n8n Workflow: Clio Draft Pre-Bill Review Emails & SMTP Escalations

Automate Clio pre-bill review reminders—with smart SMTP escalations

This n8n workflow automatically pulls draft pre-bills from Clio, sends grouped monthly attorney review emails, and runs daily reminder/urgent/escalation email checks via SMTP—while logging every internal notification to a separate guardrail/audit workflow.

What this workflow does

• Monthly attorney routing (Clio → email): Runs on a monthly schedule, fetches all draft pre-bills from the Clio bills API, groups them by each matter’s responsible attorney, and skips processing when no drafts are found.
• One internal review email per attorney: Builds and sends a grouped review email listing the attorney’s draft pre-bills, including a link to view them in Clio.
• Audit/guardrail logging: For each routing event, it calls a separate guardrail/audit workflow to log the internal notification.
• Daily reminders & escalations: Runs daily, fetches the current draft pre-bills from Clio, calculates how long each pre-bill has been in draft, and selects only items hitting reminder, urgent, or overdue thresholds.
• Escalate overdue to the managing partner: Sends grouped reminder/urgent emails to attorneys for due items, and grouped escalation emails to the managing partner for overdue drafts—again logging every notification via the guardrail/audit workflow.

Use cases

• Ensure attorneys consistently review draft pre-bills before they stall.
• Reduce billing-cycle delays by escalating overdue drafts automatically.
• Provide internal accountability with an audit workflow trail for every reminder or escalation.
• Streamline legal ops by grouping emails per attorney instead of sending one-off messages.

Technical details

• Integrations: Clio (OAuth2 + bills endpoint) and SMTP (email send).
• Scheduling: Monthly run for initial review routing; daily run for reminder/urgent/escalation checks.
• n8n workflow nodes mentioned: if, code, no op, email send, sticky note, http request.
• Key setup variables: CLIO_BASE_URL, required Clio bills access, FIRM_FROM_EMAIL, FIRM_PARTNER_EMAIL, and firm context/thresholds (e.g., FIRM_NAME, FIRM_CLIO_BILLING_URL, FIRM_PREBILL_REMINDER_DAY).