Multi-Client Matters in Clio Manage and Clio Grow

With Multi-Client Matters (MCM), you can now add multiple clients to a single matter. This feature eliminates the need for manual workarounds—like duplicate matters or combined contact names—allowing you to manage complex cases with greater accuracy and professionalism.

Add multiple clients to matters

You can add up to 11 clients to a matter when creating or editing a matter in Clio Manage. Adding multiple clients to your matter allows you to accurately manage the contacts on a matter who are employing your firm, whereas you can then use related contacts exclusively for entities connected to the matter but not represented by your firm (e.g., opposing counsel, witnesses, etc.).

When adding multiple clients to a matter, you can select which client to make the “default client”. Certain functionality in Clio Manage applies to this single default client (e.g., some reports apply to the default client only).

• Searchability: Searching for a client via Global Search will show the contact and all matters the client has been added to.

Joint billing

Adding multiple clients to a matter allows you to generate invoices that include the names of all of those clients, removing the need to manually edit bills with external tools. When adding a client, you can choose whether or not they should be a bill recipient, which dictates whether they receive a copy of the bill.

Joint billing is therefore suited to situations where all clients are jointly liable for the bill. You can continue to use split billing if clients need separate invoices for their specific portion of the bill.

To generate a new joint bill, go to Billing, then click New bills. Multi-Client Matters does not currently support generating Quick Bills. 
 

Multi-Client trust accounting

Trust funds received from any client added to a matter can be deposited and held at the matter level. The record will log which client paid the funds.

When applying available trust funds to a bill, you will have to select the client whose trust funds you would like to apply to the bill. Currently, Clio does not allow you to specify an order or draw from multiple clients in a single transaction.

Trust account reports

The following reports support multi-client trust accounting:

• Matter balance summary
• Trust management
• Invoice payments 
• Trust trial balance report
• Trust ledger 
• Trust dormant balances report
• Client ledger
• Trust listing 

All other reports will continue to apply only to the default client.

Client portals

When you create a new client portal for a matter with multiple clients, Clio will add all clients to the portal. This ensures every client has access to communications, updates, and documents.

If the client portal was created before adding additional clients to a matter, you will need to manually add those clients to the portal.

Document templates

You can use the <<Matter.AllClients.Names>> merge field when creating any document templates to automatically populate the names of all clients added to the matter. When you generate a document using your template for a matter with multiple clients, you will be able to select which client's information to populate in the relevant document fields. If you do not select a specific client, the information for the matter’s default client will be used.

Convert multi-contact matter in Clio Grow to multi-client matter in Clio Manage

You can now select which contact added to matter in Clio Grow to set as the default client and which contacts to add as additional clients on the matter. When the matter is converted to Clio Manage, these selections carry over with those contacts not  selected as clients being added as related contacts.

To indicate which contacts to add as clients to the matter in Clio Matter:

1. Open a matter in Clio Grow and click Edit Matter.
2. In the Contacts section, use the Set as default client radio button to select the default client.
3. For each contact you want to add as a client to the matter, check the checkbox for This contact is a client below the contact’s name.
4. Click Save.

When viewing the matter page, contacts marked as clients will have display a Client label.

When converting a matter from Clio Grow to Clio Manage, in the Related Contacts section of the conversion modal, contacts you previously selected as clients will have the checkbox for This contact is a client preselected. You can make adjustments before converting the matter.