On today’s Legally Speaking Podcast, I am delighted to be joined by Harsha Chandra Shekar, Vice President of Business Development at Clio and Kirby Oscar, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and General Manager at Scorpion. In June 2025, Scorpion, provider of digital marketing and technology solutions for law firms, announced its strategic partnership with Clio. The partnership solves the disconnect between marketing efforts and generative revenue – giving law firms full oversight from first contact with clients to closing the case.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob, Harsha and Kirby discussing:

– How the Strategic Partnership Between Clio and Scorpion Enhances Law Firm Growth 

– Integrating AI and Data to Unlock Deeper Marketing And Operational Insights 

– Collaboration Streamlining Lead Generation And Client Onboarding Processes 

– The Focus On ROI and Efficiency Driving Better Decision-Making for Law Firms 

– Evolving a Legal Tech Ecosystem and How it Brings More Innovation And Client-Centric Solutions

Connect with Harsha Chandra Shekar here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshacs1/

Connect with Kirby here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirby-oscar-45263583/

Transcript

Harsha Chandra Shekar  0:00  

It’s really creating a win, win situation the moment you bring up any partnership opportunity to a leadership team, the first question is, what’s the benefit for the customer? In this particular case, we actually had really strong data to show how when actually your customer is using Scorpion, they’re a lot more productive, and their earnings are significantly better. You’ve

Kirby Oscar  0:24  

got to get your product teams to open up and know that they can trust another company and lay out what they care about and what we care about. As soon as you get over that hurdle, you just start to see magic happen, and we’ve watched it play out now for the last year, ideating what three months from now and six months from now and 12 months from now will look like from a product perspective. How do we really deliver to the market for our mutual customers, but also for new customers? And that’s really exciting for the partnership.

Robert Hanna  0:48  

On today’s legally speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Harsha Chandra Shekar, Vice President of Business Development at Clio, and Kirby Oscar, Senior Vice President of partnerships and general manager at Scorpion in June 2025 Scorpion, provider of digital marketing and technology solutions for law firms, announced its strategic partnership with Clio. This partnership solves the disconnect between marketing efforts and generative revenue, giving law firms full oversight of the first contact with clients to closing the case. So a very big, warm welcome, Harsha and Kirby happy to be here.

Kirby Oscar  1:25  

Yeah, thanks for having us, Rob.

Robert Hanna  1:27  

Great to have you both with us today on the show. And before we dive into everything, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the legally speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 1010, being very real. What would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law? If you’ve seen it coming to you first?

Kirby Oscar  1:48  

Kirby, wow. Well, fortunately, I’ve watched a lot of the show with my wife, and she’s a practising attorney, so she I would probably go with a two,

Robert Hanna  1:58  

a fair two and Harsha, how about yourself? Fair two.

Harsha Chandra Shekar  2:01  

I would be a little more generous. So I started my career as an attorney in a big law firm, and some of the dynamics within the law firm that they show, some of the mentorship dynamics, as well as the competition between employees and Associates and partners, is pretty accurate. So I would probably give it a five.

Robert Hanna  2:23  

There we go, a two and a five, fair, very well justified. And with that, we can move swiftly on to talk all about you and the very exciting partnership. So to kick off, though, can you walk us through your journeys to leadership at Clio and scorpion, respectively, and some of the pivotal moments that have defined your careers. Maybe. Harsha, starting with you and then coming to you, Kirby.

Harsha Chandra Shekar  2:44  

Yeah, so I went to one of India’s leading law schools, after which I worked for this firm called amarchhand and Mangal Das, which was India’s largest corporate law firm. And during that time, I specialised in mergers and acquisitions and private equity, often working for technology clients in the US, such as Google, as they were investing in South Asia. So as part of that, I got to see firsthand all the work that goes into the transactional law, including a lot of due diligence, a lot of drafting, and that really got me interested in technology, using technology to just get smarter back in the day, even though there were a lot of automations and weights and weights and work which could differentiate an associate who was doing a lot of manual work from from an associate that delivery technology. And I was like, wow, this is just the beginning. I’m sure there’s more to it. And after five years of being a lawyer, I wisened up. I decided that I wanted to be on the business side of things. So I went to business school at U Chicago, and graduating from business school, I worked with Amazon and at PNL management capacity, building their laptops and computers category, and after doing a lot of interesting partnerships with ecosystem players, again, like the Googles and apples of the world, I wanted to build more jobs in business development, and I went to Expedia, where I was part of business that created private label e commerce websites using Expedia technology and inventory, but, but would partner with the likes of Amex travel or AARP, so that you know, it would look like an ARP travel centre or Amex travel, but it was actually powered by Expedia. So having built those businesses for airlines, for membership groups, I was strapped on by Uber to come join them as they were preparing to go public, and I was part of a central business development team where we were centralising all the deal making that. Were happening in regions and in parts into a single deal making entity that was actually making sure that we were driving a lot of leverage across regions to get better terms. So the Uber ride was really the most enjoyable ride that I’ve had in my career, because we saw the highs of an IPO, we saw the lows of covid, where all the business came to a screeching halt overnight, and after about three of the tuber, I had a really good opportunity to join Boston Consulting Group as a partner, where I was helping our clients think about, how do they build an effective ecosystem, what kind of partnerships do they do, and how do they really leverage the partner muscle in the build buyer partner framework to drive growth? So this was a very intellectually stimulating job where I got to work with a lot of different clients across technology, media and telco industries, and after three years of being a consulting partner, I did ask myself, do I want to be an advisor for the rest of my life, or do I want to actually be an operator? And I think my true calling was on the operational side. And that’s when I decided to join Clio. And in some ways, this was meeting of a lot of different parts of my career’s journey, because I started as a lawyer, so I could really relate to the customer, and because I’d done a lot of business development in deal making, both as a lawyer as well as in PNL ownership capacities. I was very excited about building a net new business development and partnership function within Clio. And when I met the leadership team at Clio, I was really impressed. I already knew Ronnie Gurion, our CEO, because I’d worked with him at Uber. And then when I met the rest of the C team, I was like, wow, this is a really amazing team to work with. So that’s how I ended up joining Clio, about early last year. And at Clio. My main focus is on building the most strategic partnerships that can help Clio accelerate and grow its ecosystem.

Robert Hanna  7:30  

I love how you brought it full circle as well, from your experience, obviously training as an attorney to obviously now with Clio, with the mission to transform the legal experience. For when I was going to ask, actually, because we’ve had Ronnie on the show. We recorded with him live in Nashville in 2023 at Clio con, when he was obviously newish to Cleo at the time, joining from Uber. So I thought you may have crossed paths there, but thank you for such a detailed overview, Kirby, you’ve sat there very patiently. We’d love to come to you now just to learn a bit more about your journey up to sort of where you are with scorpion and some of the pivotal moments that have helped define your career.

Kirby Oscar  8:00  

Yeah, absolutely, it’s kind of hard to follow that. I mean, it’s a really Harsha, and it’s been, it’s been really fun to get to know him. And I think business development kind of deal making, just generally ecosystem development takes really creative people, and so I think that’s just been a fun connection between Harsha and I, and thinking about the markets both Scorpion serves, whether it’s in legal or in other markets, and then it’s just fun to have a network of people that are solving common problems, and there’s very few people that understand some of the challenges and the dynamics that are at play. And so it’s been been a lot of fun, you know, getting to learn and watch how he operates, especially as you just heard, kind of with his background, which is, it was very like enterprise business development. And I’ve spent most of my career in kind of the SMB space, so small, small business segment, specifically in North America. And so, you know, obviously Clio has got the global dynamic and international expansion. And so just been a fun kind of all, I’ll say, thought partner and thinking about BD But to answer your actual question, I have had a kind of an interesting route to, kind of the tech ecosystem building. I graduated from school and actually went and worked for my national fraternity, and was a little bit lost at the end of graduating, I went to school for economics and political science. Thought I wanted to go into politics, and had met one of the board of directors for a national fraternity. Said, Hey, come, give us a year. Expand the fraternity. You’ll get to work with universities across North America. Will be really interesting, and you can network with all of our alumni. And so I very vocal person. Very outgoing. And I thought, Oh, this could be really cool. I’m just from North Carolina, small town. Don’t really have a good network. Let me take this opportunity. And so I took that chance, met some really cool alumni, ended up getting a job in a payment processing business doing kind of new customer acquisition sales role quickly expanded to like, wow, it’s a lot easier to close these deals if I can figure out an ecosystem around this. Payments is pretty vanilla. Like, how do I add some complex this? Like, we’re just talking about credit card processing here. And so really dug into what it meant to build an ecosystem to help drive growth for a business, and quickly I ended up leading partnerships for that group. We did about 20 acquisitions, and I would, as soon as we would do the deal, I’d go and figure out, how do we build an ecosystem around this? It was really fun, but I never got to operate really within the business. So similar actually, to Harsha, there’s a very it’s different when you’re consulting and coaching versus being able to actually go execute yourself. And I had a really good mentor at the time tell me, like you need to roll your sleeves up, spend 10 to 15 years of your career really in the trenches and building yourself. You’ll have so much more pride in the work you do if you ever choose to go back to, you know, a 30,000 foot view of the projects. And so got introduced to a company, actually in Atlanta, so the only company I’ve worked at in my home base, but got introduced to them. They were really early stage vertical SaaS platform and home services supporting like HVAC, plumbing contractors and their their core operations. And they said, Hey, we’ve got about 1000 customers. We have no integration partners. We kind of work with some industry associations, come explore, try to build an ecosystem around this. And so I spent four years there building that ecosystem, and then met the scorpion team. Was really excited about being another vertical, so that was obviously core to home services. Scorpion does support that industry, but then we had others, and so I got to marry a little bit of the All right, let me go and explore these new verticals with something I knew. And so it was really a match made in heaven for me. Loved our leadership team. I met our CRO Jamie Adams, and man that’s been almost four years ago now. And anybody that that meets Jamie, he’s a fantastic recruiter. First off, he’s our sales leader, so he should be right, so, but, but he, he convinced me kind of on this vision of what we can do to support small businesses and local businesses just across the US and North America, and so just got excited about being able to expand the impact. I think there’s nothing more valuable for me than tying, you know, some intrinsic value to the work we’re doing, to the impact it has in communities. And like, there’s no better way to do that than through small business. And so it’s just a lot of passion behind that work and then a lot of fun, because we’ve really transformed the way we think about partnerships as a business, the way it impacts our product development, the way it impacts our go to market, new market expansion. And so it’s just been a really fun ride, and excited for the next phase of that too.

Robert Hanna  13:21  

Yeah, and again, equally inspiring and super interesting journey that you shared there. And I love that you talked about mentorship as well. It’s something we talk a lot about on the show in terms of the importance of having I always describe a 360 board of mentors around you that people can give you advice, maybe ahead of you, at the same level of you, even beneath you that. And I love that you kind of reference that, and you know your journey, and congratulations on everything obviously you’ve achieved as a result of that. So I want to stick with you, if I may, Kirby, just in terms of the core challenges that Cleo and scorpion are solving for today’s law firm, specifically and Harsha for anything you’d like to add, feel free.

Kirby Oscar  13:57  

Yeah, of course, I meant to follow up with you earlier too. You did not answer the question on suits, so I’m curious, what was your ranking?

Robert Hanna  14:07  

So I actually give it a five as well. So Harsha, you and I, we could say great minds or great scores, but I, I’ve given it a five from my my lens of recruiting for law firms of all sizes for over the last decade. I think it kind of sits at a five,

Kirby Oscar  14:24  

At a five. I can never answer five on a scale of one to 10, because this is just my opinion, but it feels like a cop out. You’re not leaning one way or the other. So I always go aggressive one way or that. You’re never you’re never going to get middle of the road from for me on those rankings,

Harsha Chandra Shekar  14:40  

I think that’s a fair criticism. It’s, it’s the easy one.

Kirby Oscar  14:43  

No conflict. I’m going with five. I’m going with five. Yeah, I love it leads to my personality, just poking the bear a little bit. No, so, so we took a step back as a business probably two and a half. Years ago at this point, and we’re really trying to think about how we we helped our our clients, be more efficient with their marketing spend. I think you, you see it every day that there’s it gets more and more expensive to acquire cases and and how do we be really innovative partners, to small firms, to bigger firms, in thinking about growth more efficiently. And the only way we could do that was to get closer to their their operating systems and and when I say operating like really, it’s their operations, and a lot of times it’s very manual for us to learn what’s working what’s not working. And so started to kind of map out, like what needed to be true for us from a technical perspective, to make firms more efficient when they think about growth like that was kind of our, our main objective. And started looking at the space, looking at our customers, in thinking about all right, if we were to make some bets, where should we do that, and what’s the impact we think we would have, and go make it happen, right? And so that that journey obviously takes a long time, but I think just the main objective from day one for me was, how do I find a place where our customers live day in and day out, and make sense of how they’re growing in a more concise and efficient way. And that’s where this all kind of started from, and it’s been hugely exciting. 

Robert Hanna  16:34  

And I always say action over everything. And like you said, have the idea, but then go out and actually make it happen. You’ve been super smart in how it’s come about so harsh. Would love for you to maybe build on that and maybe talk more around the Clio and scorpion partnership, specifically because it made huge waves in and around the legal community. What sparked the idea behind the collaboration, perhaps from a Clio perspective,

Harsha Chandra Shekar  16:56  

yeah, so because Clio is a vertical SaaS company, and focuses on a very specific customer, vertical, which is law firms. Naturally, the expansion motion is around trying to do more things for those customers, so that you become the single platform on which the entire firm is operating. So with that thesis in mind. If you look at my journey from a lead to payments, it all starts with marketing right on top, right. And a lead could come through any of the various marketing channels. It could be a Facebook ad, it could be just a blog that you’ve written on your website, and then that lead, a lot. Lots of those leads come, and then they convert at certain different clips based on where the leads are coming from. And it eventually converts into a matter that starts living in clear manage all the way to billing and payments. Now we saw that we were operating on the intake management space with clear grow. We were operating all the way until payments with Clio manage. But the real top of the funnel was still out there with a lot of like different digital marketing agency, then it’s a very fragmented space. And I thought to myself, what are some of the things we can do to really create value for our customers in that space, so that we can go further up and help the lawyers not just stay more efficient, but actually make more money? And that’s where the idea of partnering with a digital marketing agency came in. The other thing is I also looked at what’s happening in other vertical, SaaS companies. So looked at toast, looked at service Titan, and of course, the service Titan Scorpion partnership did draw my attention. So these were certain things that got me down this road. And when I looked at the marketing agency world, I saw that you have a lot of smaller marketing agencies, and it is very fragmented. And then you have Scorpion, which is not just by far the leader when it comes to market share, but it’s also a leader when it comes to really adopting technology to disrupt the way things are happening in that world. And I saw a lot of parallels with Clio, where, yes, law practice management software is a fragmented space, but Clio is a clear leader. Because I think of Clio almost as the apple of law practice management software, where you’ve got a really well built, well curated ecosystem, and customers love Clio, so I felt like there was a really good match between Clio and scorpion, and I wanted to pursue it more.

Kirby Oscar  19:53  

One thing I’ll add to that is we started looking at Harsha and I early days like, started looking at our mutual customers. Yeah. Yeah, and, and there was just, like, clear delineation for them. I didn’t get exposed to this data at the time. I did later on, as we after we signed the deal, where he’s like, you know, we looked at our firms that were working with scorpion and their performance, both in our product and their growth because they have the billing information or and, and he’s like, there’s just a clear differentiation with those firms and the ones that aren’t working with you and and so that, obviously, for me, is like, third party validation is the best validation you can ever have, especially when it’s comes out of the woodworks, and you’re like, I want those scores like our team as I shared that just anecdote, and turn it like, I want to see that right, but just really fun to know that we were having an impact at scale. We’ve got just shy of 600 mutual customers between scorpion and Clio and so some just really good stats there. I think the the other piece that really excited me about about Cleo his business, is they’re really aggressive about their growth in all sorts of different verticals, and are all sorts of sub verticals, like in legal, right? And so for us, we obviously have always partnered with hyper growth firms that really want powerful website, powerful growth story, they want to spend on advertising and exposing us a little bit to other areas that maybe they don’t have that same archetype, but they still need a partner, and they still want to grow in some capacity. Maybe it’s just not as aggressive. And how do we support those? And so those are some of the really fun things from this relationship. Is it’s challenging our business to think about the clients that we serve, how we service them, and then what is the expectations that we set for those clients in regards to growing their firm or maintaining the revenue in their firm? You know, you think about this, these aren’t just recurring revenue, kind of stacked businesses, like they have to have cases coming in every single day to maintain their staff and to keep operating. It’s not just about growth, and so we’re having to rethink our messaging. And so we saw this as a really good opportunity with Clio, since they service all of those to expose ourselves to more to more clients.

Robert Hanna  22:10  

Yeah, and it just brings in, doesn’t it a new, exciting chapter for that, for the partnership, and indeed, for the for the organisations. And yeah, I love the strategic thinking behind this. And I remember when I heard very early on and harsh you were talking about it, specific is terrific. And it’s so true, isn’t it? The more specific you can be, particularly in terms of the way Clio is focused and has been so fixed on the mission to transform the legal experience for all. And just the level of detail you go to in terms of the acquisitions and the moves you’ve been been doing, it’s just tremendous to see. So I’d like to stick with you Harsha in terms of, sort of from a concept to a collaboration such as, obviously, this amazing partnership with Scorpion outline, maybe some of the key phases that took this from that sort of initial conversation to actually a strategic rollout. I think it’s super inspiring for maybe other organisations or businesses looking to take some lessons and learning from this.

Harsha Chandra Shekar  23:00  

Yeah. So it all started with, you know, an email that I had received from Kirby that was in my inbox even before I joined. So the funny part is that, you know, if you’re starting on a certain date, I think they activate your email a little earlier, and Kirby had already reached out to people and and he had my email id, probably even before I had it. And when I joined, I had that email from Kirby saying, hey, let’s connect, right? And in a parallel world, actually, in Clio, one of the very interesting and very solid hiring practice is that no matter what level you’re joining at, you have to do a case study. So I had prepared a case study around my vision for business development at Clio, and I had presented to our C team in person in the Burnaby offices. And I had partnerships like this in mind, even as I was at massaging what business development at Clio should do. So when I joined Clio, and one of the first emails in my inbox was this email from Kirby, I was like, wow, this is great. So that’s when we started engaging in early discovery conversations where I took stock of, okay, I know what the digital marketing agency world generally looks like, but how does it look for legal and specifically for SMB legal, right? As I took stock of that, like it was a collaborative exercise where we had an NDA, we were asking questions in both directions. And then the next phase was, okay, it became pretty clear that scorpion is a very clear leader who would be a good strategic partner. Then there was a validation exercise where we had to create a business case around. Partnership, and for that, we actually engaged a third party platform called crossbeam, because the interesting challenge is that, yes, we want to see what is the overlap today, which kind of validates that we do have a strong common customer, customer base, and then what are the green what are the areas, Greenfield areas where we both can expand into and we want to be able to do that without sharing our customer data. And that’s where the third party platform like crossbeam comes in, where it can give us flags around who are common customers and what is the penetration of Scorpion in each of the segments that clear markets do. And we did that, and it was very clear that, yeah, we share a strong common ICP, as we call it, ideal customer profile. And we also saw that, you know, this is an area that a lot of customers have expressed a greater need for integration in so once that happened, we were like, Okay, let’s break it into two work streams. One would be the product and R and D work stream where we brought our product leaders together. We all sat in a room I remember in Atlanta, and we just worked out, okay, what are the different customer journeys, and what are the areas where scorpions offering and to offering do overlap? And how do we reconcile that overlap around whose product should be lead in with whose product should be, you know, up to the customer’s choice and so on. So we started that exercise, as well as identifying what are the unique API endpoints we need to develop in order to create more value for the customer. For example, there’s matter stages where, you know, Scorpion brings in a bunch of leads, some of them convert. And how far are they going? How are they progressing so that Scorpion can better communicate the ROI and inform further decisions around marketing spend. That’s just a tiny example, but we sat and worked out all of this in the R and D stream separately. We also had a commercial work stream where we dug further into the data around customer overlap, figuring out, okay, what will be the go to market motions? Who are the customers that Clio will lead with and bring Scorpion in? Who are the customers where scorpion is well entrenched, where they can bring Clio in, and what are some of the commercials around it? And we ended up with a pretty solid round, several rounds as negotiations, all the way until we finalised our term sheet and our final definitive agreements. There’s a whole journey after that. But I’d love to get Kirby’s thoughts on that.

Kirby Oscar  27:53  

Yeah, I think the coolest part to me on this is like I had, we’d done a partnership in the home services space, as he mentioned, with service Titan. And so I had this, and I put that deal together too, and it kind of ideated on, like, how does this actually work? As I shared earlier, like, in we’ve really changed the way we think about how we service our customers. And partnerships was a big component. Integrations was a big component of that. And so we had done a lot of work there and had an idea of what it would look like with Cleo. But obviously I’m I’m shooting in the dark, thinking about their product, what they care about. And so I think you asked for other people to kind of hear, one of the things that’s so important is like, I play for Team Scorpion, but and BD, like, you really have to put your yourself in the shoes of other business, understand what they care about, what’s core to them, what drives their revenue, where they want to grow, how they want to grow, what makes them tick, and and, and then marry your objectives with that. And if you can’t do those two things, then, like, it’s probably not going to be a great deal long term, you can force those things. And I think people that are really good at this can get those deals done, and then they fall flat on their face. And you see that a lot across all the industries we serve, but there’s so many partnerships that get formed, and then you kind of go, oh, man, I don’t really see where this is going to go. And a lot of that is because you don’t do all this kind of due diligence, and so we spent so much time on the product side. And I think what’s really unique about Scorpion, and I get so excited to talk about, is we’re really unique in the marketing space. You know, we have, you mentioned kind of that the apple comment. But, you know, we have proprietary software, and, you know, we, at times, even get beat up for this in the market, because, you know, we’re not building websites on on WordPress, like we have our own website product. But there’s really clear benefits. And it takes you kind of diving into our business to realise that we can’t do work like this if we had not made the decision to build that years ago. Go, and because we’ve got this underlying technology as a business at Scorpion, it’s really empowered us to go and do partnerships like this. I couldn’t have gone and had those conversations if we didn’t have a platform to integrate, right? And so the marrying of our website product with our in you know, we have lead intake tools, not like matter intake, cool tools like Clio grow. We just want your website to convert really well. And so when we focus in our lane, and we really did that product mapping exercise, it became very clear, I’ll never forget walking out of the room. We had several people from from the scorpion team and the Clio team there, and all of us were like, This is really clear. Like, what we care about is driving net customer acquisition, or NET client acquisition. What you all care about is, how is that converting to a case, and how is it being managed after that, how it’s being billed, et cetera, and all the operating procedures in between research, et cetera. And so I think doing that diligence is so important, but also, just for anybody that wants to do partnerships or pursuing partnerships, is like to really think about what that other business is doing and how you can actually impact them and go prove it first, like you don’t get to have conversations like this if you don’t have substantial mutual customers, where you’re proving it day in and day out, that’s just kind of all talk. And so you do get hit up a lot around, oh, we should go and do this and we’re going to change everything. You’re like, that’s great. Can you share one common customer or two common customers and the workflows that they’re experiencing? And usually you get a response of like, Well, I haven’t found that yet, but I know if we work together, it will be great. So, you know, I think for for us, just it was a really exciting kind of workflow there that that was the moment that I walked away from going, all right, this is going to happen. There’s a lot of stuff to figure out that’s going to take us. I mean, that meeting was 11 months ago, give or take it was in the fall of of last year, so end of summer of last year, and and getting all of the kind of product and R and D and in row, and excited about it, and understanding their part in this opening up, I think that’s another piece that’s really challenging. You got Harsha, and I like championing something, but you’ve got to get your product teams to open up and know that they can trust another company and kind of lay out what they care about and what we care about. And so as soon as you get over that hurdle, you just start to see magic happen. And we’ve watched it play out now for the last year, and kind of ideating what three months from now and six months from now and 12 months from now will look like for will look like from a product perspective, but that’s probably the thing that gets me most excited, because it’s not the impact we can have today. It’s how do we iterate, and how do we really deliver to the market, for our mutual customers, but also for new customers, and that’s really exciting for I think, the partnership on a go forward basis.

Robert Hanna  32:59  

Are you a solicitor still stuck in the office while everyone else is on a sun lounger, Clio, yes, the legal software Loved by over 150,000 legal professionals wants to help you switch off this summer with Clio, you can manage cases, client billing and even Client Onboarding all in one place from Any device. That means less faffing around with paper files and more time for ice cream stay cations and just putting your feet up. And here’s the best part, sign up by the 31st of August 2025 and you’ll get 25% off your first year of Clio. Visit clio.com forward slash uk to book a demo and claim your offer, Terms and Conditions apply. Now back to the show. It’s exciting hearing the journey and just the level of due diligence, and, you know, strategic thinking and mapping and rationale, and you talk there about as well, you know, the mutual customers. And Clio has always been client centric, and something I’ve admired about the organisation from, you know, the early days of partnering them. And I love Jackson book as well, about the client centred law firm. I think it’s, it’s fantastic. But you know, you want fusion, don’t you? Rather than confusion, obviously, with this partnership, there is clear synergies, and it’s offering tonnes of value. And it leads to my next question for you. Harsha, which I can’t believe we’re already sort of half an hour into a show. I haven’t mentioned the words AI, we, of course, we have to because, you know, with tech, obviously there’s a lot of growth opportunities. So when you actually pair scorpions AI powered marketing with clio’s Obviously legal operating system, what becomes possible for the more growth minded law firms that wasn’t necessarily there before?

Harsha Chandra Shekar  34:41  

Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a great question, and the way to think about it is, historically, marketing has operated kind of in its silo, and practice management has operated in its silo, and there’s a lot. Of manual work involved in syncing data from all your leads and marketing to practice management if you don’t use an integration, right? So this advanced integration actually takes out a a lot of manual work, but more importantly, it also unlocks a lot of the data that’s sitting within a customer’s Clio manage that can actually tie back into their marketing software and help drive significantly better decisions. Because today, what happens is you have your marketing spend and you kind of make rational assumptions and guesswork around the around the business that each lead is driving, and therefore try to come up with better marketing decisions. But you’re still operating off assumptions, whereas in this new world that this integration, you’re actually tracking things a lot more granularly, the two systems are talking to each other, which means it’s taking out the entire guesswork from trying to figure out, okay, which part of my marketing is working, which one’s not, right? There’s that the second piece is in the world of AI data is the fuel, and because Clio manage has all this time keeping billing and payments data around each matter, now you can actually score your leads in a much more effective way, just by knowing that similar looking lead with similar attributes has netted you X million dollars in payments. And that’s really where the magic happens, because Scorpion has that proprietary AI for scoring leads, and Clio has all this data around not just existing cases, but past cases as well, that a law firm has done. And pairing the two is really supercharging the power of the AI.

Robert Hanna  36:56  

I want to stick with you. Kirby on the AI with purpose, particularly because, you know, you can get flooded with leads, and a lot of them can be pretty, pretty useless a lot of the time within organisations. So with the sort of AI that you’ve got at Scorpion, how are you ensuring, then building on that, that law firms are going to be attracting far better leads, not just getting a higher volume?

Kirby Oscar  37:16  

Yeah, I think probably the biggest thing there is understanding what’s happening post that initial conversation, or post that initial form fill, or post the initial engagement with the firm. And so I think what we usually run blind to, and historically, you would have a marketing manager here at Scorpion, and they’re having their weekly call with a firm. They’re talking about how many leads they’ve received that firm says, but they’re all crap. We have to go back and manually try to figure out what that means. And then a lot of times we’ll find that, hey, there were some really quality cases in there, but your intake process was terrible. Or, hey, there’s a lot of quality cases in here, but they’re in different practice areas. We should probably adjust your campaigns so that you’re not getting these leads anymore. Those conversations, though, play out over weeks. There’s manual research, research that would go into there, and then you have this delay, which ends up with marketing waste, right? And so we’re both taking out the time that’s required for us to analyse campaign performance, marry it back to matter outcomes, while in tandem making our system smarter. And so as we pull this back, and right now, this is where we’re spending a lot of our time, as it relates to our common customers, is pulling back as much of the information as we can to build logic and build a strong understanding of this is a perfect case type, and we want to go get 100 more of these. And this is the average cost, and this is what your spin should be, and here’s the revenue that you’ll see from this. So I think that flywheel is really, really critical, and what you’re seeing, and really the whole premise of the relationship is we got to create that flywheel. The only way to do it was to marry a marketing platform with an operating system, practice management. There’s no organisation to do that within Clio, and I think that really changes the game, because what’s going to happen, as I shared earlier, we’re going to learn over the next month, three months, six months, and you’re going to be able to see really powerful use cases of wow, like we should. We eliminated 30% of of waste and ad spend because we made campaigns more efficient. Now let’s it doesn’t mean that the firm’s going to spend 30% less. It means that we’re going to help them grow 30% more, right? And that we can actually use more working dollars. And so I think that’s what gets me. Really excited about how AI is layered into our systems is, you know, we have experts here. They’ve been doing it for a really long time and supporting their clients. They’ve been doing it manually. And when I have conversations like this with them, I know they’re like, besides themselves on Oh man, I’m actually gonna be able to do marketing strategy and not data analysis. That’s just a really fantastic conversation to have with with our team. But we can’t do it without kind of marrying those product teams together, and then, you know, being able to pass it back. I think something unique to scorpion is we have our own ad product, so we’re, we’re managing your budget directly in in one ad platform. So it gives us the ability to iterate and manage campaigns at scale, and pass data back and make tweaks at scale, and you just can’t do that. And then if you go out and look around the market like you can’t do those things. And so I just think that that’s really exciting for us, and we’re only gonna get better and learn with the information that we’re getting. And then we want to super superpower all the growth that we can for our clients. And that want to do that,

Harsha Chandra Shekar  41:08  

yeah, and honestly, making your marketing more efficient really has a lot of downstream effects and benefits for all parties involved. Of course, the law firm now can keep the same marketing spend and drive 30% more revenue, for example. And for us, that also means that we need to have that law firm become more productive through use of our AI assistance like clear duo, through use of smart AI tools like clear draft, so that now the law firm with the same size can still do 30% more work, and it also drives more payments, which definitely does help Cleo as well. So it’s really creating a win, win situation. And the one thing that doesn’t come out that much that I want to talk about is also that it’s not just Cleo, Scorpion and the law firms that are winners here. It’s also a lot of the other digital marketing agencies, because essentially what we’re doing today is the Collaborate really deeply to create the best in class experience, which which means that we are improving Clio grows APIs. We are building that new endpoints, and we are testing it out and piloting with Scorpion, but a lot of those will then be out there, once developed for other digital marketing agencies to use. So it’s really transforming the experience for all the DMEs, right? So, so I think that’s a bigger cause that we’re working towards as well, and that

Robert Hanna  42:45  

just fits so nicely, doesn’t it into clio’s overarching mission with regards to transforming legal experience for all. And I always say collaboration is domination, and I’ve admired the way Clio has absolutely gone about that in terms of collaborating and, you know, building and building the ecosystem, which we’ll talk about a little bit later on. One thing I want to touch on, and Kirby, you’re touching on, as well as revenue, and we’ve been kind of flirting with it, but I want to get a little bit into the deeper parts of it, the ROI. Does it speak for itself? I talk a lot about, actually, the COI, I think that’s really important that organisations get stuck with, which is the cost of inaction, actually, over focusing directly, straightly, on the ROI, but in terms of some of the early stages or success stories or statistics following the partnership, is there anything you can share with us that might be inspirational for some of our listeners? Kirby, anything you would like to share?

Kirby Oscar  43:31  

Yeah, I think, well, we’ve gotten feedback from a lot of the early adopters of the integration that they’re just really excited that they can see what’s working and what’s not. And they’re no longer talking to us about lead quality. They’re talking to us about their revenue targets, and that is just a fantastic conversation for for everybody involved. I’ll quote some of them like we can be more strategic. We can focus on our company’s culture. We can focus on being lawyers again, like we’ve had some really, really good anecdotes come out of kind of the early adopters of the integration. I think the other piece is, you know, we’re starting to, and we talked about earlier, we’ll have to do a follow up at Clio con, but we’re starting to pull back, you know, the efficiency. So that’s an ROI conversation, and happy to share more of that as we have more aggregate data to share. But it’s been really exciting just to watch our clients response to being able to see that in their products, in the reporting, and then focus change the conversation from a CPL conversation to truly like, what is my return on my advertising spend? What’s my return on my marketing spend? And and be able to have educated conversations with them a lot of a lot of times we’re proving them wrong too in certain ways, and or we’re learning, and we can make this. Decisions faster, and we can figure out what’s not working. And I think that’s like, what’s fun is like, we’re all human, and there’s so much pointing fingers, as as Harsha mentioned, like, it’s very fragmented space, and there’s so much like black box and conversations that happen, and we’re just throwing money out the window, and we’re kind of removing that entire dialogue, because you can go and look exactly where this came from. We attribute all of them, and we can show you all the way into, you know, when that client was signed, when that client engaged with you for the first time, all the way to when they’re transacting with you, even if that takes one year, two years, three years, or, you know, a week. And I think that’s really powerful for for clients, and that’s the feedback we’re getting thus far.

Harsha Chandra Shekar  45:47  

Yeah, and if you’re getting similar feedback, in fact, if I were to think of the feedback that we’ve received, it’s broadly in two teams. The first one is strategic, where they are, like, hey, we always had a hunch around, you know what channel was netting out what ROI, but now we don’t have to guess. We really can make those bold decisions knowing that our hypothesis was right in the first place. The second one is more operational, where lot of firms have said, Hey, this would have been a nightmare for us to inject all the lead data into our law practice management system without this integration, and in the past, that’s what they were doing. And with an integration, it’s a lot more streamlined, and it takes out hours and hours of an intake specialist work. So the other two broad themes, but overall, it’s been extremely positive. And we’ve had a lot of customers actually coming in saying, hey, you know what? We want to get clear man, clear grow, because clear grow and scorpion are so well integrated.

Robert Hanna  46:53  

And it’s talking to when we’ve had from piers, Lenny, from Shark Tank, dragons, then over here in the UK, come on the show. You talked very openly about a value pyramid. If you can imagine that, in terms of technology is coming in, and it’s filling up the pyramid, and you as the human service provider, it can enable you then to do like you’re talking to you before Kirby, to be the lawyer again, to do that strategic thinking, to do the work that you perhaps enjoy doing, and free up the time and all of the mundane roles that are happening. I think it’s also providing real time, high quality data to make better informed decisions, to enable you to be more client centric and do great quality work. And I love it. Okay? Harsha, sticking on this sort of streamlined conversion then sort of from an interest to actually instruction. Because law firms, you know, there’s the lifeblood they need to ensure that retaining work, getting new work in. So how are you removing a lot of that friction between the lead generation and the Client Onboarding specifically? And what’s changing and how law firms actually close new business from what you may have seen a few years ago?

Harsha Chandra Shekar  47:52  

Yeah. So what’s changing is really that we are doubling down on the integration between Clio grow, which is the intake management solution and scorpion. And to set the context here, if you remember the legal Trends report, I think it said that most law firms don’t respond to 67% of the calls that they received. Right? So there is a fundamental break point between your marketing and lead generation to lead intake and really like tying scorpion and clear grow through a deeper API integration is going to make sure that we have a lot more robust lead capture process and much better reporting between the two buckets. The other thing that’s changing is we are working together to see what additional Clio grow API endpoints do we create, for example, I spoke about matter stages. Similarly, can we predict the value of a matter, and therefore the value of a lead? How do we use AI on the data to better, you know, serve the prospective value of a certain lead? So those are some of the things that, you know, we’re really working together on, and some of that is even work in progress. As we speak, our development teams are building out those APIs, but as we deploy them, I think that’s really going to change the way the law firms are making those decisions. Yeah. Kirby, what would you add here?

Kirby Oscar  49:35  

Yeah, hi. I just like being able to have a conversation with a, you know, managing partner and say, hey, you know, you you’ve got 150 matters that are coming into your firm on a monthly basis. This is how many are flowing through these channels. This is how many phone calls it takes to close this. And by close, I mean, you know, move them into the managed process. Move. From Clio grow to Clio manage and be able to have a a really foundational discussion that’s data driven, no emotion around how their firm is structured. How many people they have doing intake? Should they hire somebody to do intake for the first time? What? Where is the leakage in that, how bad is their after hour call centre, or what have you, and being able to truly point with real data to what’s working and what’s not. And so I think what’s really transforming is, you know, we’ve had for years, you could do a, you know, a lead push from, you know, an online form into an intake solution, and that was like baseline, not great. No more duplicate entry. We solved that problem. But now there’s so many other steps that happen post that that need to be accounted for. Need to be part of a thought process and operationalizing an effective firm, and to also get more efficient with your spend. Is that a case that you can take? Is it in the right practice area? Is this a referral that should be transitioned to another firm? And then how long do each of these steps take so that you can build a build a business, and so we think of this at Scorpion around like we want people to be able to think about their firm like a business. We want them to have the same conversations we have around how we grow. And I can guarantee you, we never have conversations without any data to back them up. At Scorpion, we know how many leads it takes to close a deal. We know how many we need on a monthly basis. We have capacity that we think about and that’s what structures our entire business. That’s only fair that we can provide a small business with 5678, employees, relatively similar insights. And I think what you’ll see over the next year and two years and three years is much more maniacal focus on like operational excellence. There’s a lot of coaching groups that have popped up that are talking about these things. And what’s interesting for me is obviously strong background on the home services side. And you’ve seen this, it is a machine nowadays, between their operating platform, their marketing, their coaching, their manufacturers, their distributor networks, and they all have these really defined metrics on how every role in the business operates. And I think we’re really close to that in the legal market. And that gets me really excited, because I just want people to again, they can focus on what they do best, but they can also know how to scale their practice if they want to.

Robert Hanna  52:47  

I like that. You really drill down on the data point of view. And look, you know, facts are important as a lawyer as well. You know you need to have the right facts to make the informed decision. And you know, I just love the strategic mindset of everything that’s involved with this partnership and the way it’s going, and there’s just real exciting energy behind it all. And Harsha, I want to talk about the Clio, sort of broader evolving ecosystems. It’s been a hell of a year. You’ve come out of the blocks post Series F with, obviously the share do acquisition with V Lex with, obviously with scorpion. And I’m sure there’s gonna be lots more exciting things down the track. But what does this partnership signal specifically for the broader Clio vision, and how does it reshape, perhaps, what users can expect from your ecosystem moving forward?

Harsha Chandra Shekar  53:33  

That’s a great question. And yes, like Clio has had an amazing year, right? We started with the Series F about a year ago, then the shadow acquisition that really helps us win in the enterprise space. And now with velex, we are actually in the practice of law, as opposed to being in the business of law. And this carpian partnership is actually a really big milestone for us, because it’s signalling to the ecosystem that, hey, Clio has a very strong build buy or partner muscle. It’s no longer that, hey, we just got to build everything or buy everything. But there are going to be areas where it is the strategic move to actually partner deeply, and that’s the piece that this tells us and there are going to be other areas as well where we are looking to make some really deep partnerships. And that doesn’t mean that we are moving away from our stance of still being a very open ecosystem with a lot of integrations. I think that’s a very key part of what Clios is because Clio is the most developer friendly law practice management platform that’s out there. We have 300 plus app integrations, but there is always space for some really deep strategic partnerships where you’re actually getting the 2r and D teams to sit. Together and CO create solutions. You’re getting the two go to market teams to sit together and figure out, okay, how do how do you go to market, and what customer problem do you solve just through your deep collaboration?

Robert Hanna  55:13  

I love all of those insights. And you know, again, collaboration is something we’re super passionate about here on the legally speaking podcast, Kirby, you teased a little bit about sort of some maybe deeper insights or some new tools. Is there anything you can lift the curtain on slightly in terms of things that might be coming down the track, and what are you building that maybe might surprise the legal market? 

Kirby Oscar  55:37  

Yeah, I think the biggest piece that you’ll see is just around, like true pipeline, like full funnel management and is Harsha said earlier, like where we live is above where they’re living in that client journey. And what scorpions, like built our entire business on is just being fantastic at getting consumers to services and their time and need like we that’s what we think about every single day. Every single market, they have consumers that need a service in that moment, and usually it’s pretty critical, how do we get them there effectively, with the best customer experience? And so I think from us, it’s, how do we get those consumers problems solved faster if you’re a scorpion client than if you’re not, and and that part is, I think, a really fantastic like lead into this full funnel visibility of where do these clients exist in that pipeline where you dropping the ball is a is a firm, and being able to be strategic partners with our clients and solving those problems day in and day out, with visibility in real time. And I think those, I think you’ll start to see roles in businesses that in firms that are much more correlated to like operations than you see today. I think today it’s usually an office manager that’s mostly thinking about like hiring an HR in the office, and then I think you’re going to see those roles evolve to be kind of experts you see like the Salesforce administrators and businesses, but I think you’ll really start to see roles be created in firms that are thinking about, how do I leverage these insights and make the right decisions to effectively grow our practice, or be more efficient or lower cost to serve, you know, and so on and so forth. And I think you’ll see that across the legal market, especially with the introduction of like V Lex and and tools, and marrying things like that with, you know, Clio duo and like, if you look at the Clio product stack today, there’s clear evolution to to helping attorneys operate faster. And so I just think that marrying those two things together is what you’ll see. And we don’t even know what else we could do together yet. I think that’ll continue to evolve.

Robert Hanna  58:04  

And I guess that’s what’s very exciting about the partnership. And again, the focus on sort of data and, you know, insights driven decisions. Because I remember very early on when a mentor said to me, when emotions go up, sometimes intelligence decisions can go down. So the fact that you could be so focused on utilising data and utilising these insights to make strategic, highly credible, valuable decisions, to ultimately be better, better services for your clients, which has been the good nucleus of this discussion. Harsha, and I think you would add to that, before we look to close or any sort of final points you would like to add regard the partnership.

Harsha Chandra Shekar  58:35  

Yeah, no, I’m really excited about this partnership, and so are our customers, and that’s because this is creating very tangible value for them. And I’ll tell you this like the the moment you bring up any partnership opportunity to a leadership team, the first question that comes up is, what’s the benefit for the customer? And in this particular case, we actually had really strong data to show how when a Clio customer is using Scorpion, they’re a lot more productive and their earnings are significantly better than an average Clio customer that is not using scorpion. And I’m very excited that you know we are unlocking this functionality to help our customers make more money. And historically, Clio has been this great platform that made law firms a lot more efficient, but now Clio is becoming this platform that’s not just making them efficient, but also making them a lot more money. Because A, we have partnerships like scorpion and B, we have tools like wincent and relax that’s coming on our platform pretty soon, which will actually help them do their core work in a much more effective and efficient manner, leveraging AI, and that’s really changing the way customers are going to perceive. Clio.

Robert Hanna  1:00:01  

And it’s not just about satisfying clients with Clio. And what I’ve admired watching the journey, it’s about delighting. And everything you said, there is going to be delighting, isn’t it? Clio, existing clients and future clients, in terms of, you know, all the amazing tools and efficiencies that you’re going to bring, this has been a wealth of information and really rich discussion. I’ve enjoyed learning more about the whole deep thought process the time and just the effort and everything that’s been involved in terms of making this wonderful partnership happen. And if people would like to know more coming to you, Kirby, in terms of scorpion or indeed, updates, is there any way you would like them to go? Is there a particular website or handle you would like them to visit if they’re interested in learning more about scorpion?

Kirby Oscar  1:00:45  

Yeah, go to scorpion.co, clear.

Robert Hanna  1:00:51  

There we go. And Harsha, from your perspective, is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up, or anywhere our listeners would like to go or to get any more information you think might be useful? 

Harsha Chandra Shekar  1:01:00  

Clio.com/scorpion, simple. Keep it simple, exactly. 

Robert Hanna  1:01:05  

Thank you both so so much. Really enjoyed today’s discussion. It’s been an absolute blast having you on the legally speaking podcast, wishing you lots of continued success with this partnership, and indeed, lots of future pursuits. But from now, from all of us in the show, 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 for the link to join our community there, over and out.