Lawyers billed at 42% of an eight-hour working day in 2026, up from 39% the previous year, the largest single-year gain in the eleven-year history of Clio’s annual Legal Trends Report.
The figure arrived alongside a wave of product, acquisition and branding announcements from Clio’s opening day at ClioCon 2026 in Boston, where founder and CEO Jack Newton addressed more than 3,000 in-person attendees, the biggest crowd the event has drawn.
An additional 8,500 people attended virtually, and Newton told the audience that Clio now ships roughly 1,200 product updates every week across its platform.
The revenue case for AI adoption is sharpening: the report found that firms using Clio’s AI tools generate around 8% more revenue per responsible lawyer than comparable non-adopters, a gap that widens to 10% when AI is deployed across both Clio Work and Clio Manage.
AI adoption among law firms now stands at 85%, up from 79%, while nearly one in four American adults has already turned to AI for a legal question, and 46% say they would consult AI before picking up the phone to a lawyer.
On the strategic front, Clio disclosed three acquisitions: Page, which tracks legislative and regulatory activity across all 50 US states and the federal government including live committee hearings; Jurisage, which brings Canadian legal content into the platform; and Learned Hand, announced last month, which builds AI tools for judges and courts.
The judiciary theme ran through much of Newton’s roughly 95-minute keynote, with Casetext co-founder Pablo Arredondo joining Clio as senior vice president of judiciary and former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack taking the role of general manager.
Newton set “judiciary-grade AI” as the standard Clio intends to hold its products to, a phrase the company said it has trademarked.
For the first time in its 18-year history, Clio replaced its original logo with a new visual identity featuring a clear square Newton described as “a single pane of glass” into a firm’s practice, with a ring of shapes representing context flowing through the platform.
That visual consolidation mirrors a structural one: Clio Grow, Clio Manage and Clio Work are being merged into a single interface with one login and a unified inbox that places emails and text messages side by side and automatically files them to the correct matter, with rollout beginning in November.
Among the most consequential new tools is Agentic Workflows, which allows firms to describe a process in plain language or upload an existing procedure and have Clio construct and execute the steps, handling research, conflict checks, accounting tasks and document drafting without relying on simple triggers.
Clio Phones adds a fully integrated business phone system that surfaces caller records the moment a call arrives, then transcribes and summarises the conversation, extracts action items and prepares a time entry, addressing what Clio says amounts to an average loss of 4.6 billable hours per lawyer per month from unlogged calls.
Grow AI extends the intake process to after-hours calls, answering inbound queries, running screening questions and booking consultations automatically; Clio says 44% of client inquiries arrive outside office hours.
New drafting capabilities within Clio Work combine generative drafting with a library of more than 40,000 fillable court forms covering all 50 states, federal courts and USCIS, while Documents Pro adds a full document management layer with automatic categorisation, version control and audio and video transcription.
Clio Timekeeping, currently in opt-in beta, automatically captures a lawyer’s activity both inside Clio and across other applications, generating matter-matched time entries for review, with flat-fee work tracked privately to reveal whether it was priced profitably.
Vincent Projects introduces shared workspaces where legal teams can collaborate on AI-assisted research and documents, and Vincent is now integrated into Clio Operate for larger firms, with clients including BakerHostetler, Fisher Phillips, Weightmans and Stradley Ronon, as well as Minnesota’s Board of Public Defense, which selected the tool for around 950 public defenders.
A new Benchmarking and Insights feature lets firms measure their billable hours, utilisation, realization and collection rates against anonymised data from similar practices, while hybrid billing, which lets a single invoice combine flat-fee and hourly charges, has already been adopted by 25% of firms billing through Clio since its launch a month ago.
Newton framed the overall direction in his keynote: “At the most fundamental level, we transformed the technology you relied on to keep track of your practice into a platform that can actually do the work itself and run your law firm alongside you.”
Next year’s ClioCon will move to Seattle, Newton confirmed, as the company heads into 2027 with a significantly expanded product footprint and an increasingly assertive position in legal AI.