Executive overview

There are reliable methods to ensure success in international markets, but they require redesigning most of your company to support new international markets. Infrastructure, processes, and changes to internal operations and customer-facing support help ensure the reliable launch and growth into international markets. In this article, I illustrate the specific application of these strategies through examining Clio's international opportunities, but before that examination, I list the essential tasks below.

Disclaimer: Though these are directionally correct, guiding a company to international success requires a lot of data and a deep understanding of the business and goals that is not possible to obtain without embedding in a company, understanding their business, and reviewing their data. For any companies that find this helpful, I am available for consulting to help your company build an individual plan.

  • Refactor stack— Integrate acquisitions into a single stack, or if stacks will remain separate, prepare to internationalize and support multiple stacks for each new market. Stacks must be scalable, extensible, and configurable.
  • Create global-ready product development processes — Train the product development disciplines to build global-ready products and build lightweight processes to support the development efforts. Configurable product designs meet privacy, language, and compliance requirements for any country or region.
  • Develop an international Product team — An international product discipline and team oversees the product adaptation to new markets with unique regional and locale-specific product adaptations.
  • Create an international customer and internal operations plan — Train support and training teams to change processes to meet clients' needs anywhere in the world. Work with sales and marketing teams to create locale-specific campaigns. Work with tax, legal, and finance to decide how to allocate costs and revenue across entities.
  • Design localization and internationalization processes to support users in more languages — Create infrastructure for localization (l10n) of content and internationalization (i18n) of code to support teams so they can build global-first products.
  • Adapt corporate culture — Adapt the company culture to new regions and teams whose primary language and culture differ from the home company and business culture you've created.

TOC

Intro

None

As I write this, stock markets are in turmoil over Anthropic's release of legal tools. The announcement is devastating stocks for legal publishing and software companies. Since Clio is representative of the market, and they are advertising for a Director of International Product role, this is a good time to do a teardown of the company and examine the challenges they will face as they expand internationally. The focus on Clio will illustrate the principles I've outlined in the executive overview above.

Clio's leadership and acquisition team deserve credit for snatching up strategic assets and software to build a moat against AI competition and other legal tech products. Their acquisitions of FastCase/ VLex and Sharedo in 2025 have allowed them to jumpstart legal AI assistants for all their existing customers and scale their products to new enterprise customers. They can solidify their lead and accelerate their international presence by building out infrastructure and adapting their processes to support international markets. The goal is to create tools and processes that make international expansion into new markets a business decision unhampered by technical constraints.

Lluis Faus, Ed Walters, and Shubham Datta, I've applied for the Director of Product Management International role at Clio. I thought I'd give you a plan for how I could help Clio build a multilingual enterprise-level product that can scale and adapt to any country in the world, rather than hope your ATS or recruiters pick me to interview for the role. Perhaps you can help me make a case for my candidacy internally. For any reader whose company is facing similar issues, I'd love to consult with your company to solve these problems.

Overview of Clio's current product challenges

Clio is an all-in-one vertical product for the legal profession. They have created an "Intelligent legal work platform" with tools that help a legal team of any size manage their business and their legal work. The product suite allows Clio to serve solo lawyers, international law firms, and corporate legal teams. With this breadth comes a lot of complexity and regulations. Data privacy laws, medical data requirements, financial compliance laws, AML laws, corporate ESB laws, and legal-specific reporting laws for specific countries or regions need to be developed and supported. And the product will need to support those differences in each new and existing market. This is a lot for any business to think through.

Clio has begun their international push into English-speaking countries as many companies do. But to build a global-ready platform that can successfully scale their customer base in non-English-speaking countries, they will need to build infrastructure components they probably haven't planned or identified as essential. Some of the current issues I see across Clio's stack:

  • Internationalization work.
  • Inconsistent localization across their websites.
  • Requirement to adapt marketing for different user populations in multiple languages with different value propositions.
  • Cookies currently work differently on all their websites.
  • Payments and loans will be difficult to provide in international markets.
  • A shifting landscape of AI regulations in regions, countries, and states that the company may not have built infrastructure to support. AI policies are being implemented by bar associations around the world.
  • They have positioned themselves as education and thought leaders in the market, so training materials are a priority, and the company will need to adapt these to every market and language they plan to support.

Initial plan for Clio expansion

By using the categories I've identified in the executive summary, I can create a high-level plan of action for Clio. This initial plan would of course need to be adapted with Clio's data and a better understanding of the company goals, both of which I lack. Without data and a more thorough understanding of Clio's user population needs, feature usage, languages leveraged within vLex translations, and much more data, it is very difficult to make a thorough plan with country prioritization and features required. I will, however, posit a few ideas at the end of this article.

Refactor stack

All large-scale platforms require scalable and extensible architecture. But international platforms also require configurability. Configurable architecture has adaptable workflows and components to support locale and market differences. For example, configurable website architecture allows for differing workflows to support cookies, data privacy, AI requirements, and any other requirements that differ across markets. This is essential, especially in AI and privacy, where legislation is constantly changing and can differ at the regional, country, or state and province level (country subdivisions).

Clio has acquired 5 companies since 2018. Even if all of them have been fully integrated into Clio's product, they are still maintaining stand-alone products. Sharedo, Vlex, and Fastcase still have their own websites and they may still be purchaseable as stand-alone products. If Clio does not fold in these products, they will need to create a comprehensive plan to balance forward development and maintenance for every new international market for each stack they have. Currently, the Vlex UI is available in English and Spanish (6 countries), and Brazilian Portuguese, and cases are available via Vlex's Vincent AI translations in 13 languages. Data from vLex usage will be helpful for a country launch roadmap and plan to support customers during a transition or refactor of these essential products.

A comprehensive and continually updated process to integrate new acquisitions into Clio's main stack is essential. If not planned, integration work can bog down forward development on Clio's product. Any stack that will be left as a stand-alone product will need a separate plan for i18n, l10n, marketing, sales, etc.

A development plan to create infrastructure for internationalizing code and creating configurable product designs that meet privacy, language, and compliance requirements for any country or region is essential for supporting new markets. And this should be built with the help of I18n and L10n experts who can bring insights about current and future methodologies in these areas.

Create a global-ready product development process

Design, product, and engineering teams have varying levels of knowledge about supporting international markets. These teams often build products with unconscious biases that require them to refactor completed products to support new international markets. A small team that is adept at these builds — an international product team — should train all product development teams how to identify international market requirements and illustrate how these requirements will alter existing builds.

Global-first product design requires a methodical process to ensure that the feature or product can support new markets, privacy requirements, AI requirements, and languages with little extra effort. I've successfully built this as part of the development and design processes at a few companies. The key is to create a "kit" by retrofitting existing markets and a process for new target markets, so teams know what privacy, compliance, and language requirements need to be supported. The retrofitting and global-product design processes differ because what is required to adapt existing markets is the necessary changes to make existing product features configurable for new markets. This refactoring is not sufficient to launch new markets. The features need to be configured for each market. This can be built as part of the PRD or product design phase, where teams build specs that need to be met for a market. If the stack is refactored to be configurable, then this work becomes a checklist of configurations that are easily met with little extra effort. However, if a company only evaluates a market a few months before they want to launch it, there will be unending refactoring to the existing product and features, as each new market will require adjustments to the product that will cascade throughout the stack.

Clio now has offices from their acquisitions and expansions in 5 countries US, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Ireland. They will need to create a product development process that can support these markets as well as be adaptable enough to support any new market. What does that look like?

1. Lightweight PM global development process that integrates a table for privacy, language support required, i18n, and legislation, and how it applies to the product or feature for each specific region or country.

2. A parity analysis with decisions about whether or not the product can or should reach parity with the existing English product in a region.

3. A list of missing features that may need to be built to appropriately support a new market and an analysis of whether or not those features would be useful in existing markets.

4. A PMM plan that helps position the product for each specific launch country.

Develop an international product discipline

International product work requires someone who can work tactically on adapting existing product features to new languages and regulations, while thinking strategically about how to redesign the product to be configurable, position the product in the new market, and explain these changes to the product development teams that own the overall product features that will have to be refactored.

International Product teams can be designed in many different ways. They can be PMs in a specific region or a small team of PMs that function across the organization, identifying issues at the design phase. Regardless of where they sit, the team must not only be versed in the whole product suite, including new development projects, but they must also actively advise other teams on issues that will arise when products are released into new countries. The first year or two of this work is difficult because the team will identify a lot of refactoring work across the stack to adapt the existing product for market expansion. Rarely do companies initially design and build products in ways that are easily adaptable to new markets.

Since this type of product work differs from most other product work, the company will need to train International PMs to do the work, and train all their other PMs on how to create features that support all markets, and how to work alongside International PMs who will advise them on building product features. The International PMs must also become adept at working with Product Marketing Managers for each market. Every element of the product must be evaluated for each new market. And when changes are necessary, the extent of the change must be scoped. Sometimes it is a repositioning of existing features to better meet the new market's needs. Other times, it requires refactoring the existing code to better adapt to the requirements or regulations in the new market. This will require a thorough evaluation of how to refactor the product or feature to meet the needs of other new markets as well.

Create an international customer and internal operations plan

The goal is to train support teams and change processes to support clients' needs anywhere in the world, and also to adapt the processes so that they can easily scale to meet the demands of any other new markets.

Hours of operation, support SLAs, and SOPs can ruin the opportunity in an international market if they are not appropriately adapted to the new market. This work needs to be adapted to the expectations, sensibilities, and needs of your international clients. This may mean time zone changes, and language-specific support and knowledge bases, or it may mean machine translation tools to support your existing teams to address international client needs. This requires assessment and planning to get right. Whatever the plan, this should be continually communicated, frequently reviewed, adjusted, and validated to make sure the processes and translated content are appropriately supporting customers.

Clio's support plan will also need a comprehensive plan to adapt their training and thought leadership for new markets. This includes webinars, blog posts, white papers, and anything else they do to remain a thought leader in the legaltech space. They've begun some of this work by writing specific documentation for Legal landscapes in Canada, the US, and other markets, but this is all just done in English. I find that odd since Canada has a two-language policy and Quebec has a French language law. If there is any place to begin this work, it seems like meeting the home market needs and using it as an opportunity to meet the needs in every market is a great way to build essential processes for international expansion.

Design L10n and I18n processes to support users in more languages

I'd further split this work into development work, integrating internationalization features into the stack required to display languages addressing CLDR issues, content work creating and maintaining content for international users (blogs, marketing, sales, websites, KB), and support/training work in multiple languages that will be done in webinars, in-person, or through chats and tickets. Even though these may be delivered by different teams, it is essential that Clio creates company-wide processes to allocate costs and revenues, designs processes for localizing, updating, and deprecating content across all of their businesses. Clio will need to run training sessions, write blogs, and answer queries in multiple languages and locales to remain a legaltech thought leader. This will require people and infrastructure changes to support multiple languages, time zones, and regulatory environments.

Localization has been undergoing massive disruption over the last 8 years. Statistical machine translation, neural machine translation, and large language models have upended three decades of processes and tools that established large-scale localization at enterprises. Translation and review processes have changed, quality requirements have shifted, there is an expectation of a lower cost for a higher quality, and the tools that once seemed essential are struggling to justify their cost. But certain regulated industries (for example Clinical trials) have not adapted their localization requirements to the new realities. They still have processes and requirements that must occur to comply with existing regulations. Clio will need to examine the regulations for each market to ensure their processes comply with legal regulations in each market it plans to enter.

Though machine translation and LLMs haven't replaced the need for humans, they have shifted the workload and altered the timelines for work. This means Clio will need to decide what quality is needed for each type of content, what their tolerance for error is, and how long content will live on their site. This information will help them create viable processes that reduce costs, improve processes, and still allow them to comply with the regulations in each market.

Customer communication and training

Supporting customers in every locale and time zone is essential as you grow your business outside your home market. Clio's acquisitions gave it a leg up, and their new offices in Australia, the UK, and Spain give Clio some advantages for starting operations to support users in other countries and languages. However, these existing teams need to learn the suite of products Clio has created if they are to contribute to the overall growth of Clio. And Clio will also need to evaluate its existing processes for customer communication and training. Will their existing processes allow them the ability to scale to any country in any language in any time zone, and still support a growing multilingual customer base with extended hours and days when support will be necessary?

Adapt corporate culture

This year, Clio has added 2 new businesses that will be integral to the success of their enterprise legal tech offerings. Clio needs to ensure these teams are fully integrated into Clio culture and Clio's goals. This is much more difficult as Clio has acquired companies with existing corporate cultures that function in more than one language or in multiple languages other than English. The work requires adaptation of the business culture to a new locale (a country, language, and culture) as well as a changing of the narrative that acknowledges how the new business is essential for Clio's overall success. Besides all of that, it will also require an internal localization and adaptation model to ensure they can communicate with all their employees anywhere in the world. This work is as important as supporting customers around the world. Without a plan and active integration of acquisitions, fiefdoms, and competing priorities will drain Clio's ability to execute in international markets.

Localization processes might translate documents to explain a culture, but they won't build a culture. You need to adapt your business culture to these new businesses and locales, much like you need to adapt your products to the needs of a new market. This requires getting your teams together globally and ensuring they have a chance to meet clients, work on cross-team projects, and help drive ongoing integration efforts to create one global team that is working collaboratively to delight customers and help them grow their own businesses.

Clio's opportunities in international markets

Clio Library and Vincent AI will be a driving force for international expansion. Vincent AI already translates queries and content from the legal documents into 14 languages (Catalan, German, English, Spanish, French, Galician, Italian, Dutch (Nederlands), Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Arabic). This is a great start that will provide essential data for where there are global opportunities and how to adapt the UI of the product. Vlex's UI is only available in English and Spanish. VLex's customer requests, development backlog, and data will help make data-driven decisions on how to accelerate support for non-English speaking users or if there is no need to internationalize the product.

Clio Library, formerly VLex Library, features 1 billion documents for 110 countries. It is the largest collection of Spanish legal information online, including comprehensive, regional, and national documents from Spain and across Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru). It has extensive coverage of legal materials from the U.S., U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, and Singapore. It supports Portuguese with native legal workflows and documents for Brazil and Portugal. There are also native legal workflows and documents for France.

Open questions that need investigation

  • Do lawyers want a localized UI from Clio? And if so, what languages are wanted? Which languages, and compliance requirements will unlock the most markets? Which open the most lucrative and strategic market opportunities?
  • Expansion order and why? Currently, Clio's expansion process is only into English-speaking markets. I think there is a more complex strategy that can be developed, but deep dives into data and more customer discussions can inform a development plan.
  • What are the most important products and features for growth in their existing markets? Are those the same features and products that can drive international product growth?
  • What blockers and regulatory requirements are essential to make a product or feature viable in new and existing markets? What are the differences in regulation that might require configurability?
  • Does Clio have the right data to create models for potential growth and estimate the cost for launching and supporting the platform in new markets? What essential investments need to be made in each market to create a base group of users that can help iterate on the product and contribute new ideas for existing markets?
  • There are so many more questions that need investigation. And Clio has the data to begin those investigations. This work is essential to help understand what is needed to scale into new markets and realize the opportunities of those new markets.

Clio products and where they will need international product work

Clio can take many different paths to expand internationally. They could expand their efforts across the whole platform and more heavily invest in anything that shows promise. They could focus on a specific customer base, like solo practitioners, or focus their international expansion on their enterprise customers that depend on Sharedo and enterprise-level tools. The path they choose will inform what becomes important and essential for their growth. Below are a few examples and what they might do to support international expansion.

  • Clio Manage's AI assistant was expanded to more countries and became available in Canada. At ClioCon 2025, in November, it also got a complete feature refresh and evolved into Manage AI. Manage AI is an essential product feature for solo practitioners and enterprise-level customers. But the product features seem to function differently depending on what type of customer you are. Clio could attempt to expand internationally further across this product, or they could focus on the features essential to a specific user persona. And that decision will cascade across product development processes, support, marketing, sales, and even finance.
  • Clio will need to create a comprehensive strategy for documentation and customer communication across markets and how and if they keep consistency across their international markets. This planning will require coordination between content, marketing, localization, and product teams. An example of the documentation Clio will need to generate for each market can be seen in this AI Legal Compliance document for the US market and the corresponding Canadian version. The document explains the complexity of the legal ethics and state bar association legislation on AI. There is no corresponding French, Irish, or UK version of the document. Was this a conscious decision by Clio or is it indicative of a need for a comprehensive customer communication plan?
  • Clio capital and payments — depends on Affirm: Affirm currently operates in three primary countries/regions: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. While it previously operated in Australia, that service was wound down. Its services are primarily tailored for customers and merchants with billing addresses in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. Klarna might be a good option to accelerate this product outside of the 3 countries Affirm supports. However, their stock has recently taken a large hit due to their shift to longer repayment plans because of the slower collection.

The CEO pointed to accelerated loan originations — part of Klarna's push into "Fair Financing" (longer-term installment loans) — as the primary driver of the Q4 shortfall, since those require upfront credit loss provisions that hit the bottom line immediately. Whether that headwind is temporary or structural is the key question investors are now asking.

Since collections and Clio Capital, Clio's bridge business, are less established, it is important to instrument these products correctly to gather essential data to understand their importance for the platform. If early indicators show this is an essential part of Clio's growth, work should be initiated immediately to find partners and plan for the expansion of this product into other markets. The Anti-money laundering digital payment requirements for the regulated legal market will take time and effort to adapt to new international markets.

  • Clio — Grow — email marketing and text to pay country-specific guidelines. Localization capabilities to support international law offices and non-English speaking clients should be built in for existing markets. Reputation management tools should have multilingual capabilities. Again, prioritization and analysis of these features are essential to ensure there is a demand and that the features will meet customer needs. But if Clio Grow lacks multilingual abilities it is a much less viable feature in international markets.
  • Clio Operate begs to be multilingual. Clio has dedicated a net new staff to win the enterprise and build enterprise features. This seems like a likely candidate for international growth because large legal firms have international staff and offices, and the work they do crosses countries and supports international conglomerates. A thorough evaluation of the products and features being built for Clio Operate would help to identify the most important products and features that need configurability to support privacy, workflows, internationalization, and localization efforts. Since this is net new work, there is an opportunity to build the processes correctly before a lot of products and features get built. This would avoid refactor work required to support new markets and languages. It would avoid the need to retrofit products built for a single market or language.

Conclusion

International Expansion is as much art as it is science. There are no hard and fast rules that always lead to success, but there are ways to derisk the work and create the best conditions for success in international expansion. Though there is no one-size-fits-all, the tips I give here help to improve the odds. If I had to describe the process in a few sentences, I'd say: The goal is to redesign your whole company and all its operations to support customers anywhere in the world. And that means redesigning not only your development and support processes, retraining your people, and rethinking the value your product provides to customers in each new market. It is much more than adapting an existing product for a new international market. It is redesigning every part of your business to continually illustrate the value you can provide to distinct customers working under differing constraints. I love the work because it is not limited to tweaking a product or changing a language. It requires developing a deep understanding of customers and constraints in each market and refactoring or repositioning your work for new customers that value different things.

In Clio's case, they are well-positioned for success in many international markets. They have acquired essential companies and technologies. They have a long history of innovating for customer needs, and they are showing success in English-speaking international markets. But if they haven't yet begun the process of redesigning every aspect of their business to make international expansion a business decision, not limited by technical or process constraints, then there is still a lot of work to be done to reap success outside of English-speaking markets.

If your company is facing similar challenges, please reach out. I love to work on international expansion, and the skills I've gained from careers in education, technology, and energy can be harnessed to help your company succeed in any market you want to enter.