LegalTechTalk Uncovered Ep 11 – Myles Mclaren  

Transcript

Robert Hanna: Welcome to the Legally Speaking Podcast, LegalTechTalk Uncovered mini-series powered by Clio. Please introduce yourself.

Myles Mclaren: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Myles Mclaren. I’m the channel sales lead here at Clio.

And yeah, Clio is a practice management platform, which I’m sure you’ve heard Rob talk about in recent weeks or recent months. But yeah, that’s who I am.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, and it’s great to have you, and we’re big fans of Clio on the show, and obviously recording live here at LegalTechTalk. It’s an awesome conference, loads of people here, great buzz. You can probably hear a bit of that in the background as well, because we’re literally by the speaker stage.

But could you tell me a little bit about how you’re finding the speaker sessions you’ve heard thus far at LegalTechTalk, and any standout for you thus far?

Myles Mclaren: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s been good. I think obviously shout out to the event, the first event they’ve had.

I think it’s definitely put on a good show. It’s a real, we’ve got a good lineup of speakers, a good set of sponsors, so really enjoyed that, and quite surprising with someone’s first show. I think from my side, being new to this space, I think the diversity of speakers has been good.

I think they’ve got people that have catered to different types of tech, different types of sizes of industry, you’ve got general councils, you’ve got law firms as a whole. So from my side, it’s a bit of a brain dump of understanding what’s out there, what’s going on, what’s the thought pieces, what people are thinking about in law firms. So I think that’s been really good from that perspective in terms of a standout.

You put me in a spot in terms of names here. There was definitely a session around how AI can help firms become more efficient. And I think for me, that was the best one so far.

Robert Hanna: Yeah. And obviously AI is going to be the buzzword of 2024. You touched on Clio high level, but we’d like to dive a bit deeper into Clio.

Can you describe your focus specifically with the company?

Myles Mclaren: Yeah. So I look after our channel sales here in EMEA. I think thinking about focus, one of the things we found as a business is having partners involved in a lot of these deals are vitally important.

So my focus is a number of different types of partners. So I manage the relationship and go to market with some of our solutions partners. So people in the other tech businesses, there’s net documents of the world, info tracks of the world, but then also manage the relationship with people that do services in and around Clio.

Clio is an interesting company in that we hardly do any services. We do a majority, which want to be a tech platform and sell our software. So we have a lot of trusted partners that help us with migration, document migration, training and upskilling their staff.

So I manage the relationship with those businesses as well. And then we’re also seeing a lot of adjacent kind of partners in this space. So people that look after security, manage services, MSPs.

So my job is to figure out how we can partner with these guys and sell that into clients together and add value to clients. I think that’s the ultimate thing a channel sales does.

Robert Hanna: And obviously yourself and Clio are doing a great job. And, you know, as I say, we’re big advocates for your mission to transform the legal experience for all, which is a very bold mission. And I love that because I’m kind of passionate about building a more collaborative, kinder, thriving legal community.

That’s all great, but there’s challenges, right? And it’s never straightforward because trying to get to that level is not straightforward. So what have been some of the challenges Clio, yourself, have identified in the legal sector?

And how are you addressing them specifically?

Myles Mclaren: Yeah, I think, as you mentioned there, probably moving practice management solutions is not the easiest thing to do in the world. I think, again, I don’t want to talk to you about lawyers too much. I haven’t been in this space that long.

But one of the things I’ve found is there is some apprehension, especially when you’re doing big migrations away from platforms or moving to a platform for the first time. You have to convince a lot of people. There’s a lot of things to think about.

And I think as a business, we’ve got a great sales team. We’ve got a great organisation in terms of and a great product. And I think that’s kind of helping customers come on board.

But it is a challenge to kind of get that aboard. And I think actually being in the channel is helping. One of the things I think we believe in a lot is bringing in the right people to help mitigate that.

We’ve got some excellent partners across the board that can help customers and clients do transformation. They can help customers understand what they need to do, get them ready for the big changes, make sure that they’re having the right systems integrated. And I think one of the things I think we found a challenge last year is maybe we weren’t bringing in partners as often into deals.

We’re bringing them in too late. We’re bringing them in down the line when it was already kind of decision made. I think the shift we’re trying to get towards is how do we leverage channel earlier to make customers’ journeys easier to onboard a practice management solution?

And I think we’ve got some really good partners in the space and what we’re hoping to see is better conversion, quicker conversion and more satisfaction from the customer. And not those challenges of things that are outside of the distance solution. Because the product is obviously what we focus on, but the challenge of convincing the whole business, transformation work, which is not easy.

I’m sure you see a lot of people moan about how hard it is to transform an organisation. And I think that’s something I’m hoping to change at Clio, is bringing in partners early and leveraging them early. But ultimately, it’s to have value to the customer and make sure the customers see and reap the rewards of having someone in there with them, helping them get across the line with integrating someone like Clio. 

Robert Hanna: Yeah, and I know you’ve got so many great things that you are thinking about. I love you’ve got the 24-5 support system. I love the fact that you have zero downtime when people are thinking of actually transferring.

They haven’t got that worry of, oh my God, what’s going to happen? And then also just generally, you really care about the sort of taking them on the journey, making them feel valued and all the great things that you’ve just seen. I think it’s great.

Okay, what’s the future look like for Clio? Any exciting things you can let us in on or any future plans or is it all hush-hush?

Myles Mclaren: Yeah, Clio is quite a hush-hush company sometimes. They do a lot of, I think we’re an interesting company in that we often don’t like talking. We like to perform and do it.

And I think there’s a lot of stuff happening in the background where we’re improving the product, probably some of the buzzwords people are hearing, we’re working on it. But when you see it, it’s not gonna be a half-baked product. It’s gonna be a product that’s ready for the market and really tested and added value to the business.

I think for us in EMEA, we’re seeing a lot of traction in emerging markets. I think that’s gonna be something that we really focus on. And one of the areas we’re also gonna see more of is, Clio historically was more on the smaller end of businesses, kind of up to 50, we’ll be doing a lot more in the mid-market and adding value to some of the bigger firms.

And I think it’s a shift that’s happened and we’re seeing a lot more wins in that space. And I think the future holds a lot more for that in the future for businesses. So yeah, I think those are the types of things we’re seeing, even some of the regions we’re seeing, like Kenya, for example, real big buzz over there, real big push over there.

So hopefully you see us in more regions and more places in the near future.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, exciting. It’s global. It’s fast paced.

Yeah, love what you’re doing. Love the energy that you bring into Clio. Love, generally, what the platform stands for.

And also the community that you really play a lot of part in in terms of supporting the legal community more broadly when it comes to things like access to justice and so many other things as well. If people want to connect with you or learn more about Clio, where’s the best place for them to go?

Myles Mclaren: Yeah, feel free to reach out to me. My name’s Myles Mclaren on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to grab a coffee or go for lunch, actually being centered here in London, so I can get around the UK quite easily.

So yeah, feel free to reach out. My email address is myles.mclaren@clio.com. And we can go from there.

Robert Hanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Myles. It’s been a real pleasure.

Myles Mclaren: No worries, much appreciated.

Robert Hanna: 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.