How a ‘leap of faith’ switch to Clio transformed Azorra Limited’s practice

By moving from Leap to Clio, Azorra Limited has transformed its operations. Now, with Clio Manage and Clio Grow, the practice effortlessly saves time, works more efficiently, and grows its business.

Azorra Limited isn’t your average old-school law firm. Exclusively focused on clients in the live events industry, the London-based legal practice follows a forward-thinking strategy in everything from its client service to its hybrid working model. As such, the team also seeks a high level of innovation from their legal software.

As CEO and Founder Kirsty McShannon explains, Azorra’s previous legal software, Leap, couldn’t support their vision or workflows in a way that worked for the firm.

The limitations of old-fashioned, frustrating legal software

For both Kirsty and Azorra’s COO, Caroline Pesch, using Leap was a frustrating experience.

“It didn’t do anything it said it was going to do,” Kirsty says. It was so unuser-friendly—it used a very old-school model.”

Coming out of the pandemic, the firm grew from just Kirsty to seven people within just 18 months. They realised they needed to improve their processes and efficiency as the firm grew, so they turned to Leap.

However, they soon found that the software’s clunky document management features, lack of internal permissions control, and cumbersome interface were causing more pain and frustration than they were helping.

A more efficient solution: Clio’s intuitive legal software

When using Leap became too disappointing, Kirsty and Caroline started looking for an alternative solution—“That’s when we found Clio.”

“It was quite a leap of faith for us to go to a new provider because we had some trust issues,” says Kirsty.

While they’d tested Clio before going with Leap, they hadn’t had the time to fully explore how Clio’s intuitive features could benefit the needs and requirements of legal users.

However, following their experience with Leap, they had a clearer idea of the features and functionality that Azorra needed—and that Clio could deliver.

Azorra’s smooth transition to Clio

While initially hesitant to try a new software provider after their experience with Leap, the Azorra team decided to trust Clio.

Fortunately, Kirsty, Caroline, and the Azorra team quickly understood the difference. Where training to learn how to use Leap was sparse and less-than-helpful, adopting Clio was smooth and simple.

“The training was built around us and what worked for us—rather than what worked for the trainer,” Kirsty says. “People were always accessible for follow-up questions and answered them efficiently, succinctly, and helpfully. The onboarding process with Clio was just streets ahead of Leap’s. It was tailored to us and what we wanted to get out of it.”

As for the other members of the practice?

“They love it,” Caroline says. “I get emails from the team to say, ‘I just love Clio,’” Kirsty adds.

Clio’s reliable, solution-focused support

Beyond the initial transition to Clio, both Caroline and Kirsty appreciate Clio’s helpful and responsive support team.

“What I found brilliant was the ability to chat to someone at any time,”  Caroline says. I can just say, ‘I’m trying to do this,’ or ‘Could you help me?’ or ‘This is what we’d like to do.’ The team is super knowledgeable and very friendly.

Clio’s award-winning support team is available 24/5—that’s all day and all night from Monday to Friday—to serve you by phone, email, or live chat

Clio gives clarity and control over documents

Before using Clio, Kirsty found that substantial time and effort were wasted creating and tracking new versions of documents. With Clio, it’s easy to work with documents with confidence that you have the correct version.

“In Clio, you just launch a new one, and it saves it as a new version. You can then go back into all of the different versions, easily download them, and easily compare them.”

Optimised performance across the board with Clio

From fewer emails to reducing the need for constantly uploading documents, Clio streamlines processes and improves efficiency at Azorra.

“Time will always be against us, given what we do, but I think we can be more efficient by using tasks, setting deadlines within tasks, and giving feedback on something that someone’s working on,” Kirsty says. 

As Caroline explains, these time savings also extend to the client onboarding process. With Clio Grow, client onboarding and follow-up times are quicker and more responsive. Once the client says yes, having everything in one place makes it quick and simple to set up matters in Clio Manage.

20% of time saved per day with Clio

With Clio’s platform, Azorra Limited has slashed administrative time by an impressive 20% daily. Tasks such as document versioning and deadline setting have been simplified, allowing the team to focus more on client needs. This newfound efficiency not only streamlines internal operations but also enhances client service.

Clio makes remote work seamless and secure

Clio’s cloud-based software makes remote work easier and more efficient, improving the overall work environment for the team, which operates on a hybrid model.

“With everybody working remotely, we needed to make sure that we had a sound document management system in place where all of our contracts were stored, where we could easily access each of these documents, and, ideally, that we could also use it for time recording purposes,” Kirsty says.

With Clio, the team can work seamlessly on documents without the added back-and-forth and added risk of saving documents locally to their desktops.

The right solution for law firm growth

Now that they’ve made the switch, it’s clear that Clio can support Azorra’s future growth and success.

“Clio is the bedrock of our systems and of our processes,” Caroline says. 

To law firms considering making the move to Clio but who may be delaying the switch out of fear of change, Kirsty offers the following advice:

“Do not hesitate. It has been transformative for our business. We were not a great place previously, and it felt like everything was holding us back.”