Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Clio, poses for a photograph at the company's headquarters in Burnaby, B.C., on Friday, March 6, 2020DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
Clio has closed a transformational US$1-billion purchase funded partly by a US$500-million equity financing that values the company at US$5-billion.
Burnaby, B.C.-based Clio, legally named Themis Solutions Inc., has also negotiated a US$350-million debt facility to fund investments in artificial intelligence and strategic acquisitions as it looks to expand its set of digital offerings to lawyers.
“We’ve built up a war chest to equip ourselves for what I consider to be the most profound evolution we’ve ever gone through,” Clio chief executive and co-founder Jack Newton said in an interview.
Founded in 2008, the company entered this year as a leading provider of practice management software to smaller law firms, offering lawyers a cloud platform to perform such tasks as bookkeeping, accounting, billing, client onboarding and document and case file management.
It will end 2025 as an emerging powerhouse providing AI-enabled software for law firms large and small to manage all aspects of both the business and practice of law. Clio now generates US$400-million in revenue and is profitable; it’s used by more than 400,000 legal professionals and has ambitions to go public.
Its transformation has been fuelled by two acquisitions. In March, Clio bought U.K.-based Sliced Bread Ltd., known as Sharedo, a practice management provider for large law firms. That deal, Clio’s largest to date, doubled its potential market globally.
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In June, Clio agreed to buy Barcelona-based vLex LLC from European private equity firm Oakley Capital for US$1-billion in cash and equity. The acquisition, one of the largest by a Canadian private tech company, expanded Clio into another new area – legal research – again doubling its potential market and pitting it against giants Thomson Reuters Corp. and LexisNexis. (Thomson Reuters’s controlling shareholder, the Thomson family, owns The Globe and Mail.) That deal has now closed.
vLex built its business by accumulating a library of more than one billion legal documents, but had little presence in the U.S. until it was sold to Oakley in 2022. vLex merged in 2023 with Washington-based Fastcase, giving it access to more than one million lawyers in the U.S.
vLex also developed a generative AI assistant called Vincent that automatically reads cases, creates research memos, builds arguments, flags potential legal issues, cites authorities and drafts documents. Similar to agents built by Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, Vincent includes features to prevent a common problem with generative AI technology – its propensity to make up answers.
With an expanded product, Clio now positions itself as an “intelligent legal work platform,” distinguished from rivals that offer practice management or legal research, but not both. Mr. Newton unveiled the company’s strategy at a user conference in Boston last month, saying Clio’s AI tools could proactively engage in legal work, automating a range of tasks including drawing data from documents, providing cited recommendations for case plans, and anticipating as well as enacting next steps for lawyers in their workflows, such as drafting client updates. “It’s now on us to execute on that vision,” Mr. Newton told The Globe.
The new vision has already won plaudits from pundits. Joe Patrice, an editor at Above the Law, an industry news and information website, called the strategy a moon shot plan for Clio “to become an everything app for lawyers,” adding, “it’s difficult to bet against Clio’s capacity to convert on its ambitions.”
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Bob Ambrogi, co-founder of LawNext Legal Technology Directory, called Clio’s new direction in a blog post an “inflection point in the evolution of legal tech” that “aims to dissolve the line between the business of law and the practice of law and to redefine how legal work itself gets done.”
Clio’s equity financing was led by U.S.-based private equity firm New Enterprise Associates, which also led a US$900-million deal in 2024 to buy out employees and early investments. The deal was also backed by other existing investors TCV, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Sixth Street Growth and JMI Equity. The debt facility is backed by Blackstone and Blue Owl Capital.
“This is not only a revalidation of our original thesis but a double-down on Jack and the team,” said NEA co-CEO Tony Florence in an interview. He added that Clio’s strategy reflects a new era in which vendors need to show “demonstrated return on investment” for customers using their AI-powered software.
Clio continues to keep apace with other emerging Canadian leaders including Wealthsimple Financial Corp., now valued at $10-billion after a $750-million financing, and 1Password, whose CEO David Faugno told BetaKit last week that his company had surpassed US$400-million in revenue.