Inside District Court Te only practical use for personal injury lawyers using
Clio’s document creation feature is to create letters to send to the client, representation agreements, and possibly captions for pleadings. Tis is a new feature that may have been rushed to market to compete with the new document creation features of Clio’s rival Rocket Matter. Hopefully, enhanced features will be added soon.
Tasks
Probably the most difficult part of law practice is creating and maintaining a consistent system to keep track of tasks. Requests for medical records must be diaried for follow-up, deadlines to file pleadings must be met, and days must be scheduled for case work.
Document Creation A new feature rolled out in January 2012, Clio now has
the ability to automatically create form documents based on information in the case. At this point, the document creation feature is a disappointment. It has solid footing—the documents are simple to create.
Te user first creates a model document. It does not need to be a formal template, but can be any Word document, or any other document (including WordPerfect) that is converted to a PDF. Te second step is to create tags that serve as placeholders,4
and to sprinkle them in the document. Tese tags might include the client’s name, address or phone number. Te problem with the document creation is that the
tags are extremely limited and seem to be geared toward billing and invoices. In a personal injury practice, document creation would be most useful for form letters like ordering medical records, sending letters of representation to insurance companies, and creating pleadings. Unfortunately, the tags are not advanced enough to allow the user to automatically import information that Clio doesn’t have fields for—namely, dates of birth, social security numbers, and vendors (like
doctors or hospitals) related to the client. 4 Available tags for any given case are viewable at
https://app.goclio.com/document_template_ example.
54 Trial Reporter / Summer 2012
Clio does a decent job—the interface for Task entry is simple enough, and Tasks can be sorted according to case, Clio user, tasks due today, tasks due tomorrow, tasks due this week, and overdue tasks. Once entered, tasks can be easily edited, and multiple reminders can be set for tasks. Te area for improvement is Task reminders. Clio gives users the option of adding e-mailed reminders or popup reminders. Users must add the reminder a specified number of minutes, hours, days or weeks before the task’s due date. Tis is somewhat complicated by the fact that Tasks don’t have times—they are only set for days. Clio assumes that every task is due at midnight on the day it is assigned, so reminders must be calculated backwards from there. Another feature for Clio to consider is the ability to simply specify as specific date and time for the reminder, without having to calculate time between the reminder and the task’s due date.
It’s also
curious that users can’t add reminders months or years before an event, except as multiples of weeks.
Calendar Aside from the same problem that is present with Tasks
(the inability to choose a specific date for a reminder), Clio’s Calendar is a terrific feature. It is simple to view different features on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly calendar. Tose features include tasks, items on the firm calendar, items on the user’s personal calendar, and statute of limitations dates. Tere is also an Agenda feature on the calendar, which
lists all upcoming tasks, events and statutes of limitations. Completed tasks have a strikethrough mark. Te Agenda allows users to effectively plan for upcoming events and see deadlines and events ahead of time, making planning easy. Users can sync the Clio calendar with Google calendars— any changes to one will be reflected on the other.
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