Payton Young

Founder @ClaspLegal - Modern case management for small & mid-size law firms. (Think: Alternative to Clio, MyCase etc..)

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Lawyers:

What's the one task you do every week that you're pretty sure a computer should be doing for you by now?

I asked 49 firms this and these were their answers.

--

While it's a small sample size, I think the results is interesting because none of this is AI related.

This is all operations and practice management related.

In 2026, why are law firms still having to:

a) Chase down clients to top up trust accounts
b) Manually write time entries at the end of the day
c) Manually tag emails to cases

I think it's because the legal tech industry has taken their eyes off the ball of practice management and focused heavily on AI drafting, research, etc.

Legacy products like Clio are doing $500m/year and haven't adapted their product in over 20 years.

p.s. yes, law firms that have made the switch to @ClaspLegal spend zero time on any of these tasks that a computer should be doing

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

My brother and I spent the last 13 months building the modern version of Clio.

We truly believe modern case management is what legal tech has needed to deliver on for lawyers this entire time.

If you’re a lawyer, we’d love to show it to you!

https://t.co/cRBQ1vXjEx

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@cyrusjohnson Lmao what

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

I completely agree with this. Great post. I worked inside a 8 person family law firm as a case manager/admin. Many many small firms are dealing with problems that are not being built for with the current hype we see on X of legal AI, AI first law firms, etc…

Would love for you to check out https://t.co/UyGXNPXtBJ

We aim to provide a more modern experience than products like Clio in the practice management side.

Instead of building endless AI we decided to do things like: partner with Microsoft 365 to modernize document workflows instead of AI workflows.

Anyways would love your eyes on it!

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Subtly magical. Taste.

[thameem @th2049]

convert files with just drag + shift

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Completely agree. We collectively need to stop larping about our education and professional roles.

I’m a college dropout and I proudly own it.

[EBS @estockbridge]

I did a JD/MBA. I learned that law school is an incredible education and firm life wasn’t for me. So I found a great role at a corporation that allows me to leverage both degrees. Never bothered to take the bar. I’m not a lawyer or an attorney. It’s easy to not lie about this.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@syfert Gotcha. You should definitely check out Midpage! I have no affiliation, but I recommend it to many of the lawyers we work with just because it's much cheaper than the big names we see in the headlines.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@pearberrydreams Hey Tracy! I'd love to chat if it's helpful. I'll send you a DM

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@syfert Looks very solid. Definitely some UI suggestions, but the librarian product feels similar to midpage and others. I assume you're using the FreeLaw/CourtListener API?

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@syfert Ok cool I'll give it a go!

[Lawyer Issues @LawyerIssues]

Future PI lawyers chasing flying ambulances

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Clients don't actually think small firms are too expensive. They think they can't see what they're paying for.

When a prospect says "how can a small firm charge this much?", they aren't comparing you to a big firm's rate card. They're picturing a big firm: an office, a team, a process. Then they look at you and can't picture where the money goes.

Don't get me wrong, some small firms do underprice and some overprice. But the ones who hold their rates with no pushback all do the same boring things. The client gets a call back the same day. The client knows the next three steps before they happen. The bill reads like a story of the case, not a list of 0.3s.

None of that is about size. It's about making the work visible.

The irony is that a small firm has the advantage here. At a big firm the partner you hired hands you to an associate you've never met. At a small firm the person who picks up the phone usually knows your kids' names and your custody schedule.

That's not a discount product. That's the premium one.

I think "we won't be small forever" is a great answer. But the better one might be: "being small is why we're worth it."

Curious if other small firm owners have found a way to show that before the client asks.

[Foundational Nupe Lawyer @egi_nupe]

I was talking to a someone today about divorce fees and he said: how does a small firm like ours charge so much? Then I told him: we might be small to you today, but you still came to us. The big firms you see today were once small too. So, we won’t be small forever.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@syfert True

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Law firms that charge flat fees are more likely to adopt software that increases efficiency .

Law firms that charge hourly are less likely to adopt software that increases efficiency.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Incentives are everything:

Law firms that charge flat fees are more likely to adopt software that increases efficiency.

Law firms that charge hourly are less likely to adopt software that increases efficiency.

[JP Mohler @jaypmo]

Flat fees make law firms pay for their own inefficiency.

You can see why this is controversial.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

Nobody can run their law firm solely on Claude or ChatGPT. Agreed that they can be useful tools, but systems of record are still extremely important. The stack should be:

System of record + AI and that's it.

Nothing extra like docusign or zapier. Your CMS should have all that built in.

[Ann Srivastava @helloparalegal]

SOFTWARE IS DEAD!

That’s what a lawyer from New York told me yesterday. He cancelled every software subscription his firm had. Clio, Lawmatics, DocuSign, Zapier, three others.
His firm did not slow down. It got faster.

Meanwhile, the lawyer next door is still paying $5000 a month to click buttons.

Log in. Copy. Paste into another tool. Set a reminder. Forget the reminder. Update a dashboard nobody reads.
That is not legal tech. That is a second job with a monthly fee.

And the gap between these two lawyers is widening every single week.

One of them is spending his evenings on data entry. The other is signing clients while his intake runs itself.

Go read Reddit. Solo lawyers are asking the same question everywhere: "why am I paying for this when Claude does half of it?"

They are right. And the ones who figured it out early are not advertising it. They are just quietly eating everyone else's lunch.

The software that wins next will not have a dashboard. It takes the task and finishes it.

Client fills an intake form. Engagement letter goes out. Missing documents get chased. Call gets booked. CRM gets updated. Client ghosts, they get followed up. Lawyer gets a one-line summary.
Nobody clicks "continue."

That is what we are building at Hello Paralegal. AI paralegals that do the work, not software that watches you do it.

In two years there will be two kinds of solo firms. The ones that cancelled, and the ones still paying.

Which one are you?

[Daanish Khazi @bertgodel]

We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.

It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@DietCoke_Esq SMH. Worst part abt court is when you go back and forth with the clerk trying to find a suitable date and you realize OH DAMN 3 months from now.

[justin curl @curl_justin]

Job Opportunity: Lawyers, come join @AnthropicAI for a 4-month fellowship!!

Law is a field where it’s notoriously hard to define quality, and there’s so much interesting and important work to be done here.

Link here: https://t.co/l7LfbBgURL

[Payton Young @Payt0nY]

@eerabuilds i love that you're building this. i found my way into legal tech through filing a DVRO against my father.

there are too many people affected by this and i'm glad that you are building in the space.

happy to support in any way