Jack Newton, Clio. Image: © Connor McKenna/SiliconRepublic.com
Episode seven of The Leaders’ Room’s season two features Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Canadian legal tech provider Clio. This series is created in partnership with IDA Ireland.
Season two of The Leaders’ Room podcast again sees host Ann O’Dea get up close and personal with the Irish-based leaders of some of the world’s most influential technology, health-tech, software and engineering companies with operations in Ireland.
As well as getting their insights on the nature of good leadership and the strategies that define success in some of the world’s most influential companies, the series also gets their expert views on the big trends that are shaping their sectors.
In this episode, we spoke to Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Canadian legal-tech provider Clio about his approach to leadership at a successful and rapidly growing young company, founded back in 2008 with a mission to fundamentally transform the legal sector through cloud computing.
In a series that mainly focuses on local leaders of large global players, this episode was a little different with the opportunity to get Newton into the studio on a flying trip to Dublin, and really get an insight into the founder’s journey.
Clio makes cloud-based systems for lawyers to help them manage and grow their legal firms. Newton describes it as ‘an operating system for law firms’. Lawyers use Clio to help run their operations, communicate with their clients, manage their finances and produce documents. It makes Clio a fascinating case study, given the legal sector has been historically so paper-based and security obsessed – with good reason given the sensitivity of the data they deal with.
In such a compliance-led sector, there was always going to be resistance to the move toward cloud-based systems, so it is interesting to hear Newton explain how they navigated that challenge – very successfully, based on their remarkable growth since Newton and his lifelong friend Rian Gauvreau founded the company in 2008.
In July 2024 it closed it Series F funding round with an equity investment of more than $500m, along with participation from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Sixth Street Growth, CapitalG, and Tidemark, valuing the company at some $3bn.
Clio’s headquarters is in Vancouver, but they have offices in Toronto, Calgary, Sydney and they’ve been in Dublin since 2013. Newton explains how he and Gauvreau saw the legal sector’s resistance to cloud technology as an opportunity, rather than a problem, giving Clio the chance to be the first if they did it right, and face little competition.
A computer scientist by background Newton of course has overseen a careful integration of machine learning and AI over recent years and describes specific use cases for AI within Clio.
Lawyers can, for example, ask Clio natural language questions and use it to help summarise, analyse and draft documents. He believes AI and automation will help lawyers to be more productive and concentrate on the more valuable work they do. When it comes to leading such a fast-growing business, Newton points to a growth mindset while retaining humility, all very sensible.
But I particularly enjoyed his third analogy of ‘drawing the owl’, how he looks for leaders and team members that can draw the broad strokes and then figure all the rest out. It is quite a visual analogy, so if you haven’t come across it before, I do recommend you pop the phrase in your search bar to truly grasp the concept. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
We’re extremely grateful to all our interviewees for taking the time to come into the studio and share their insights and their intelligence again for season two of the podcast. And big thanks as ever to our partners IDA Ireland who have made this series possible.
The Leaders’ Room podcast is released fortnightly and can be found by searching for ‘The Leaders’ Room’ wherever you get your podcasts. For those who prefer their audio with visuals, filmed versions of the podcast interviews are all available here on SiliconRepublic.com.
Check out The Leaders’ Room podcast for in-depth insights from some of Ireland’s top leaders. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
