How one firm cut billing time from days to hours with Clio
How Leiper Gupta Family Lawyers rebuilt its operations to grow faster, bill smarter, and keep client care at the centre of everything
Leiper Gupta Family Lawyers (LGFL) was never meant to be a conventional firm. When Rita Gupta and her co-founder Anne Leiper set it up in 2008, they wanted autonomy and faster decision-making, free from the partner committees where nothing ever seemed to get decided. That meant building the firm around technology from the very beginning.
Nearly 18 years later, LGFL has grown into a leading family law boutique with 11 staff and a fully paperless operation. Rita now shares what she’s learned with others, speaking at legal technology conferences and having recently completed the Goldman Sachs Mini MBA.
18 years of growth also meant 18 years of evolving demands. Their original case management software had been a reasonable fit at the start. Both Rita and Anne knew of it from a previous firm, and the system held up well enough in the early years. But it had been built primarily as an accounting tool with case management added on top, and as LGFL’s volume grew, the gaps became harder to work around.
“I never do anything less than a hundred and twenty miles an hour, so for me it was really frustrating.”
Their software wasn’t cloud-based, which meant billing often had to wait. Getting invoices out remotely meant carrying a laptop and hunting for a reliable connection. Rita was always working wherever the day took her, and the system made that harder than it needed to be. She remembers one holiday in Devon where it took hours just to get the monthly bills through, the system crashing repeatedly.
Seeing the ceiling before you hit it
Rita could see where the firm was headed: more practice areas, more clients, more complexity. Technology had been central to LGFL from the start, and she knew that as the firm evolved, the systems had to evolve with it.
“Any law firm wanting to survive has to embrace technology positively. It’s not something we can ignore.”
So she started evaluating options. She brought her team into the process, not just for buy-in, but because they were the ones who would be working with the technology day to day. They attended trade shows and worked through demos methodically.
In the end, two vendors made the final cut. What mattered most was how each system felt to use. Ultimately, one feature separated the two vendors: Clio’s client portal.
LGFL regularly shares large volumes of sensitive documents with clients, and doing it securely had always required more steps than it should have. “When you’re paperless, it has to be done securely,” Rita says. Clio’s client portal gave them a straightforward way to do exactly that. Now clients have one place to access everything, and documents get where they need to go without the hassle.
Choosing the right centre of gravity
Rita had been clear about what she needed: a cloud-based system with centralised data. Before, moving between tools was just part of the daily routine. With Clio, that changed.
“We love the fact that it’s all together. We don’t have disparate systems. And I think that’s really important when you’re a lean, agile firm like ours.”
Rita has always believed in getting the most out of the tools she chooses. She has since brought a solutions architect on board to deepen how the firm uses Clio, and they’re constantly exploring what else the platform can do for them.
The rhythm of a well-run firm
The first benefit Rita noticed was in their billing process. In their previous system, getting monthly invoices out across 90-100 matters was a two-to-three-day process every month, with real operational risk if the person running it was away from the office. Now, the same cycle takes hours, and multiple team members are trained to run it.
“We can usually get all our month’s bills out within hours now, whereas prior to that it would take two to three days in the old system.”
Client onboarding followed a similar pattern. The process had been dependent on individual knowledge and was hard to hand off. Rita saw an opportunity to standardise it, and the results were immediate: roughly 15-20 minutes saved per client and a much smoother experience for new team members learning the ropes.
The client portal that ultimately tipped the decision has since become one of the firm’s most valued tools. LGFL walks each new client through it in a brief onboarding session, and uptake has been better than expected. “We’ve got people who say they’re really not very tech savvy using it and loving it,” Rita says. “And it saves my inbox.”
Away from the office, Rita relies on the mobile app to keep things moving. “I was in the back of the taxi, checking a document and then time recording,” she says. The work travels with her, and nothing gets left behind.
Freeing the lawyer to be a lawyer
In addition to standardising workflows, LGFL is putting Clio’s AI capabilities to work across the practice, giving lawyers more capacity to handle the complex work only they can do. The team is constantly exploring what’s possible and runs a dedicated channel where they share prompts, compare results, and build on each other’s findings.
It reflects how the firm has always approached technology: thoughtfully, and as a team. Rita is clear about why that matters from the start.
“Technology helps us be better lawyers. My whole ethos is that it frees us up to get away from the administrative aspects of being a lawyer.”
That matters more than ever for a boutique firm competing for talent. Recruitment remains a challenge for smaller practices, but the model LGFL has built gives them the answer. When the systems are doing their job, the firm can take on more complex work, maintain a higher standard of client care, and grow without simply adding headcount to absorb the load.
18 years in, LGFL still moves at the speed it was built for. The firm Rita set out to build has never been more capable of taking on whatever comes next.
