Clio Onboarding Email Automation with n8n + SMTP

Automate Clio matter onboarding emails with n8n—daily, personalized, and SMTP-ready

This n8n workflow automatically pulls open matters and firm users from Clio, determines which onboarding stage is due based on the matter’s open date, generates a personalized onboarding email, runs a compliance/opt-out guardrail check, and then sends approved messages via SMTP.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: executes daily at 9:00am.
• Fetches data from Clio: pulls the firm’s user directory and all open matters using the Clio API.
• Prepares onboarding targets: splits matters into individual records, skips entries missing a client email or open date, and calculates the number of days since the matter opened.
• Assigns an onboarding stage: categorizes matters into day-based stages for day 0, 1, 3, or 7.
• Sends only what’s due: filters to matters with a stage due today and stops cleanly when nothing is due.
• Personalizes content: builds stage-specific onboarding email content and matches the responsible attorney ID to the Clio user list for accurate personalization.
• Compliance/opt-out first: calls a separate compliance/guardrail sub-workflow to append the required footer and suppress sends for opted-out recipients.
• SMTP delivery: sends approved onboarding emails via SMTP; suppressed recipients are skipped.

Use cases

• Legal teams using Clio who want reliable, time-based onboarding touchpoints for new matters.
• Automation engineers building daily onboarding email sequences that only trigger when a stage is due.
• SaaS operators or internal teams needing guardrails (opt-out handling + required footer) before any email is sent.

Technical details

• Integrations: Clio API (OAuth2), SMTP email sending.
• n8n nodes/logic used: if, code, no op, filter, split out, and email send.
• Key setup: add CLIO_BASE_URL, configure GUARDRAIL_WORKFLOW_ID, add an SMTP credential, and set FIRM_FROM_EMAIL plus firm variables (e.g., FIRM_NAME, FIRM_EMAIL).