Clio
When Clio bought vLex for $1 billion in June, it called the acquisition a “turning point for the future of legal work.” So far, industry watchers aren’t convinced.
Clio is one of legal tech’s dinosaurs. For nearly two decades, it’s sold the unglamorous software that law firms use to send invoices and track cases. The $3 billion company has enjoyed a recent growth spurt, adding $100 million in revenue annually for two straight years.
The company it scooped up, vLex, is a different animal: a pioneer in legal research and the closest thing yet to a serious rival to LexisNexis and Westlaw, both deep repositories of case law. It built a vast digital law library and, more recently, layered in generative artificial intelligence to help lawyers search it.
The $1 billion deal, the largest in legal tech history, sought to fuse these offerings. As Clio founder and chief executive Jack Newton put it, Clio handles the business of law; vLex covers the practice of law. Together, they’re pitching an all-in-one stack for lawyers.
Based on conversations with nine people, including three Clio leaders and three competitors, the acquisition is really chasing two goals. One is to climb upstream into Big Law — a long shot, by many accounts. The other is to chip away at the duopoly in legal research.
LexisNexis, founded in 1973, and Westlaw, launched in 1975, have spent decades digging a moat that’s almost impossible to breach. Only one company has come close. And Clio just bought it.
Cracking the duopoly
With 200,000 users, Clio has traction with the lawyers who make up the bulk of the American bar: solos and small firms. These attorneys are more likely to run their practice from a desktop computer, still have a fax machine in the office, and often turn to free tools like Fastcase, a vLex product, for research.
They’re far less likely to be on LexisNexis or Westlaw, which are priced for Big Law with subscriptions that can run into the tens of thousands a year. According to a 2024 American Bar Association survey 45% of solo attorneys report using a paid online research tool, compared to 78% of lawyers at larger firms.
The legal-research duopoly has been propped up by the simple fact that American law, while technically public domain, isn’t freely available.
Federal courts charge for access to filings by the page. Some state courts offer recent opinions online, but older decisions may be stuffed into filing cabinets. Even when documents are digitized, they’re hard to search.
Lexis and Westlaw solved that by collecting, cleaning, and organizing the material into usable form, said Shlomo Klapper, a former litigator turned legal-tech entrepreneur. They package the law and sell it back to lawyers, law schools, and the courts themselves.
Law schools often give students free access to Lexis and Westlaw. Because lawyers spend years becoming fluent in one system, they’re reluctant to switch, making it easy for the incumbents to set prices and shut out competitors.
Like Clio, vLex built its base among small-time lawyers and says it now reaches 2 million users through state bar associations that bundle in access. Joining forces gives them a chance to pitch their products to each other’s customers, creating what could be a major cross-selling opportunity.
For small firms without IT support, an all-in-one “everything law co.” is far more attractive than piecing together software from multiple vendors, said Adrian Parlow, a legal tech founder whose startup, PointOne, works to automate timekeeping and billing for law firms.
With vLex at its side, Clio believes it can loosen the grip on legal research. As analyst Richard Tromans put it, the bet is to turn the “Big Two” into a “Big Three.”
David Wong, chief product officer at Thomson Reuters, Westlaw’s parent company, isn’t convinced Clio’s “one-stop shop” is a serious threat. The idea of linking billing to research may offer small firms some efficiencies, he said.
“I don’t know if it fundamentally changes how you work,” he added.
Selling upstream to Big Law
Where the story gets shakier is Clio’s other ambition: to sell upstream.
Clio insists it’s already on the path. Chief operating officer Ronnie Gurion, a former Uber exec, points to more than 1,000 mid-market firms using its software. He framed the acquisitions of vLex and ShareDo — a Clio-like platform that served many of the largest law firms in the UK — as a bridge into the highest-grossing firms and top-tier enterprises.
The pitch is that Big Law, like smaller firms, will eventually prefer a single, cloud-native platform over a patchwork of tools. But making that case means persuading some of the most entrenched, risk-averse institutions that a 17-year-old practice-management company is now a peer to the research giants they’ve trusted for decades.
That’s a tough sell, said Klapper, the former attorney who now runs Learned Hand, a company building tools for judges and clerks. Lawyers at larger firms prefer to cite established sources like Westlaw or Lexis over newer databases, even if the case text is identical.
“Treatises and annotations aren’t just documents — they’re symbolic authority,” Klapper said. “Even if duplicated, they wouldn’t be trusted without the halo of their provenance.”
Clio built its empire on small law firms. Now it hopes the $1 billion it spent on vLex will help it buy a seat at Big Law’s table.
History suggests Clio may not get the warm welcome it wants.
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