Document Automation: Working With Clio Templates in Faster Drive

Faster Lawcademy: Video Tutorial 2.3.5

The following is a video tutorial.  For the best experience, click the "Full Screen" button while watching this video.

View the Full Faster Lawcademy Video List 

The Templates Folder

Clio’s document automation can be really helpful for saving time creating documents, and Faster Drive makes editing your templates much easier.

If you don’t know how to create templates for document automation, we recommend contacting Clio’s support team to learn how you can add merge fields to documents to have them automatically populate with information from Clio.

Let’s open Faster Drive to learn how to manage our Clio templates.  We’ll click My Files on the Faster Ribbon, then open the Templates folder.  We should see two folders here, Sample Templates and My Firm’s Templates.

Sample Templates: Examples of commonly used templates that Faster Law has created for reference.  You can copy these templates but may need to create some custom fields in Clio or change some of the merge fields to fit your firm.

My Firm’s Templates: All of the templates your firm currently has stored in Clio.

Clio's Document Categories Folders

The folders that you find in the My Firm’s Templates folder are directly tied to your document categories in Clio and you should not modify these folders in any way unless you want to make that change to the document category.

For example, deleting a folder here will delete the document category in Clio and creating a new folder here will create a new document category in Clio.

Clio does not maintain a backup of your document categories, so if you accidentally delete a folder here you will have to recreate it and manually assign the category back to any documents previously assigned to that category.

What do these folders do?

Clio allows you to assign document categories to your templates.  When you generate a document through Clio, the document will be created for the selected matter and given the assigned document category.  It will also be created inside a folder in the selected matter with the name of the document category.

By organizing your templates into the document category folders in the My Firm’s Templates folder, you can easily pre-organize where generated documents will be created.  Any templates not in a folder here will be generated in the matter but not placed in a folder and will not be assigned a document category.

Working with Templates

We can manage our templates here the same way we work with any other document in Windows.

We can double-click a document to open it, edit it, then save it.  We can rename documents here to rename the template in Clio, and if we’re sure we want to delete a template, we can delete it here through Faster Drive as well.

Clio also doesn’t back up your templates, so make sure you’re absolutely certain you don’t need a template before deleting it.  We recommend backing up your templates locally just in case someone deletes a template by mistake.  That way you can easily recover it and continue using it to generate documents automatically.