**SUB: **Canadian product was built on case law dataset from Clio’s Jurisage acquisition.
Canadian legaltech giant Clio has launched an AI work assistant in Canada after it saw success among its US customers, the company said.
**The news: **Burnaby, BC-based Clio announced on Thursday that it is launching Clio Work, its AI-powered workspace for lawyers and legal professionals, across Canada. Clio Work allows lawyers to use generative AI tools to summarize cases by pulling from filings and transcripts, pull up relevant case law and suggest arguments, and draft legal documents. It’s already available in the US and other, smaller markets,
From the source: “Clio Work is our fastest-adopted product in Clio’s history in terms of metrics,” Luke Slan, Canada manager for Clio, said in an interview with BetaKit. “For lawyers, [they’re] just minimizing the amount of hours on non-billable work, and finding ways to be doing more business development.”
**Following the thread: **Clio said that its recent acquisition of Toronto startup Jurisage made it possible to launch the product in Canada. That’s because with Jurisage, Clio bought a comprehensive legal dataset that spans more than 470,000 cases across over 40 courts. This data allows lawyers using the platform to query and pull from a corpus of Canadian case law.
Slan said that Clio’s $1-billion USD ($1.4-billion CAD) acquisition of vLex last year allowed it to do the same thing in the US, because of its comprehensive legal database. The BC firm sued another Canadian legaltech startup, Alexi, for allegedly breaching the terms of a data-licensing agreement concerning the database. Alexi has since countersued Clio for alleged anticompetitive behaviour. A judgment hearing in Washington, DC, was scheduled for July 8, and both parties are awaiting a ruling. **Final thought: **While a Clio report released earlier this year found that 95 percent of Canadian lawyers are using AI in their work, not all of them are using the tech properly. Just last week, the Toronto Star reported that the Law Society of Ontario suspended a Toronto lawyer who had cited fake cases generated by ChatGPT, then returned to the chatbot for help preparing for her hearing. Slan claims that Clio Work would avoid this problem since its AI operates in a closed system grounded in verifiable case law—but cautions that lawyers must read everything they sign off on.
Feature image courtesy Clio.