Wilmington-based XTND Technologies, a legal billing software firm, has entered into a strategic partnership with Canada-headquartered Clio, a legal AI platform. 

A spin-off of Coral Edge, a Wilmington-based boutique technical consulting company, XTND originated as billing software for national insurance defense firm Lydecker. Kirsti and Ben Elliott founded Coral Edge in 2007 and officially co-founded XTND in 2025 along with John Dantzler. 

XTND offers billing solutions for insurance defense law firms, including an integrated software system, insights, automations and workflows to improve efficiency. According to Kirsti Elliott, the firm addresses a need for holistic, end-to-end billing solutions within insurance defense practices with complex billing processes. 

“These law firms are having to comply and generate invoices that comply with all of the different e‑billing platform requirements… There’s just a lot of regulations between the e‑billing company and the insurance carriers,” Kirsti Elliott said. “There’s not a system that does that for them.”

After working with Lydecker for nearly eight years, as well as other firms, the Elliotts and Dantzler decided to bring their product to market. 

“What we were finding through our customers is that there was a very real problem for insurance defense law firms,” Kirsti Elliott said. “There was a gap in the technology space that just really wasn’t being met. Bits and pieces of it were being met by other companies, but not an entire solution.”

XTND had already integrated with Clio, Kirsti Elliott said, and found that the insurance defense market was particularly “underserved by technology.” 

“Clio wants to go after that market, but understandably, as a SaaS provider that needs to meet the needs of the legal industry in general, for them to build out a lot of customizations specifically for outside counsel or insurance defense doesn’t make sense strategically,” Kirsti Elliott said. 

According to Kirsti Elliott, Clio approached XTND with an offer to join its partnership program. The program establishes XTND as a solution partner within Clio’s partnership ecosystem, giving XTND access to sales and marketing resources and natively integrating XTND with Clio and QuickBooks. 

“To be associated with Clio and working with them really opens up a lot of doors for us,” Kirsti Elliott said. 

“As a startup that is bootstrapping, we can leverage that relationship and the support that they provide us to just really continue to grow and expand at a pace that maybe we wouldn’t be able to do on our own,” she added.  

As far as how AI will influence the legal industry over time, Kirsti Elliott is optimistic about what it has to offer. 

"I do think that the firms who resist it are the ones who are actually going to be the ones hurt,” she said. “They may actually be replaced by the ones who adopt it, and not because they somehow found something magical with AI.”

Following the partnership, Kirsti Elliott said the firm is focused on growth and continuing to scale. The company is looking to hire a strong implementation and customer support team, she said.

“The great thing about Wilmington is it really does have great talent,” she said. “If we can be a part of the business that keeps the talent here and prevents that brain drain out of Wilmington, then that is 100% what we are hoping to do.”

While XTND continues to grow, Kirsti and Ben Elliott remain the owners of Coral Edge, which is still actively consulting.