Clio publishes a REST API secured with OAuth 2.0, covering matters, contacts, time entries, billing, and documents, plus an App Directory of pre-built integrations for email, calendar, document storage, and accounting software. We go a step further and build directly against the API itself, for the specific connection your firm needs that no pre-built app in that directory quite matches.
Clio's API exposes most of what you'd expect from a practice management platform: matters, contacts, calendar entries, time and billing records, custom fields, and documents, all reachable once an app authenticates through OAuth 2.0 and a firm grants it access. Developers get a documented endpoint reference and sandbox access through Clio's developer portal, and several endpoints support real-time notifications so a connected app can react when something changes in Clio, a matter's status, a new document, rather than checking back on a schedule.
The App Directory sits on top of that API and is where most firms' experience with Clio integration starts and stops, a catalog of ready-made connections to email providers, cloud storage, e-signature tools, and accounting software. It covers a lot of the common ground well. What it doesn't cover is anything specific to how your firm actually runs, a particular field mapping, a trigger condition unique to your intake process, a report format nobody's built a connector for.
A directory app is built to work for a lot of firms at once, which means it rarely matches any one firm's workflow exactly. The moment you need a specific field to land in a specific place, or a specific event in Clio to kick off a specific action somewhere else, you're back to someone doing it by hand around the edges of whatever the connector does handle.
Building directly against the API closes that gap, but it's genuine engineering work: handling token refresh correctly, respecting rate limits during a busy sync, and mapping Clio's data model onto whatever system sits on the other end. And a short list of actions, mostly bulk admin operations and a handful of settings screens, still only exist inside Clio's own interface, not the API. When that's the actual limitation, we drive the browser directly to handle it instead of waiting on an endpoint Clio hasn't published.
A new lead from your website, call tracking line, or a referral source calls Clio's API directly to create the matter and contact, with the fields that matter already populated, instead of going through a generic form connector.
We pull matter, time, and billing data straight out of Clio's API into a dashboard built around how your firm actually tracks performance, rather than exporting a standard Clio report and reshaping it by hand every week.
Tell us what you need Clio to do with another system, and we'll tell you honestly whether it's an API job, a browser-automation job, or both.
Describe the specific connection your firm needs and we'll scope what building it against Clio's API actually takes. Clio's API happens to be a strong one to build on, but the same approach applies to any system in your firm's stack that isn't talking to the others yet.
Let's talk →Yes. Clio publishes a documented REST API secured with OAuth 2.0, covering matters, contacts, time entries, billing, and documents, along with a developer portal and sandbox access for building and testing against it.
It's Clio's catalog of pre-built, ready-to-install integrations with email providers, cloud storage, e-signature tools, and accounting software. It covers common connections well, but doesn't reach firm-specific workflows or field mappings.
For anything beyond a one-time test call, yes. Handling authentication correctly, staying within rate limits, and keeping a sync reliable over time is real engineering work, not a weekend configuration task.
Yes, through the parts of the API that support real-time notifications for changes like a matter update or a new document, which an integration can use instead of repeatedly polling the API to check for changes.