Clio launches new AI assistant

The tool is part of the company’s wider AI-driven product roadmap and marks a ‘significant milestone.’

Clio, the Burnaby-based legaltech unicorn, has launched an AI assistant to help legal professionals prioritize critical work and boost productivity without switching applications.

Named Clio Duo, the product is connected to the company’s law firm management software. It allows customers to extract and cite details from documents within seconds, summarize text with one click, receive recommendations on high-priority tasks and matters, and automatically generate text messages and email replies to clients. According to the company, what sets it apart from other AI tools is its audit log — making it easy for lawyers to trace and verify cited references or document origins in court.

“The release of Clio Duo represents a significant milestone for both Clio and Vancouver’s tech ecosystem,” Jonathan Watson, the company’s CTO, told the Vancouver Tech Journal in an interview. “It’s a testament to our ability to drive innovation on a global scale from right here in Vancouver. This launch showcases the talent of our team, proving that world-class technology solutions can be built and scaled out of Canada.”

Approach to AI

Clio Duo was built by bringing together a combination of AI tools and leveraging large sets of feedback from customers — which currently includes over 150,000 legal professionals.

“There's folks that are wrapping OpenAI or other tools and just allowing that to be [presented to] customers,” shared Watson. “And there’s folks that are doing a lot of prompt engineering based on data to take out that learning curve for customers. We're the [latter]. We very much take away the learning that lawyers have to do [in order] to interact with these tools.”

The CTO added: “Then there's the third step [that] we're also in, which is beginning to bring back [...] some more traditional ways of solving these problems. Not everything is an LLM. You interact with LLMs, you interact with traditional machine learning systems, and you interact with a whole host of other systems.”

Security and limitation measures

A key part of Clio Duo’s functionality is its guardrails in place to build “the most locked down system” possible, said Watson.

“We have what's called a ‘red team’ on our application security team,” he explained. “They actively try to hack and manipulate our systems in nefarious ways, but for the betterment of our security and system overall. So they very much take that approach with AI as well.”

Watson said Clio Duo also prevents internal unauthorized access or misuse through customized settings.

“One of the more interesting things technology-wise is that the system works on the permissions that the attorney or the legal professional that's interacting with it has,” he said. “So even if you did manage to talk to it in a certain way, it can't cross that boundary. It makes sure that the information is locked down in the way that it should be and can’t be exfiltrated in a way that it shouldn't.”

What’s next

Clio Duo is just one major step in the company’s wider AI-driven product roadmap. While Clio is yet to reveal specifics to the media, it did share some overarching trends as hints.

"We're going to continue advancing into the practice of [...] how you get work done as an attorney, and continue to drive more solutions that will help people understand what their next set of work is [...] and how they go about their day,” revealed Watson. “We really care a lot about that. There's a lot of cognitive load in just managing your day to day, and there's a large amount of that that we can take away.”