Clio

The single best reason to work at Clio is that while it has grown a lot in the past few years, the founders (Jack and Rian) have worked hard to protect the "scrappiness" of the company. This means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but in the context of this review it means: single people can and regularly do have an enormous impact on the company.

I've worked at other places, but I've never worked at a place where I have felt so empowered to make changes as required in order to streamline processes and effect real change within the organization.

Other reasons that working at Clio is an excellent way to spend your time:

• Clio is a very welcoming and inclusive workspace.
• But we don't take it to f*cking ridiculous extremes of political correctness and formality.
• Clio has both a strong local culture (in Vancouver) and a strong remote culture (via text chat).
• The Founders care about the company, but also about the employees as well as abstract notions like "morality". They aren't always right on the money at first (although much of the time they are), but they'll always listen to reasons that they aren't right, and judge the words fairly.
• Clio works very hard to be a good company to their customers. Extra time is put in to do things correctly, respectfully, securely, and to really help lawyers be more productive and to grow their practices. Legitimately, Clio is trying to improve the practice of law -- and that's amazing.

You'll like it so much that you'll have a hard time achieving work-life balance at times. Not because Clio is sweating you to work harder, but because YOU are sweating you to work harder.

You need to pack bag lunches if you're in Vancouver -- unfortunately, there is an intractable food desert around the Vancouver HQ.

Finally, Clio is still growing, and sometimes there are growing pains that come along with that. In particular, there are some growing pains around the company "deepening." It feels like Clio is still "figuring out" some of the things about being a mid-sized company (i.e., performance feedback, people management, etc.). Still, it's an adventure, and everyone is just trying to get through it together. So, as long as you remember that nobody's perfect and everyone's rowing to the same end, it'll eventually work itself out.

When implementing personnel management, performance management, and so forth, try hard to figure out a way not to screw up the owl drawing that can (and does!) still occur at Clio.

When things deepen, that sort of thing gets a lot harder to protect, but it is so, SO worth it!