Ambrogi interviews
Landmark news broke this morning that law practice management company Clio has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the AI and legal research company vLex for $1 billion in cash and stock.
After my initial report earlier today, I had the opportunity to sit down with Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton to discuss this deal and what it means for the legal tech market. Below is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length, style and consistency.
Ambrogi: I feel like every time I’m on a call with you, it’s some news that’s bigger than the last time I talked to you. And I can’t even imagine what the next call is going to be like, because this is pretty big.
Newton: I don’t know how we’ll keep it up, but we’ll do our best.
Ambrogi: Honestly, I’m still trying to process and digest this, so help me understand this. What’s the significance of this deal?
Newton: Well, I think it’s hard to understate the significance, Bob. Like you, I myself have had a hard time processing just all the opportunity this represents. And I think in the age of AI especially, there’s really a first-in-legal-tech-history opportunity to bring together the business of law and practice of law together. What I saw about a year ago was that AI would drive a really deep convergence of the business of law and practice of law. These had, up to this point, been two very discreet universes in legal and in legal tech. Lawyers had their business-of-law tools like Clio, and they had their practice-of-law tools like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis and Fastcase and vLex. While there might be some superficial integration between those two tools, they were really discrete.
What we saw with AI was the incredible opportunity that it represented … to bring these two worlds together and to drive a convergence of these two worlds where you’re able to look at all of your legal workflows and all of your legal data from one vantage point. Especially as we evolve into an era of agentic AI, we saw an opportunity for Clio to evolve as a platform – as a platform that is not just orchestrating the work of human legal professionals, but helping those human legal professionals orchestrate the work of agentic AI, helping support them in realizing their full potential and helping them deliver best-in-class legal services to their clients.
We saw vLex as a unique company and a unique asset in the marketplace to enable those AI ambitions and our ambitions – to bring together the business of law and practice of law. This company is incredible in that – as you’ve pointed out in your own writing – they’ve built what is widely regarded as the best legal AI in the market. They have the most comprehensive global legal database. When brought together, this represents an opportunity to bring incredibly strong AI capabilities to Clio’s platform and to leverage the incredible wealth of data and actionable insights that data represents and embed those deeply within the tool that lawyers use every day in the form of Clio.
We really haven’t seen in the history of legal tech these two types of companies brought together. The Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis duopoly is rooted in a history of legal publishing. Bringing these technologies to the place that legal work gets done, I think, is a uniquely empowering capability for legal professionals. And I think this becomes essential in the world of AI because legal professionals will expect the tools they’re using to support both their execution of the business of law and them doing their real legal work within the practice of law. Bringing these under one platform, we think is the same kind of unlock that Microsoft was able to achieve when they brought Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office together for the first time. We’ve all seen what a powerful combination of platforms that has been over the course of the last 20-plus years. We think this is the combination of platforms that will power the next 20-plus years of legal innovation.
Ambrogi: You’re talking a lot about the AI capabilities that vLex has developed. It’s also a substantial legal research database. It’s a substantial source of litigation data. What do those parts bring to Clio or how do you see those parts as fitting into what you’re doing?
Read more at
