Legal has a reputation for being a slow-moving industry when it comes to technology, but evidence to the contrary is mounting.
“I think the latest stats are that legal is one of the ones that’s adopting (AI) the fastest now, which is very unexpected in many ways,” Michelle Dunlea, vice president of product management at Clio, tells TechInformed.
Indeed, Clio’s own 2025 Legal Trends Report found 79% of legal professionals use AI in their firms, and 82% expect to use it even more in the ensuing 12 months.
And Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2026 found 74% of professionals (a group that includes lawyers) now use AI several times a week, with 44% relying on it multiple times a day.
From front door to research engine
Clio’s suite centers on three core products: Clio Grow, an intake and marketing tool described as the front door of the law firm; Clio Manage, which handles billing, timekeeping, invoicing and matter management; and Clio Work, a research and drafting product built on last year’s acquisition of vLex, the legal research company behind the AI engine Vincent.
The vLex deal — which closed last November alongside a $500 million funding round valuing Clio at $5 billion — pits the company more directly against research incumbents Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, whose CoCounsel and Protégé assistants are chasing the same AI-driven workflows, as well as venture-backed newcomers such as Harvey. Clio Work debuted at the company’s ClioCon conference last October and became available to solo and small firms as a standalone product in April.
The acquisition gave Clio access to more than a billion legal documents, which Dunlea says grounds Clio’s AI in verified, professional-grade legal information. “The likelihood of [hallucinations] happening is much … reduced when they have this big corpus of legal information in the background,” she says.
AI misuse and hallucinations have become much more common, leading courts in the US and elsewhere to sanction lawyers for filing briefs containing fabricated, AI-generated citations. One widely cited tracker of such incidents has logged more than 1,800 court decisions worldwide, with 69% in the United States, as of August 2026.
One hub for a solo practice
One firm hoping to avoid ending up on that list is the Matechik Law Firm, a solo practice founded by Matt Matechik that focuses primarily on guardianship cases and uses all three Clio products. He calls the platform the hub for his practice, relying on it for intake, matter management, documents, communications, timekeeping, billing, drafting, research and case tracking.
Matechik has used Clio since 2020, after moving over from another cloud-based practice platform, and says centralizing his workflow was always the priority.
“I wanted one place where everything could live, instead of having documents, emails, notes, deadlines and billing scattered around in different places,” he says. “In my practice, like most, there are a lot of sensitive facts, family dynamics, court filings and deadlines, so staying organized really matters.”
That emphasis on organization paid off when the pandemic forced the profession online almost overnight. “I was able to pivot pretty smoothly to virtual hearings, virtual consultations, electronic signatures and digital workflows because I was already doing that,” Matechik says.
Since then, Matechik has leaned further into Clio Work for substantive legal tasks such as drafting complex pleadings, conducting legal research, reviewing documents, building timelines and spotting issues.
“It can dramatically accelerate the first-draft stage of work that used to take much longer,” he says, “but the lawyer still has to review it carefully, verify the law, apply judgment and make the final decisions.”
He has also started using the tool as an adversary, asking it to pressure-test his own arguments. “It helps me identify potential weaknesses in my position before the other side does, so I can be better prepared,” he says.
Keeping a human in the loop
Both Dunlea and Matechik are emphatic that AI is not replacing legal judgment, particularly in the kind of practice areas where empathy is central to the work.
“It does not replace me, the lawyer, especially in a practice like mine — primarily guardianship, where judgment, compassion and human empathy matter so much,” Matechik says. “But it does make me more efficient, more prepared and more effective.”
Dunlea says that balance between automation and oversight has shaped how Clio builds its products.
She pointed to an early version of a scheduling tool that automatically populated a firm’s calendar from a court order’s deadlines, a feature customers rejected in favor of one they could check.
“They wanted to be able to see where every date had come from and be able to review it,” she says. “So we actually built in human-in-the-loop workflows, and that’s something that we’ve continued to do as a pattern.”
Beyond efficiency
For Dunlea, the payoff goes beyond efficiency to access to justice, allowing firms to take on more clients without burning out their lawyers on administrative work.
She pointed to an unnamed customer who recently returned to practicing law after a decade away to help a friend fight a dog-bite case in court. The customer won their case with the help of Clio’s AI, and without the grinding manual work typically needed to prepare a case.
“A lot of these people go to law school, they love practicing law, but then they end up with all this administrative overhead that gets in the way,” Dunlea says.
“I think it’s really cool that [Clio] can take that toil off of them so that they can go and represent people in court and actually have fun doing their job.”