Canadian-founded SaaS legal practice management vendor Clio has acquired UK cloud case management provider ShareDo, in a move that enables it to cater for the needs of all segments of the legal market, from solo to large enterprise customers. The acquisition will also accelerate Clio and ShareDo’s global expansion.
ShareDo’s founder and CEO Ben Nicholson will take on the role of general manager of ShareDo, which will continue to be available as an independent product.
Where Clio is used by solo to mid-market law firms, ShareDo’s customer base is typically larger law firms, corporate legal teams and insurance companies. Law firm customers include DLA Piper, DWF, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters and Leigh Day. The platform has a tight integration with Microsoft, enabling organisations to fully leverage M365 and Power Apps.
Very recently ShareDo was selected by PE-backed law firm consolidator Lawfront, which is working with company to build its own practice management system.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Clio’s founder and CEO Jack Newton said: “What we saw in ShareDo is a world class technology platform that really capably addresses the needs of the large enterprise law firm market, and that’s a segment of the market that Clio has really not penetrated.
“Historically, we’ve been very focused on the small-to-medium sized segment of the market, and in combining forces with ShareDo, we saw an opportunity to create what I would consider to be the first ever company in the history of legal tech that fully addresses the needs of every law firm, from the solo to the 1,000- person plus enterprise law firm.
“We also saw an opportunity with ShareDo to bolster our international presence. We’re already seeing a lot of success worldwide: we’ve got customers in over 130 countries, but we’re primarily based in or have our primary customer base in the US today, whereas ShareDo is primarily in the UK. We saw some real synergy there, both to bolster our presence in the UK, but also a real opportunity to dramatically expand ShareDo’s presence in in the US and help it become a truly global product as well.”
ShareDo’s founder Ben Nicholson first began speaking with Newton after Clio’s user conference ClioCon in Austin, Texas last year. He says: “I went over to ClioCon and came back to my team and said, ‘I’ve just seen what really good looks like.’”
Clio gave Nicholson access to their R&D team and Nicholson says: “I look at the enterprise legal sector and it’s so poorly served. I think we serve that market well but with all of these Clio bells and whistles it’s as if we’re levelling up and we’ve just discovered the ultimate cheat code to go from level five to six. Customers really love our stuff but now they are going to love it so much more.”
Newton added: “To play off Ben’s language, this is like unlocking a superpower for the ShareDo team where we’ll let them accelerate their product, roadmap and global expansion.”
The intention is to create ShareDo integrations with Clio products where it makes sense and Nicholson said: “It would be remiss not to provide a payment solution to the enterprise market and that’s without us having done much work. The opportunities to provide an integrated suite of enterprise applications for large law firms are there.”
Clio will be looking at opportunities across the likes of drafting, payments, calendar rules and Newton said: “We’re still on the whiteboard brainstorming what some of these opportunities might look like but I think there’s very clear opportunities for Clio Grow, Clio Draft, Clio Payments and Calendar Rules to integrate really strongly with ShareDo. While this is more blue sky thinking that might be several years down the road, what ShareDo has done in terms of workflow automation could be something we take to market for our small to medium sized customers in time too. I see opportunities to really cross pollinate between these product offerings and bring the best of both product lines to our respective customer base.”