At the tail end of a very busy, very strong year, Clio is bucking ‘work-from-home’ tech trends by officially opening the doors to its largest office yet.
Last month, the Vancouver-based legal tech giant moved into its biggest space to date at 16 York Street in Toronto, a 28,000 square foot HQ with room for roughly 200 employees. Clio’s previous Toronto office, located on Bay Street, was “bursting at the seams,” according to Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton, and he couldn’t be happier with this expansion.
“I can’t underscore how important this space is to us,” says Newton. “We describe our work as ‘distributed by design’, so while we recognize our employees are highly distributed and in many cases working from home, we deeply want to invest in in-person connection for our team.”
Clio has offices in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver (well, Burnaby, but Newton doesn’t mind the Vancouver lump-in), as well as international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia. As many tech companies move towards shedding long-term leases and focusing on either hoteling existing office spaces or complete work-from-home approaches, Clio has found a way to walk that thin line of keeping employees excited about in-person work while still growing.
Newton emphasizes that Clio’s high-performing culture is largely built on a foundation of in-person connectedness – with limits.
“We think that in-person connection sets up teams to do the best work they can remotely and distribute it across their teams,” says Newton. Employees come in sporadically for key anchor days, and “on-sites are the new off-sites,” according to Newton.
It’s hard to prove Newton’s philosophy wrong. Earlier this year, Clio raised a historic $900 million funding round, marking a few records: the largest Canadian tech funding round ever, the largest legal tech funding round ever, and a top 5 venture SaaS deal of 2024.
With that new funding secured, Clio continues to ascend at a rapid pace. The company is now well over 1200 total employees and hiring close to 100 new roles.
At the time of the raise in mid-2024, Clio had roughly $200 million ARR, and now Newton casually slips in that the company sits at $250 million ARR, with a lofty goal of $1 billion shifting into view quicker than ever.
Like many tech companies expanding in Canada, Newton cites the Toronto tech pool as a key reason for the larger office investment, noting that the city has the broadest and deepest selection of talent in Canada.
“The breadth and depth of talent here, and the other scaled technology companies that have a presence, makes for really fertile recruiting ground,” says Newton. “As we start to think about our next stage of growth to a billion-plus ARR, I anticipate continuing to drive very quick growth in our Toronto footprint. But above and beyond, it’s patriotism that led to the expansion here.”
Big talent pools are a big deal for a few reasons. Clio is a legal tech firm with a huge number of clients across over 100 countries, but the company scaled its early business by focusing on the U.S. as a key market. That strategy has paid off so far, but now Newton and his team are looking to scale domestically, with plans to focus on their largest go-to-market push in Canada ever in 2025.
Oftentimes, when the idea of “tech talent” is mentioned, one immediately thinks of developers or product teams or data scientists. But in this new expanded Clio space, the largest team is sales. Having a massive Toronto HQ aligns with this vision perfectly.
Clio’s main target clients are law firms that vary in size, and often some of the best wins come from scaling six-figure firms to become seven-figure firms and above. The legwork required to learn and break through to these accounts is vast, requiring a huge focus on sales and a push towards recruiting the best in the business. In Toronto, the best salespeople can be recruited from every single line of business, without needing to focus on tech.
Couple this with Clio’s focus on the Canadian market, in addition to a new office located in the capital of Canadian law where hundreds of firms are just a few minutes walk away, and you have a perfect storm to break through to the Canadian market.
“With a very clear Market leadership position established in the U.S, we’re now focusing on Canada and some additional International markets as big expansion opportunities,” says Newton. “The density of Canadian law firms right here in our backyard is going to be a natural opportunity for us to build relationships.”
Of course, Toronto is also replete with tech talent, and Newton cites the abundance of AI prowess as another core factor for expansion. Clio recently debuted its generative AI assistant Clio Duo a couple months ago and continues to make inroads with bringing AI to the legal tech space.
Finance is also a major factor, and finding the right talent will help Clio with its bread and butter offerings: embedded payments. Newton and the Clio team cited embedded payments on the platform as a key role in growing the company from $100 million ARR to $200 million ARR, and more updates are coming soon.
“Payments is a big piece of that,” says Newton. “We’re now thinking about financial services more broadly: What other types of value can we bring to our customers on the platform? Whether that be lending or BNPL or payroll or other types of financial services.”
Above all, Newton is just incredibly happy to be a burgeoning piece of the Canadian technology industry, and hopes this expansion and the push into Canadian markets will continue to show other founders it’s possible to build billion dollar companies at home, and even outside of Toronto.
“Ultimately what all of us should be trying to build is this flywheel that starts generating momentum and starts feeding off of its own energy, where talent from one company that’s seen the next stage of growth can graduate out and go help that next smaller company achieve scale,” says Newton.
“It’s not enough to have a Shopify and a Clio and a handful of others. We need dozens and eventually hundreds of these success stories.”