Jack Newton is the founder and CEO of Clio and a pioneer in cloud-based legal technology.
He is the recipient of a 2022 BC CEO Award in the large company category. Six B.C. business leaders will be recognized by BIV with C-Suite Awards on Feb. 3.
After a US$100 million Series E financing round in 2021, Clio became the first legal practice management firm in the world to reach unicorn status. Newton co-founded and is acting president of the Legal Cloud Computing Association. He has been recognized as EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year, as Canada’s Most Admired CEO and as one of the Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2022 by Goldman Sachs.
Your greatest business or career success to date?
What I’m most proud of is having scaled Clio’s incredible culture from its nascent stages in 2008 with just a few people on the team to a thriving, “human and high performing” culture today with more than 900 Clions.
Your toughest professional or career decision?
A major fork in the road for me was deciding in 2004 whether to pursue a PhD in machine learning following the completion of my master’s of science at the University of Alberta. I had an incredible opportunity to study under Geoff Hinton, a major figure in the field of neural networks, at the University of Toronto. I ultimately decided to pursue a career in industry (and have loved this journey), but I often wonder what an alternate path in the world of machine learning would have looked like.
Best piece of advice received?
Christoph Janz, Clio’s first outside investor, gave me some hugely important advice on the importance of aiming for the fences when building a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company like Clio. We had originally been planning on building what some would pejoratively describe as a “lifestyle business,” and Christoph helped us understand, in the long term, our expected outcome would be much better with a more aggressive approach. This forever changed the trajectory of what we aimed to (and did) build with Clio.
How do you lead?
My leadership style is one of instilling high trust and high agency in my teams. An important part of my role is aligning my leaders, and the company as a whole, on a set of shared goals alongside a common set of leadership and operating principles that allows the organization to execute in a “highly aligned but loosely coupled” way against a set of common goals. Lastly, my role is to set a vision for the long-term outcomes in the company, and to align and inspire the company around our mission to “transform the legal experience for all.”
Biggest areas of growth over the past year?
We have gone through a substantial evolution of our executive team at Clio over the last year as we prepare for our next stage of growth. This period of change, which is easily the most substantial leadership change we’ve ever gone through, has been painful on some levels but enormously rewarding on others. It is an object lesson in the need to constantly evolve your team as you approach new growth goals and new challenges. You cannot achieve growth either at a professional or personal level without feeling some level of discomfort, and leaning into that discomfort has been one of my learning experiences in 2022.
Join BIV to celebrate three BC CEO Award and three BC CFO Award winners at the C-Suite Awards, Feb. 3 at the Terminal City Club. Tickets and event details are available at the link above.
