Ajax’s Clio Integration: Everything You Need to Know
For Clio firms, time leakage happens outside of Clio: in the emails, calls, redlines, and research that get written up later. A typical week loses five or more billable hours per timekeeper this way.
Ajax connects to your Clio, captures that work as it happens, and pushes finished entries back through a real two-way sync. Clio firms running Ajax recover the seat cost in the first month and add 10x to 100x ROI on top.
What is Ajax?
Ajax is a native desktop application built specifically for lawyers. It runs in the background while you work, reads what's on your screen, and drafts client-ready time entries on the right matter. You review the drafts, edit anything you want, and release them to your billing system in one click.
Ajax customizes itself to each firm during onboarding, learns the way your team writes its narratives, and runs deep two-way integrations with Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Centerbase, Filevine, Actionstep, Soluno, and most other billing systems on request. Most timekeepers see real drafts in their own voice on day one.
What is Clio?
Clio is a practice management platform used by more than 150,000 legal professionals. It handles matter management, client intake, billing, document storage, calendar, and time entry inside a single web-based system.
Clio Manage includes a built-in timer for tracking hours, and Clio Manage AI extends that with assisted time entry inside the practice management suite. Both still rely on the timekeeper to remember to track their work and write up the entry, which is where most of the billable-hour leakage happens. That gap is where Ajax fits in.
How Ajax integrates with Clio
Ajax and Clio share a deep, two-way API integration. It is one of the deepest integrations we ship. You connect once, and after that Ajax pulls your matters, codes, rates, and calendar from Clio and pushes drafted time entries back as native Clio entries with no extra work.
Because Ajax is reading what is on your screen, here is exactly how it handles your data:
Captured screen content is processed into time entries and then automatically deleted on a rolling basis. Ajax does not hang onto your data.
Ajax does not use your data to train any AI model.
Ajax's downstream AI vendors are contractually prohibited from retaining or training on any data that passes through.
Ajax is SOC 2 certified.
Each user sits inside a strict individual silo. Your raw activity in Ajax is visible only to you. Managing partners and firm admins see aggregate metrics, never another user's screen content.
A pause button stops Ajax whenever you want it stopped. Hit it before a personal call or a confidential thread, and Ajax stops reading the screen until you turn it back on.
What Ajax pulls from Clio
Ajax pulls four things from Clio on connection and keeps them fresh automatically. Your active matters and client names. Your firm's activity codes and task codes, including UTBMS and any custom codes, with the right codes applied to the clients that require them. Your billing rates, straight from the Clio rate table. And your Clio Calendar events, so meetings and hearings show up in Ajax with the right matter already attached.
Every new matter, every rate change, every code update you make inside Clio is reflected in Ajax automatically. Nothing to configure when a new client opens, nothing to maintain when a rate changes.
Matter attribution is automatic too. Ajax picks the right matter by reading the work itself: the document you opened, the email you replied to, the parties involved in the thread. It then matches the work to the matter you have in Clio. When Ajax cannot tell which matter a piece of work belongs to, it flags the entry and asks. The next time that party or address shows up, Ajax gets it right. The same model runs across our MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Centerbase, Filevine, Actionstep, and Soluno integrations, so firms with mixed PMSes get the same experience across the board.
What Ajax pushes back to Clio
Once you approve an entry in Ajax, it arrives in Clio as a native time entry with the matter, activity code, billing rate, hours, and narrative all pre-filled. One click in Ajax sends the entry to Clio in real time.
A typical entry looks like this:
Field | Value |
|---|---|
Matter | Chen v. Park Industries |
Activity code | L120, Analysis/Strategy |
Hours | 1.4 |
Narrative | Analyzed opposing counsel's motion for summary judgment on statute of limitations grounds; researched applicable case law; drafted responsive brief section addressing proportionality arguments; conferred with client regarding litigation strategy. |
The 1.4 hours on that entry might be three separate touchpoints across the day, a 25-minute morning review of the motion, a 45-minute redline session after lunch, and a 14-minute call with the client before close. Ajax groups them into one coherent entry on the right matter, so your timesheet shows one continuous block of work on Chen v. Park for the day.
Your bills look exactly the same as always. The only difference is that nobody on your team had to stop and type any of it.
How the two-way sync handles edits
Ajax's two-way sync is the full round-trip. Edit an entry in Ajax, the edit shows up in Clio. Edit it in Clio after the push, the change flows back to Ajax. Either system can be the source of truth on any given entry, and they stay aligned automatically.
This matters more than it sounds. Say you finish an entry on a Chen v. Park motion in Ajax and push it to Clio at 11am. At 1pm, opposing counsel emails about the same matter, and you spend another 15 minutes responding. Ajax picks up the additional 15 minutes, updates the same entry, and the change is reflected in Clio without you opening Clio.
The same property helps at the firm level. Billing managers can clean up entries inside Clio the way they always have. The cleanup flows back to Ajax, and the next time Ajax drafts a similar entry, it reflects what the billing team prefers.
How to connect Ajax and Clio
There are two ways to set up the integration, depending on how your firm wants to manage it.
The first is org-level, where a Clio admin connects the firm's Clio account to Ajax once. Ajax then accesses the Clio APIs for matters, codes, rate tables, and calendar on behalf of every timekeeper in the firm. One connection covers everyone. This is the right fit for firms with central IT.
The second is per-user, where each timekeeper links their own Clio account to their own Ajax account. Same APIs, scoped to that user. This is useful for firms with strict admin policies, and for setups where the timekeeper is also the admin.
From there, onboarding looks the same as any other Ajax deployment:
Book a demo. The Ajax team walks through your specific Clio setup, your billing guidelines, and what you want your narratives to sound like. About 30 minutes.
White-glove install. Ajax installs the desktop app for every timekeeper on your team. That single install covers all of their Clio activity, so IT can leave Clio alone.
Silent run for two days. Ajax runs in the background before your kickoff. It customizes its settings to your firm's billing guidelines and any client-specific Outside Counsel Guidelines, learns narrative style from prior entries in Clio, and has day-one drafts ready in your voice.
Log in and release. Real Clio activity is already waiting as draft entries with matters assigned. Review, adjust anything you want, and release to Clio.
Most firms recover the cost of Ajax in about 11 days.
What this looks like for Clio firms
Clio firms running Ajax recover the seat cost in the first month and add 10x to 100x ROI on top.
Three Clio Reisman Award winning firms use Ajax: King Law Offices, Torrey Pines Law Group, and O'Connor Family Law. Several Reisman winners also chose to invest in the company.
Jordan Guthrie, an attorney at King Law Offices and a Clio Reisman Award winner, put it like this: "I thought I was already good at timekeeping. Then I opened Ajax last night, and it found six entries I had missed."
A few more Clio firms running Ajax have shared their numbers publicly:
Firm | Practice Area | ROI | What they said |
|---|---|---|---|
Nemphos Braue | Business Law | 102x | "We're finding us an extra 0.3 hours per person, per day, across eight people, that adds up fast." (George Nemphos) |
Bartell & Powell | FINRA / Securities | 106x | "Best legal tech purchase we've made." (Jennifer Walsh) |
Kirker Davis | Family Law | 23x | "This isn't just another piece of software. It's a competitive advantage." (Chris Kirker) |
O'Connor Family Law | Family Law | 19x | "The first technology I've brought to my team where zero people complained." (Heather O'Connor) |
Hone Law | Commercial Litigation | 60x | "For the first time in 30 years, I left on Friday knowing I had all my time in." (Jennifer Arledge) |
Across every firm, Ajax catches about 12% more billable hours than the same lawyers were logging manually. Most of that 12% is the small stuff that never used to make it onto a timesheet: the 6-minute discovery email, the 12-minute call with co-counsel, the 9-minute redline review. Our data report has the full picture on how much time leaks at a typical firm and where it goes.
How Ajax compares to other AI timekeepers on Clio
Most AI timekeepers on Clio read metadata. Ajax reads the work itself.
Metadata-based tools see that Outlook was open for 14 minutes. Ajax sees what was actually in the email, who the parties are, and which matter it belongs to. That difference is why Ajax's draft narratives read like a lawyer wrote them, and why matter attribution is accurate even for people who never made it into the firm's CRM, like judges, opposing counsel, and peripheral parties on a thread.
Ajax's Clio integration is one of eight deep two-way PMS integrations we ship. The others are MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Centerbase, Filevine, Actionstep, and Soluno, and we support most other billing systems on request. For a head-to-head with other tools, our comparison roundup walks through eight of them in detail.
Common questions about Ajax and Clio
Does Ajax replace Clio?
No. Clio is still your billing system. Ajax sits in front of Clio, captures the work, and writes the entries.
What exactly syncs between Ajax and Clio?
Everything syncs both ways. Ajax pulls matters, client names, activity codes, task codes, billing rates, and calendar events from Clio. Ajax pushes drafted, approved time entries back as native Clio entries. Edits in either system flow back to the other.
Can my managing partner see my entries before I release them?
No. Entries are private to you until you release them to Clio. The partner only ever sees what you have decided is ready.
Can I try Ajax on my own Clio first to see if it actually finds extra billables?
Yes. We offer pilots so you can measure ROI on your own Clio data before you buy.
Does Ajax work with other practice management systems?
Yes. Deep two-way sync also runs with MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Centerbase, Filevine, Actionstep, and Soluno. Ajax supports most other billing systems on request.
What does Ajax not capture?
Anything that never touches a screen falls outside Ajax's reach: handwritten notes, in-person sidebars in a partner's office, the 4-minute hallway question about a matter. Most of the workday does touch a screen though, which is where Ajax catches the leaks.
Book a demo and see Ajax and Clio together
Twenty minutes is enough to see Ajax on your own Clio setup, watch captured activity show up from your own inbox and documents, see entries grouped on the right matters, and see one land in Clio the moment you release it.
Book a demo and we'll walk you through Ajax and Clio on your own setup. Most firms recover the cost of Ajax in about 11 days. One recovered hour per user per month covers the seat.
Final thoughts
Most Clio firms already know which timekeepers are leaking the most billable time. The hard part has been finding a tool that does something about it without changing the way the firm works. Ajax on top of Clio is the smallest change to a billing workflow that still recovers a real percentage of unbilled work, with two-way sync so Clio stays the source of truth on everything that ends up on an invoice.
If you have questions about how Ajax would handle your specific Clio setup, your firm's billing guidelines, or any of the other practice management systems your team uses, we are happy to walk you through it. You can book a demo, email sales@joinajax.com, or call 917-841-2101, whichever is easiest.
