Bilingual SMS Case Updates Synced to Clio for a Personal Injury Law Firm

Case updates written as internal Clio notes often needed to reach the client by text too, which meant a staff member manually rewriting the note as an SMS, checking or guessing at the client's preferred language, sending it through a separate tool, and remembering to log that it went out: a multi-step manual process repeated dozens of times a week, with no consistent way to confirm a client had actually been updated.

A scheduled poll checks Clio every 15 minutes for new matter notes, filters to only those tagged for SMS delivery and not already marked sent, then cross-references an internal log of already-processed notes so an overlapping poll can never text the same update twice.

For each remaining note, the workflow pulls the matter's client-language custom field from Clio and passes it, along with the note text, to an AI agent under a strict rule set: if the note is already written in the client's preferred language, return it verbatim: no rewriting, no grammar correction. If it's in the wrong language, translate it into plain, natural, conversational text rather than a stiff literal translation, while always leaving the firm's brand name untranslated regardless of language.

The finished message goes to the client's phone number (pulled from their Clio contact record and normalized to E.164) by SMS, but only during business hours; outside that window the send is deferred with a wait step until the next morning rather than texting a client at an inconvenient time. Every send is logged to an internal audit table with the original note, the exact text sent, and which language variant was used, and a confirmation note is written back into the Clio matter tagged as sent, so anyone reviewing the case file can see exactly what the client was told and when. Failures at either the send or logging step trigger an immediate Telegram alert instead of failing silently.