Clio automated workflows: the complete guide

A Clio Manage automated workflow is a When / Then rule: when a matter is created or moves into a stage, and it matches the conditions you set, Clio assigns a task list, generates a document, or applies a matter template. You build them in Settings → Automated Workflows, Clio ships ready-made templates under a "Made by Clio" tab, and a firm can have up to 1,000 of them.

That is broader than the feature is usually described, it is not only "stage change creates tasks", and narrower than firms hope, in five specific ways. This page is the complete version: triggers, conditions, actions, limits, plans, the errors, and where it runs out.

The three words, kept straight

Clio uses three similar terms for three different things, and the confusion is why clio task lists and clio matter stages get searched as often as the automation itself.

• A task list is a saved template of tasks, titles, task types, assignees, relative due dates, with a name, a description and a practice area. It has no trigger; you apply it, or something applies it for you.
• A matter stage is a step in a workflow you define per practice area: Intake, Discovery, Trial Prep, Closing. Matters move through them on a kanban board under Matters → Stages, or via the matter's Dashboard.
• An automated workflow is the When/Then rule that connects the two.

What an automated workflow can express

The honest inventory, from Clio's own configuration screen.

Two corrections to the common description of this feature. It does have conditions, practice area is required and responsible attorney is an optional narrowing, so "no conditions at all" is wrong. And it does more than tasks: document generation and matter templates are first-class actions, which matters if you were about to buy something to do document assembly on a stage change.

Within that shape the feature is reliable, needs no integration, and costs nothing beyond the plan. A firm whose intake produces the same nine tasks every time has its problem completely solved.

Which Clio plan includes automated workflows

Read this section carefully, because Clio has renamed every plan and its own help centre has not entirely caught up.

The current lineup is Starter, Core, Signature and Elite, starting at $49/user/month. Automated workflows appear on Signature and Elite in Clio's plan comparison table. Clio's own help article on automated workflows still says the feature requires "Advanced and Expand", the former names for those two tiers. Same tiers, old labels.

Three things to do arithmetic on:

Only the entry price is public. Clio publishes "starting at $49/user" and routes Core, Signature and Elite to a Get pricing form. If you have seen $119 and $149 quoted for the two top tiers, those were the old Advanced and Expand list prices and they are no longer on the page. Get a written quote; do not budget off a number from a blog, including the one you are reading.

Matter stages come with the same tiers. Stages are the trigger surface, so you cannot buy the automation without the tier that has the trigger. This is why clio matter stages cost and clio automated workflows pricing are the same question.

It is per user. A six-person firm is buying six seats every month to automate task creation. Price it against what the manual version actually costs you in hours, for plenty of firms the honest answer is that a task list applied by hand covers it.

How to set one up

1. Build the matter stages first, per practice area, using the names your firm says out loud. Stages are the trigger surface; renaming them later is where automations quietly detach.
2. Build the task list. Tasks, task types, assignees, relative due dates. Note that relative due dates inside a task list are set against the trigger date of another task in the list, not against another task's completion.
3. Create the workflow. Settings → Automated Workflows → Made by Clio, pick the trigger and action pair (for example Matter is created → Assign a task list), and name it something a colleague will understand in a year.
4. Set the When. Practice area is required; add responsible attorney if you want to narrow it.
5. Set the Then. Choose the task list and who to assign it to. How each individual task lands also depends on that task's own use list assignee or select assignee setting.
6. Fill in the matter's role fields, responsible attorney and responsible staff especially. Not optional in practice; see the errors below.
7. Test on a matter you do not care about. Move it in, watch what appears, then move it back and forward again to see what a re-entry does.

The five things it cannot do

Branch on anything but practice area and responsible attorney. Those two are the entire condition set, they are ANDed rather than ORed, and custom fields are not available at all, so "only if the matter has real property" cannot be expressed. Nor does the document action rescue you: Clio Manage's document templates are merge-field substitution only, with no way to include or exclude a clause. There is no conditional logic anywhere in Clio Manage. Full treatment in different task lists for different case types.

Recur, or run on a schedule. Every trigger is a matter event. There is no clock. Tasks cannot recur at all, see can Clio tasks recur.

Anchor dates to a calendar event. Due dates come from the task list's own settings, counted from the trigger. "Three business days before the closing meeting" needs to read the meeting and re-date the tasks when somebody moves it. Nothing native does that.

Wait on a task's completion. Relative due dates key off another task's trigger date, not whether it is done. So the engagement letter cannot be due three days after the records search actually comes back, only three days after the search task was scheduled to start. A guessed deadline trains people to ignore deadlines.

Assign beyond the three matter roles. Responsible attorney, originating attorney and responsible staff are the only role fields, and the API confirms all three reference firm users. Anything finer, by office, by case sub-type, routing around leave, has nowhere to live. See can Clio assign one task to multiple people.

Two smaller ones that bite in month two: tasks in a task list cannot be reordered (Clio's advice is to delete and recreate them in order), and you cannot change a task's due date once its list has been assigned.

The three errors firms hit

The task list could not be assigned

The common one. A workflow that assigns using a matter role fails when that role is empty on the matter, most often responsible attorney. Clio shows an error rather than creating anything, and Clio's stages documentation confirms you get a notification when moving a matter between stages triggers a workflow, including when the workflow fails.

The fix: fill in the missing field, then change the stage again to re-trigger it. Filling the field alone does nothing, because the trigger has already fired and does not re-arm.

The prevention: make those role fields part of matter creation rather than something completed on day three. A workflow whose assignees depend on a field filled in later will fail every time, and it looks like a bug rather than a data-entry gap.

Duplicates from a re-trigger

Moving a matter back and then forward again fires the workflow again. Sometimes that is what you want, it is the documented recovery for the error above. Usually it is not, and there is no de-duplication, so somebody deletes the second copy of every task by hand. Clio does warn you when a new apply a matter template rule conflicts with an existing one, but that is a rule-level conflict check, not a per-matter one. If you see unexplained duplicates, the automation history panel tells you which rule fired and when.

Assignees pointing at a departed user

A task list holds a named user unless the task uses use list assignee. Deactivate that user and the template keeps naming them. Nothing warns you. Add "audit the task lists" to your offboarding checklist, ten minutes, and the cheapest reliability fix on this page.

When to use the built-in feature, and when not to

Use it, and only it, when all of these hold:

• Your repeated task lists are fixed. Same tasks, same order, every time.
• The condition that selects the list is the practice area, or the practice area plus the responsible attorney.
• Assignment lands on one of the three matter roles, or on the list assignee.
• Due dates counted from the trigger are good enough, and nothing waits on a completion.
• You are on Signature or Elite already, or the upgrade pays for itself in hours saved.

Look elsewhere when two or more of the five limitations describe your real workflows. The test we give firms: write down your five most-repeated task lists. If none branch, none hang off a meeting, and every task lands on one of Clio's three roles, use the native feature and spend the money elsewhere. If three of the five need something on that list, you are going to build it somewhere, the only question is who owns the maintenance.

How Taskflow handles it

Taskflow uses the same triggers Clio already gives you, a matter stage change or a calendar event, and replaces the fixed list with a template that branches on any matter or custom field, dates tasks around your firm's real working week and closures, holds a task undated until the task it waits on is actually complete, and resolves assignees by rule rather than from three fixed fields. It writes ordinary Clio tasks, so nothing changes shape inside Clio and nothing is trapped in our system. The documentation is public and the price is a flat firm-level number rather than per user.

Questions people also ask

What triggers a Clio automated workflow?

Three things: a matter being created, a matter stage change, and a matter moving from Clio Grow to Clio Manage. There is no scheduled trigger and no field-change trigger.

Can a Clio automated workflow have conditions?

Yes, but only two. Practice area is required, and responsible attorney is an optional additional condition. All specified conditions must be met. Custom fields cannot be used as conditions.

How many automated workflows can a Clio firm have?

Clio Manage allows up to 1,000 automations per firm account. In practice the binding constraint is maintenance, not the cap, firms lose track of near-identical rules long before they approach it.

What is the difference between a task list and an automated workflow?

The task list is the set of tasks. The automated workflow is the rule that applies it. A task list on its own is applied by hand.

Why did my Clio automated workflow not run?

In order of likelihood: the matter is missing the role field the assignment depends on; the matter's practice area does not match the rule's required practice area; the rule also conditions on a responsible attorney who is not the one on the matter; the matter was created rather than moved into a stage, or vice versa, and your trigger is the other one; the task list names a deactivated user. The automation history panel is where to look first.

Can automated workflows generate documents?

Yes. Document generation from a template is one of the three actions, with merge fields populated from the matter. Note what that does and does not give you: Clio Manage document templates substitute merge fields, they cannot include or omit a clause conditionally. That engine is in Clio Draft, a separately priced product.

Do automated workflows work in Clio Grow?

Clio Grow has its own automated workflows for intake, and Grow tasks can be automatically assigned within them. Grow and Manage tasks do not sync, so Grow automation does not create Manage tasks. The one bridge is the apply a matter template action, which fires when a matter moves from Grow into Manage.

Can I see a history of what my automated workflows did?

Yes. The automation history panel logs each time a workflow was triggered and for which matter. It is the first place to look for both duplicates and silent non-runs. Note that the API exposes a matter's current stage but not its stage-change history, so an integration cannot reconstruct this independently.