Building for Growth: Bird Law’s Journey With Clio

Christian Bird spent years working inside other law firms before he started his own – Bird Law. Across seven different practices, he tried nearly as many practice management systems, which gave him a clear sense of what a good one should feel like by the time he set out on his own. When he founded Bird Law in Adelaide in 2025, he built a practice around high net worth individuals, family offices and premium commercial businesses, working across corporate and commercial law, dispute resolution, franchising, retail and property, billing a mix of fixed fee and hourly work.

He was also, in the beginning, the only person at the firm. That meant every hour spent learning new software was an hour not spent on client work, and every dollar spent on subscriptions came straight out of his own margin. Those two constraints, time and cost, shaped almost every decision he made in the firm’s first year.

Christian first heard about Clio through his mum. 

What got him across the line initially was the price, dramatically cheaper than anything else on the market while he was still a firm of one. What kept him there was that Clio turned out to be instantly better than anything he had used before.

Christian had sat through two or three day inductions at other firms before feeling comfortable in their systems. With Clio, working directly with a Clio representative, onboarding only took him an hour. 

Bird Law added a new staff member almost every month in its first year, growing from one lawyer to 12. New lawyers get their Clio account on their first morning, and are logging time and connecting their email before lunch, handled entirely in-house without needing a Clio representative in the room again. Staff arriving from other systems notice the difference immediately, and the adjustment period that normally comes with a new hire barely registers.

The Outlook integration turned out to matter more than Christian expected, letting correspondence and matters live in the same place instead of being copied back and forth between systems. Xero plays a similar role on the financial side, handling invoicing while Clio produces the reporting, including work in progress figures, that would otherwise never make it across.

As the firm scaled past a dozen lawyers, Christian’s own relationship with the software shifted. Early on, Clio was simply the thing that let him practice law without friction. Now, running a firm with a single principal overseeing more than a dozen lawyers, he spends more time in the reporting than in the billing itself. 

He can see what’s billed, what’s unbilled, and how the firm compares to the same point a year earlier. Going from one lawyer to 12 also meant 12 sets of software costs, and Christian had budgeted for that to sting. It didn’t with Clio.

There were no onboarding fees on top of that and no contract locking him in.
Trust accounting brought a different kind of relief. As a partner at his previous Sydney firm, someone else had always managed the trust account, so running his own for the first time at Bird Law was, in his words, a genuinely scary step. It turned out to be the smoothest part of the transition.

Bird Law is planning to grow again this year, from 12 lawyers toward 20 to 25. Christian still points to the trust account reconciliation as the easiest part of running his own firm, a small detail that says something larger about what he built underneath the growth. The ambition was always going to be there. What Bird Law has is the infrastructure to match it.