Implementation Guidance provides practical advice and design recommendations for using Clio Operate features effectively.

These resources outline different implementation approaches, highlight best practices, and explain the advantages and trade-offs of different approaches to help firms make informed design decisions.

Example topics include:

• Managing inbound email
• External conflict checking

Implementation Guidance provides practical advice and recommended approaches for implementing Clio Operate effectively.

Drawing on experience from real-world implementations, this guidance helps organisations understand how best to use platform features, functionality, and configuration approaches to support efficient and scalable solutions.

Rather than starting from scratch or learning through trial and error, teams can leverage proven implementation patterns and practical recommendations to accelerate their implementation journey.

Practical Experience, Applied

Implementation Guidance is developed from hands-on experience across many implementations. It utilises lessons learned, common patterns, and practical design considerations that help organisations make informed decisions when configuring and deploying solutions.

Each piece of guidance focuses on a specific capability or implementation challenge, explaining:

• Different ways the feature or capability can be implemented
• When particular approaches may be most appropriate 
• Advantages and trade-offs of different design choices 
• Practical considerations for implementation and ongoing operation

This enables organisations to select the approach that best aligns with their business processes, technical environment, and operational requirements.

Supporting Faster, Better Implementations

By providing clear guidance on how to use platform capabilities effectively, Implementation Guidance helps organisations:

• Reduce time spent researching or experimenting with configuration approaches
• Avoid common implementation pitfalls
• Apply proven patterns and practices
• Design solutions that are scalable and maintainable

Implementation Guidance complements Accelerators and Workflow Patterns, helping organisations not only implement solutions faster, but also implement them well.

Implementation Guidance may cover a wide range of implementation considerations, such as:

• Approaches for ingesting and managing inbound email
• Implementing external conflict checking processes with external datasets
• Best practices for configuration management and release processes 

Each topic focuses on helping organisations make informed implementation decisions based on practical experience and common industry patterns. Together with Accelerators, Implementation Guidance forms part of the Implementation Acceleration approach, helping organisations implement Clio Operate with greater speed, structure, and confidence.

Accelerators help firms start implementation with proven foundations rather than a blank page.

Built from real-world Clio Operate implementations, Accelerators provide structured starting points for common legal operational scenarios. They include pre-designed configurations, workflows, and supporting guidance that significantly reduce the time required to design and build solutions from scratch.

Accelerators are designed to speed up implementation while maintaining flexibility. They provide the foundational configuration for a subject area, enabling teams to focus their time on tailoring the solution to their specific business needs rather than building core components from the ground up.

Designed as Foundations — Not Plug-and-Play Solutions

Accelerators are not intended to be deployed as plug-and-play solutions.

Instead, they provide the foundational configuration for a particular subject area, which organisations can build upon to deliver their full business solution.

Every firm operates differently, and it is the responsibility of those implementing an Accelerator to ensure the final solution:

• Meets their specific business requirements
• Aligns with internal policies and procedures
• Complies with relevant regulatory and legislative obligations

Accelerators should therefore be treated as structured starting points, not finished implementations.

Accelerator packs fall into two categories: Functional Accelerators and Micro Solutions.

Faster Implementation, Proven Foundations

By providing pre-designed configuration and practical implementation guidance, Accelerators enable organisations to:

• Reduce solution design time
• Start implementation with proven patterns
• Focus effort on tailoring solutions rather than building from scratch
• Deliver value from Clio Operate more quickly

This catalogue brings together everything available to support your Clio Operate implementation.

Accelerator Recipe Cards define how different accelerators and sample configuration can be combined to support specific areas of legal work.

While individual accelerators provide distinct solutions for particular processes or operational capabilities, most legal practice areas require multiple processes working together. Recipe Cards bring these components together to form a collection of accelerators and sample configuration that can form the foundation for implementing a practice area solution.

You can think of Accelerators as the ingredients, and Recipe Cards as the recipe that combines those ingredients into a practical solution.

Example: Personal Injury Recipe Card

A Personal Injury practice area implementation may require a combination of common accelerators, practice-specific accelerators and sample ‘starter’ work types for things like instructions and matters, this is to provide the ability to visualise and demo what an implemented solution could look like.

A Personal Injury Recipe Card might include:

Common accelerators:

• Proceedings
• Offers
• Forms of Authority (FOA) & Record Requests
• Managing Witnesses

Personal Injury specific accelerators:

• Managing CRU
• Personal Injury limitation date calculator

Sample Configuration:

• A sample personal injury instruction work type, including sample participant roles, key dates, portal, etc.
• A sample personal injury matter work type, including sample participant roles, key dates, portal, etc.
• Sample data capture such as injury details
• Sample budgets for capturing claimed amounts/reserves

Together, these components form a foundation for designing and implementing a Personal Injury practice area, which can then be tailored to reflect the firm’s specific processes, policies, and regulatory requirements.

Guidance, Not Prescriptive Solutions

Recipe Cards are intended to provide guidance and inspiration, rather than prescriptive implementation designs.

Different firms structure their processes in different ways, and organisations should review the accelerators listed within a Recipe Card to determine:

• Which accelerators are relevant to their needs
• How those accelerators should be adapted
• What additional configuration may be required

Recipe Cards should therefore be viewed as illustrative combinations of accelerators that help guide implementation planning.

By showing how accelerators can be combined into practical solutions, Recipe Cards help firms:

• Visualise how practice area solutions can be assembled
• Identify relevant accelerators more quickly
• Design practice-specific solutions more efficiently
• Accelerate overall implementation planning

Together with Accelerators, Recipe Cards form part of the Implementation Acceleration approach, helping organisations implement Clio Operate with greater speed, structure, and confidence.

As part of the Operate accelerator strategy we are developing accelerator specific design principles to ensure we have a consistent and scalable design approach.

These are design principles, not rigid rules. Exceptions are permitted where there is a clear, value-driven reason to deviate.

1. Designed as Foundations, Not Ready-to-Use Solutions

Accelerators are not intended to be deployed as ready-to-use solutions for client implementations. Instead, they provide the foundational configuration for a particular subject area, which clients build upon to deliver their full business solution.

In the legal enterprise sector, every client operates differently. It is the responsibility of those implementing an accelerator to ensure that the final implementation:

• Meets the client's specific business requirements
• Aligns with internal policies and procedures
• Complies with relevant regulatory and legislative obligations

2. Matter Type and Non-Matter Type Accelerators

Accelerators broadly fall into two categories:

• Matter work type accelerators — built around a specific matter or case type, e.g. real estate residential sales or claimant personal injury.
• Accelerators used in relation to a matter work type — not tied to a specific matter type, but used in addition to them, e.g. undertakings, mediation, or hearings.

Where possible, accelerators in the second category should be jurisdiction and matter-type agnostic. This allows us to deliver value to more clients and implementations, more quickly. It also means that clients who cover multiple jurisdictions and matter types can utilise a consistent approach and starting point for driving standardised implementations.

3. Self-Contained and Exportable

Accelerator configuration should be as self-contained as possible, so it can be exported reliably:

• No third-party system integrations
• No inherited configuration or references to other work types, wherever avoidable
• Typically no more than one work type per accelerator, with no dependencies on other work types or Operate features

Dependencies of this kind limit exportability and create unwanted dependencies for client implementations.

4. Recognising Reusable Functional Elements

If a functional element identified within a matter work type accelerator could apply to other matter types, it should become a standalone accelerator rather than remain embedded.

For example, undertakings are used on both real estate and family matter types. Undertakings should therefore become a standalone accelerator, usable across both.

5. Avoid Abstract Work Types

Accelerators should not use abstract work types. If two work types share enough commonality to suggest an abstraction layer, they are more likely one work type which could use sub-types for differentiating the minor variations.

6. Designed to be Added to, Not Stripped Back

Accelerator content should be designed on the assumption that clients will add to it to meet their needs — not that they will need to remove content that isn't relevant.

For this reason, accelerators generally exclude elements known to vary significantly between clients and environments — for example, approval processes or time recording — as these are defined by each client's own operational and business requirements.

7. Supporting Scaffolding

A minimal config scaffold should be provided to enable accelerators to be demo-able and enable gap analysis. A simplified instruction work type and a simplified mandate work type will be provided in the future to further support matter work type accelerators, enabling a realistic implementation context.

These standards aim to ensure accelerator configuration is consistent, standardised and exportable across our suite of accelerators. 

Unless specified here or in the accelerator design documents, configuration should remain at its OOTB/default state.