And it’s it’s very beneficial to a law firm, they get paid twice as fast. Yeah. But then we looked at a lot of the features that depend on having electronic payments, things like automated Bill reminders, things like advanced fee deposits that go into client accounts, things like payment plans. And what we found is law firms that were using those with electronic payments were seeing really positive returns as well, except for payment plans, where we saw collection rate decreased. For law firms, it was 2% lower correlation than firms that weren’t using payment plans. We’re like that doesn’t make any that doesn’t make any sense at all. Right, Payment plans are like, one of the things almost every client asks for, and it’s what makes legal services somewhat affordable, absolutely. Yeah. So we dug into that, and it was entirely the way we did the math that that created that result. So we were looking at your annual overall average collection rate, but the collection rate itself is calculated on a rotating three month basis. Not every client pays the bill right when they get it all right? Payment Plans just broke that cycle. Yeah, most payment plans we were looking at are a year, year plus, and so it just broke that three month calculation. It was marked as unpaid for a year, even though you were getting paid. And I know under the the UK financial services act right, like 12 months, 12 payments. That’s like the limit before you you get into consumer credit services, yeah? And so you, you need to know these things, yeah, in the UK. But we’re like, Okay, so we’ve broken the collection rate math. Is it worth it? Yeah? For law firms do this. And what we found is that law firms that were offering payment plans were on average, seeing 43% higher revenue, wow, than firms that weren’t, and solo and small firms, so your High Street firms were seeing up to 70% more revenue, on average, than firms that weren’t offering it. And so we had to like, oh, okay, we got to shift how we look at this to see the benefit. Here’s where we get even further into the Access to Justice, right? Okay, so that’s great. Law firms offer payment plans. They make more money. How is that access to justice? Well, what’s the average payment in that payment plan? And for the last four years we did this, and since I check it periodically, the average payment amount is right around $400 Wow, yeah. And so we can translate that to pounds, but what we’re seeing is we’ve we’ve stumbled upon what the market is telling us is Affordable Legal Services, affordable legal representation. And so the the big data and reportability that we are able to bring back to our customers is not just benefiting law firms now, but we’re going beyond that and benefiting their clients and hopefully the public’s access to legal services well into the future.

Robert Hanna  21:59  

Really well said. And I have to say congratulations on 10 years of the legal Trends report and the quality of the content, everything you putting out. I mean, we could speak for hours on this stuff. It’s been fascinating. And I guess, just to zoom out before we we look to close. Joshua, what’s been a highlight moment for you this year? You’ve been to many, many Clio cons. But what’s been a highlight moment for you this year here in Boston thus far,

Joshua Lenon  22:21  

honestly, Jackson keynote, we’ve everybody’s talked about how amazing it is. For me. What was special about it is a lot of what he’s talking about is a vision I’ve been seeding in various departments for the last five years. And this is not to brag, because what is coming to the forefront is even more than what I was imagining. But I could see automation potential that we just needed data, yeah, to make possible. And I was like, we need to be able to pull, like, the court records, we need to be able to pull scheduling orders. We need to be able to and with the acquisition of velex, in addition to great case law right, great regulations and black letter law, we also do see this integration into court systems, yes. And so for litigators, the automation capabilities are just going to skyrocket, and I don’t want transactional lawyers to feel left out. We’re going to be pulling from a wide variety of sources to help with them as that as well as new regulations get proposed, for example, like, how is that going to like, drill down, and which of your client base are going to be impacted? Do you need to update your workflows? Because there’s a new form coming out, right? There’s all kinds of similar automations that we can do, but I’m just so excited. Yeah, you know, this idea I had five years ago has also taken a hold of the smartest people I know, Team Clio, the smartest people we know outside of Clio V Lex, and we’re going to work together to build it now. And I’m excited

Robert Hanna  24:03  

for you, and this has been an incredible journey. And I just love all your insights, the level of detail, the way you come to these interviews. Joshua, yeah, tonnes of value. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about Clio or indeed, get in touch with yourself, what’s the best place for them to go? Feel free to share any websites or any

Joshua Lenon  24:17  

social media. Absolutely. Well, clio.com is the website the legal Trends report is available@clio.com forward slash L T R, legal Trends report, L T R, and you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. My name is Joshua Lennon, L E, N, O N, or at Blue Sky. My username is Joshua Lennon, there I can I do like one more thing, absolutely, all right, this is for you. Next year there’s going to be some special content coming out that’s focused specifically at the United Kingdom. Okay, this is my like coming soon. This is

Robert Hanna  24:51  

a good teaser. Make sure you’re following Joshua on socials and go check out the website and the legal Trends report. Once again. Thanks so much for joining me here on the leaps being podcast Live from Boston. Spots by Cleo, but for now, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and Collaboration Hub, the legally speaking club, over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com, there’s a link to join our community there, over and out.