Send staged client onboarding emails with Clio and SMTP

Quick Overview

This workflow runs daily and pulls open matters and firm users from the Clio API, calculates which onboarding stage is due based on each matter’s open date, builds a personalized onboarding email, runs a compliance/opt-out check via a sub-workflow, and sends approved messages via SMTP.

How it works

1. Runs every day at 9am on a schedule.
2. Fetches the firm’s user directory and all open matters from the Clio API.
3. Splits matters into individual records, skips entries without a client email or open date, and calculates days since the matter opened to assign a stage for day 0, 1, 3, or 7.
4. Filters down to matters with a stage due today and stops cleanly when nothing is due.
5. Builds the stage-specific email content and personalizes the contact details by matching the responsible attorney ID to the Clio user list.
6. Calls a separate compliance/guardrail workflow to append the required footer and suppress sends for opted-out recipients.
7. Sends the approved onboarding email to the client via SMTP, otherwise skips suppressed recipients.

Setup

1. Add a Clio OAuth2 credential and set the CLIO_BASE_URL n8n variable to your Clio instance base URL.
2. Create and configure the compliance/guardrail sub-workflow, then set its ID in the GUARDRAIL_WORKFLOW_ID n8n variable.
3. Add an SMTP credential for sending email and set FIRM_FROM_EMAIL for the sender address.
4. Set required firm variables such as FIRM_NAME and FIRM_EMAIL, and optionally configure FIRM_CLIENT_PORTAL_URL, FIRM_BILLING_EMAIL, FIRM_RESPONSE_TIME_DAYS, FIRM_PAYMENT_TERMS_DAYS, and FIRM_ONBOARDING_CHECKLIST.
5. Adjust the schedule (cron expression) if you want the daily check to run at a different time.