Author: Onit

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

Posted on May 9, 2022 by - Business Process Management

We live in a dynamic age. With the business landscape constantly transforming, legal operations is at a crossroad of material challenges and growth opportunities — from revenue generation and operational efficiency to innovation and corporate culture.

The good news? According to the Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report, nearly four in five (78%) enterprise respondents view Legal first and foremost as stellar business protectors. But what may come as a shock is that only 19% of employees believe that Legal prioritizes its internal clients. What’s more, only 39% of US employees see Legal as a good business partner — and, spanning the globe, that number plummets to just 24% in Germany and 16% in France.

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

There are five ways Legal can initiate, develop, and maintain trusting business partnerships within the enterprise:

  1. Shed the image of the “No” Police

It’s no surprise that Legal is not known to go rogue. Legal must play by the rules; the specific purpose of Legal is to establish and execute clear boundaries. However, the ELR report revealed that three in five respondents believe Legal can complicate matters with red tape, citing Legal as overwhelmingly bureaucratic.

This image of Legal as bottlenecks contributes to fracture: 10% of UK employees deem Legal as uninvolved, one in five claim that Legal is an unwilling business partner, and 19% of enterprise employees worldwide do not even believe that Legal even understands their needs.

But there is always time and room for change. Rather than saying no outright, Legal can act as a more consultative partner and offer alternatives that appease both parties.

  1. Quicker turnaround times

While 3 in 5 reported a matter of days as the average time for Legal teams to respond to requests, the ELR showed that at times inquiries can take weeks to be acknowledged, especially in the United States, Germany, and France — leading a similar 60% of respondents worldwide to perceive Legal as inefficient.

Ever-increasing workloads, chronically understaffed teams, and the constant mantra to “do more with less” can put a strain on both people and processes, hampering the ability to prioritize legal asks in a timely fashion, which in turn can impede the flow of business.

To turn this perception around, legal leaders can examine the current process for legal service requests (LSRs) to identify potential bottlenecks and then implement measures and technology that enable a faster response to inquiries.

  1. Embrace WFH 

While the capability to work remotely proved a blessing for most businesses during the height of COVID-19, 61% believe that Legal has been less responsive since the work-from-home (WFH) trend began. In fact, 38% of enterprise organizations say that Legal was more responsive prior to the pandemic.

With more than half of legal teams continuing to work at home full-time or on a hybrid schedule, this transition has presented novel challenges for collaboration and support – a sentiment magnified in the United Kingdom and France, where 42% of respondents reported a perceived slowdown by Legal.

Legal can set expectations for responsiveness by adding proactive communication around how or why processes may have changed in addition to offering direct solutions for adjusting to new working environments.

  1. Increase visibility

Similarly, while most respondents believe that Legal is visible and transparent regardless of their working location, two in five regard Legal as less so today than the department has been in the past.

Virtual and remote engagement, when compared to face-to-face office connections and real-time visibility, may understandably diminish approachability, which could in turn affect the resolution of legal issues and impact operational efficiency for a multitude of matters.

To increase visibility across the enterprise, legal departments may want to participate in company-wide communications to provide status updates into key initiatives or projects. Frequent and proactive touchpoints go a long way in promoting transparency.

  1. Encourage flexibility

Half of all global enterprise employees — 49%, and as high as 58% in France — believe that Legal creates an inflexible corporate culture. This perceived inflexibility can prohibit future collaboration, growth, and Legal’s fundamental role in the enterprise.

There is a colossal level of scrutiny on Legal and the department’s obligation to not only mitigate risk, but to set the standard for new and acceptable risks; this is true. The ELR Report found that Legal has a direct and positive impact on various functions from sales, revenue, and renewals to the corporate brand, R&D, and innovation. Legal can use this opportunity to lead from the front and transform beyond a traditional back-office function.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

“The ELR Report reveals a glaring reality check on how Legal is perceived by their enterprise organizations,” Onit CEO Eric Elfman said. “It’s time for Legal to evolve in impactful ways — their businesses are counting on them.”

Evaluate and implement cutting-edge technology, like workflow automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Improve efficiency and reduce rigidity. Be bold and step up as a business partner like never before.

Now is the time to evolve.

Get your head start on a legal evolution by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

The Transformative Legal Department: Building Stronger Connections to the Enterprise

Posted on April 13, 2022 by - Digital Transformation

Technology drives our modern universe, and it has been proven to galvanize legal departments. However, most legal tech systems—whether enterprise legal management (ELM), contract lifecycle management (CLM), AI, or others—orchestrate processes that also involve business units beyond legal.

At Legalweek 2022, Onit sponsored an emerging technology panel discussion featuring legal operations experts sharing their visions of how self-service technologies and digital transformation have enhanced and advanced their organizational relationships. By doing so—even through navigating the challenges of an increasingly complex regulatory environment and the COVID-19 pandemic—they have facilitated a vital connection to the broader enterprise.

Legal Ops: Initiator of Digital Transformation

Legal departments do not operate in a silo. While it’s no secret that they are well-positioned to operationalize efficiencies, investing in relationships with other departments can have a significant impact on enterprises at large.

“We have moved past the place where legal operations service only the legal department,” explains Jessica Williams, global outside counsel operations manager for Hearst Media Corporation. “Projects that start in legal, such as e-signature programs, often become enterprise-wide.”

Additional projects with cross-departmental span include creating a strategic game plan to deploy AI chatbots and a focus on ELM self-service, which is particularly advantageous for finance departments. Self-service solutions allow users to extract precisely what they need, such as revenue accrual or incurred expense reports, without requiring an administrator’s permission. This frees up time for both parties, a benefit for the business overall.

Corteva Agriscience legal operations leader Gregg McConnell agrees: Fostering relationships outside and across traditional team lines pays off immeasurably. Having spearheaded an enterprise-wide initiative to transition to all-digital documentation at Corteva, McConnell discovered that finance would often approach legal not only for automated reports, but also to identify and quantify the value of new tech.

“Building relationships that create end-to-end transparency across the organization contribute to the core foundation and make an organization bigger, faster and stronger,” McConnell believes.

Championing Projects for “Joe”

Leading in tech introduction while keeping “Joe” in mind—that is, the reluctant adopter of new products or systems, as McConnell says—is the goal. When Corteva found up to 75% of invoices through their ELM cycle had failed, a bulb of wisdom sparked: They needed to speak first to tech skeptics, then build a skillset to accomplish tasks in a simple and constructive manner and present them in a positive light, all while working to solve major pain points.

“Organization synthesizes operations. From a change management perspective, creating comfort and confidence in relationships is key,” says MassMutual business systems consultant Anthony Curzio.  “We learned that if info existed somewhere else, customers were imploring, ‘Please do not make us have to key it in again.’” This led from drag and drop functionality to an increasingly more complex data warehouse beyond matter and e-billing.

One transformation initiated by Nick Whitehouse, general manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, was connecting the contract process to the CRM process without creating any additional forms. “Pragmatic as that seems, that paved the way for pace of growth, creating transparency, freeing up time and massively improving the sales process,” notes Whitehouse.

The Art of the Possible

Even the most seemingly miraculous software, however, cannot do all the work: an enterprise requires resources, structure and regular “care and feeding.” This is where the magnitude of relationship cultivation matters most.

“If you automate a broken process, you just get a faster broken process. But taking a longer-term view of strategy and empathizing among teams will develop maturity and trust and ensure efficiency,” says Williams, dedicated to establishing quick automations and delving into predictive analytics for Hearst.

“Disrupting the way legal, finance, and procurement work and automating systems will make things quicker, better, faster and bring a work/life balance back to teams so we can build a real family,” insists McConnell, who is rolling out new ERPs to bring strategic partners together at Corteva. “It’s all about the people.”

Curzio, who pioneered a holistic lean transformation at MassMutual, calls finding the right solution for the time and the ability for legal to partner with finance, IT, service providers and end users the “art of the possible.” Similarly, Whitehouse sees enterprise connections as a servitude to service.

“Every process starts with people, and busy people don’t want to spend time changing things. But when you pose it as, ‘How many six-minute increments will this help you get back in your day? How many hours?’ and find that empirical data, it inspires the journey to build on systems and relationships that become amazingly valuable assets for the entire organization.”

When state-of-the-art user-savvy tools are utilized to amplify how legal ops serve a business, time is saved, never-before-seen financial and data transparency and risk are more effectively managed—and the enterprise becomes more connected as a whole, with the openness, innovation and evolution required for future excellence and success.

To learn more about the impactful role that legal technology plays in enterprise connections, you can explore the capabilities of solutions such as enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and AI.

Onit’s CEO Eric M. Elfman Featured in a CLOC Podcast: The Evolution of Matter Management and How to Leap-Frog Your Strategy

Posted on April 5, 2022 by - Company News and Events

Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit, recently participated in a timely and thought-provoking CLOC podcast, The Evolution of Matter Management and How to Leap-Frog your Strategy. In this episode, Eric was joined by CLOCTalk host Jenn McCarron, Head of Legal Operations and Technology, Netflix, and Duc Tran, Senior Manager at EY Law to discuss the evolution of matter management and how legal teams can successfully implement and leverage it across departments. This is the final episode in the three-part series CLOC is releasing in collaboration with EY Law, titled The Art of the Possible.

Onit was a pioneer in the development of automated matter management tools. Our current solution offers visibility about your overall matter portfolio and provides real-time data and dashboards so you can monitor and track all your matters throughout their lifecycle. Legal team members have immediate access to critical matter, financial and performance metrics through simple information collection, management, and workflow.

How to Learn More About Onit’s Matter Management Solution

Interested in learning more about Onit’s Matter Management? Start here or request a demonstration.  You can also learn more about Matter Management with these resources:

To listen to the CLOC podcast, click here.

How to Choose the Right Legal Tech Vendor for Your In-House Legal Team

Posted on March 30, 2022 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Technology is increasingly vital in helping in-house legal teams optimize their time and resources. The transformation of working practices over recent years, with the continued trend for remote working, means IT tools are more important than ever for communication, administration, data management, and knowledge sharing at work. In addition, legal teams require specific legal tech software to manage and automate everything from spend management and billing to matter management, reporting, and administration.

In-house legal teams face an array of vendors to choose from. With so much choice, how should in-house legal teams choose the right technology vendor for their needs?

To help you, we’ve compiled a checklist of key considerations:

YOUR LEGAL TECH VENDOR CHECKLIST

1. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY MEET DATA SECURITY REQUIREMENTS?

The data handled by legal teams are too sensitive to take any risks. You need to be confident the technology you choose meets every security requirement of your IT department. Look for solutions that offer data security assurances, such as banking-grade encryption, single-jurisdiction hosting, and compliance with regulatory standards, such as ISO 27001 and GDPR.

2. DOES THE TECH VENDOR MEET COUNTRY-SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS?

Define your requirements by thinking through your daily work and identifying what is missing. How can technology help? Ask vendors how their technology can address your specific challenges. For example, when your company is based in Europe, can the technology meet European country-specific requirements, such as taxation and invoicing?

3. WHAT LEVEL OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT IS ON OFFER?

Does the vendor have a professional customer service team? Will you be assigned a dedicated customer success manager? Does the vendor have dedicated European support capabilities? How many languages are supported? Do they have the resources to provide the support you need?

4. IS THE VENDOR TRUSTED BY CLIENTS AND INDEPENDENT COMMENTATORS?

Check out client testimonials, read case studies and ask to speak to clients. Find out if the vendor and its solutions are trusted and valued. Look for independent approvals or verifications from respected organizations, such as Hyperion Global Partners. Does the vendor have a network of trusted partners to support and champion its solutions?

5. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATE WITH EVERYDAY IT SYSTEMS?

We all use various software and IT systems to support efficient collaboration and communication. You need to find legal technology that integrates fully with common software from Microsoft, Google, and others. Choose interoperable legal technology tools that meet you where you work.

6. CAN YOU REQUEST A FREE DEMO?

Ask all shortlisted vendors for a demonstration of their software and its application to a practical example. Before committing to new software, take it for a test drive. Most vendors offer a free trial to test features, benefits, and usability.

MEET LOCALLY

If you need help choosing a vendor, you can meet many leading legal tech providers at conferences across the United States and Europe throughout the year. These provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about your region’s legal tech landscape, meet some of the people you could work with, ask questions, and sample the technology.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

Your New CLM Tool: 6 Unexpected Things to Consider Before You Buy

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The challenges around finding a good CLM tool continue to occupy the minds of CLOs and GCs. In a recent survey, 70% said they are looking to improve their existing contract management software, which is not surprising since a sophisticated, enterprise CLM tool can accelerate revenue, reduce risks and provide consistency and standardization.

When it comes to implementing technology to help handle your contracts, all contract software is not created equal. The following list shares key characteristics you should look for in a CLM tool.

A CLM Tool for All Phases of Contract Management

Getting a deal inked is only half of the process. Many contract management systems focus heavily (or even solely) on the pre-signature contracting phase. This is understandable since that phase requires a lot of heavy lifting in terms of workflow, collaboration and communications – often across multiple departments.

However, as corporate legal departments know, the contract lifecycle doesn’t end when the papers are signed. The contractual obligations must be managed to ensure critical dates, times and deliverables are met and accounted for. CLM technology that accomplishes this includes capabilities such as:

  • Batch review – Extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.
  • Repapering – Identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes in less than five seconds.
  • Contract abstraction – Identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents for easy analysis and management.
  • Audit compliance – Automate large-scale legal contract review during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.
  • Due diligence – Automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value tasks.
  • Legacy contract migration – Analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.

Unlimited Users

Contracts reach far beyond legal and across the enterprise, including sales, marketing, HR, procurement and more. All depend on contracts to move the company forward. Yet, many CLM tools require pricy licenses for each user – a situation that prioritizes dollars rather than speed, collaboration and productivity. With unlimited licenses, any stakeholder involved in a contracting process can access the system for self-service, submissions, updates and more.

Pre-Trained AI for Your CLM Tool

Historically, training AI is a time-consuming and costly endeavor that requires specialized AI-specific skills and resources. It’s understandably an endeavor that corporate legal departments are equipped to handle.

Your CLM tool should come with out-of-the-box functionality with pre-trained AI, and it should incorporate thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts. This means you can start using it – and seeing its value – right away.

Independence from Legacy Products

Since contract management challenges extend across an enterprise, some popular CLM solutions are reliant on specific legacy products or platforms. In this context, the contract management feature may be an addition with limited functionality bolted to a system built for an entirely different business use. This can present challenges, as it limits contract management potential. Beyond limited functionality, you may not be able to use or have access to the product (or have to pay for additional licenses). Additionally, the legacy product may require you to invest time in implementing and training to understand it beyond the contract management functionality. A better solution is to have a CLM tool independent of legacy products – a full-fledged system robust enough to handle the challenges of contract management on an enterprise level.

CLM Tool Integrations

Your CLM should work where you work, meaning integrations are vital. Most contract stakeholders – including lawyers – rely on Microsoft Word for contracts, which means you want to make sure your CLM system has a Microsoft Word add-in. The same is true for any other tools you use heavily or are used in your company. You want to make sure your CLM solution offers seamless integrations, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between solutions or resort to data entry to continue the information flow. This includes integration with existing legal systems such as matter management, spend management, legal holds, legal service requests, analytics and more.

Proven Expertise and Support

Never underestimate the value of your experience with a CLM technology provider. When you’re purchasing something as crucial as CLM, you want an expert sales representative who can understand your needs, ensure your CLM solution is a good fit and offer services and partners that can help with configuration, implementation and support.

The right CLM solution can mean significant savings in cost, better use of your staff’s time, increased efficiency and more. Schedule a demonstration with us today to learn more about how Onit CLM can work for you.

Legal AI Technology: How Its Adoption Leads to Real-World Results

Posted on March 15, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Legal AI technology, along with other forms of AI, was once the stuff of science fiction. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has entrenched itself in the mainstream. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions floating around about what AI is and what it can do, one thing is clear: AI gets results.

That’s why more and more corporate legal departments and legal ops professionals are turning to AI-powered solutions to boost efficiency, cut costs and more. As the year goes on, one of the top legal operations trends we expect to see is companies capitalizing on the practical, real-world results that AI can provide.

The Prevalence of Legal AI Technology

We’ve come a long way from the early days of AI, which were largely dominated by chess games and robot movies. Today, AI is present in nearly every aspect of business, with legal AI technology serving as an integral part of how modern legal ops teams function along with the benefits of a contract management system.

There’s no question that general AI adoption among companies of all sizes is on the rise. McKinsey’s State of AI in 2021 Report found that 56% of survey participants across multiple industries adopted AI in 2021, up 50% the previous year. This adoption significantly impacted companies’ bottom lines, with 27% of respondents saying they could trace at least 5% of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to AI.

Corporate legal departments are part of this upward trend. According to CLOC State of the Industry Reports, in-house AI usage increased from 12% in 2019 to 22% in 2021. Not surprisingly, the AI legal software market is predicted to grow by more than 28% between 2021 and 2026.

AI Results in Action

AI is a technology that learns, reasons and acts for itself. It can make decisions that usually require a human level of expertise, meaning it can help lawyers and legal ops professionals anticipate problems and address issues as, or even before, they arise.

AI is ideal for data-intensive tasks because it identifies patterns, learns from them, and generates insights faster and more accurately than humans. Legal work is increasingly made up of data-driven tasks, meaning more legal ops professionals should be turning to AI. A perfect example is contract management.

A study showed that legal contract review software makes new users immediately 51.5% more productive and roughly 33% more efficient by conducting first-pass contract review, making redlines and delivering a contract risk profile, all in a matter of minutes. If you take a typical midsize company with 55 lawyers who collectively review an average of 9,526 contracts each year, a 51.5% productivity increase allows the same legal team to process 4,906 additional contracts each year – the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to the team.

The benefits of AI based contract management don’t end when the deal is signed. Your contracts contain mountains of valuable data that can help you better run your business and increase efficiency. The only problem is that you historically needed someone to review all those contracts to get at that valuable data, and few legal departments had the time or staff to do the job correctly.

Legal AI technology, though, can review thousands of contracts at once and export data in five seconds or less. When you apply that power to time-intensive, voluminous tasks like repapering, batch review, legacy contract migration and more, AI can save in-house counsel and legal ops professionals a significant number of hours. And that time savings can be reinvested into tasks that create value for the company. In fact, it’s been shown that properly managing contracts from start to finish can increase revenues by up to 9.2%.

A World of Possibilities for Legal AI Technology

Contracting is just one area where in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals are seeing real-world results by implementing AI. As innovation continues to disrupt the legal tech world, AI is being introduced into nearly every aspect of practice and business. But now, AI has evolved beyond a buzzword to provide meaningful – and impactful – results.

To read more about how legal AI technology impacts legal departments and other top trends shaping legal ops today, download our white paper Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.

How to Improve Legal Spend with Technology

Posted on March 10, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

If you work as part of a legal operations team, chances are you spend plenty of time thinking about how to improve legal spend – specifically, how to manage and reduce it. Under ever-increasing pressures to do more with less, the spotlight on legal spend is brighter than ever.

The following are just a few examples of enterprise legal management software can go a long way toward reducing legal spend.

1.   Improve Legal Spend by Moving to Electronic Invoices

You can’t improve legal spend without understanding what your baseline is. If your law department and its law firms are working with paper invoices, you limit the chances of understanding what your spend truly is and where you may be overcharged. Plus, paper invoices limit insight into vendor management, evaluations and comparisons.

Why? Because for most corporate legal departments, manual invoice review is time-consuming, tedious and can lead to human error. There are simply too many invoices and not enough time or resources to vet line items. Plus, it’s hard to compare and analyze costs when all information is on paper.

E-billing enables a corporate legal department to adopt industry standards for formats and billing codes. From there, legal ops can begin to capture and “digest” precious data for reporting and analysis – valuable indicators such as overall spending, trends and more – and compare them to industry benchmarks (more on that below). It also minimizes the time spent inputting invoices into billing systems for review and payment processing.

2.   Use a Specialized Legal E-Billing System Rather Than a General Tool

There are a lot of e-billing systems on the market, but many of the most popular ones aren’t designed to handle legal billing. Too many corporate legal departments fall back on general e-billing tools when a legal e-billing system can better deal with legal-specific billing problems and improve legal spend.

Among other things, the right legal e-billing system will offer the following functionalities, which are traditionally not available in general e-billing tools: supporting electronic timekeeper rates from outside counsel, preventing law firms from billing to matters without approval, receiving invoices in the industry-standard Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) format or comparing LEDES invoices against company billing guidelines, permitting write-offs or rejections of individual invoice line items, allowing for comparison of invoices against budget, supporting the automatic allocation of invoices to specified cost centers or codes, and allowing for reporting on spend by relevant factors such as time, activity, matter, firm and more. All of these capabilities are critical to accurate and efficient legal invoicing.

3.   Automate Billing Guidelines that Comport with Outside Counsel Guidelines

Compliance with outside counsel billing guidelines is one of the most important goals of reviewing invoices. Manual review is not up to the task. Technology is, so make sure you have a tool that allows you to input your specific billing guidelines so they can automatically and consistently be applied across all your invoices to identify areas of improper charges and prevent overpaying.

The billing rules often come as part of legal spend management systems. They automatically scour incoming invoices from law firms and legal vendors for discrepancies and fix or flag the invoice for further review. This relieves reviewers from manually combing through each line item, often resulting in immediate savings.

4.   Implement AI that Looks Between the Billing Rules

Legal invoice review has long been rules-based. While billing rules represent an excellent first step for reducing legal spend, it’s only the beginning. Invoices may still slip through the cracks with a purely rules-based approach or be incorrectly approved for payment.

How does this happen?

Billing rules, while valuable, rely on specific descriptions or words to identify potentially improper charges. If by some chance, an invoice employs different keywords or descriptions not included in billing rules to describe a line item, billing rules may not flag the charge. It may, instead, not identify the noncompliant charge and approve it for payment. After all, you can’t program billing rules to consider every potential variable in word choices.

If you want to further improve legal spend, consider an AI-powered invoice review tool that looks between the rules to find hidden legal invoice review errors and even more savings. These technologiesdf work in conjunction with enterprise legal management systems. They are trained on millions of legal invoice charges to look for areas where overpayment is common, or correction is typically needed – things like block billing, vague descriptions, work done by the wrong class of staff or non-work travel.

When these issues are identified, InvoiceAI can either automatically adjust the charge to comply with outside counsel guidelines or it can bring the problem to reviewers’ attention, significantly reducing the likelihood of improper payment and lowering overall legal spend in the process.

5.   Leverage Benchmarking Technologies

Knowing how much you spend on a particular law firm is great. Even better, though, is knowing how much you should spend based on what everyone else is spending – even down to a law firm in a specific location for a particular task. This is where benchmarking comes in.

Benchmarking is a critical part of any sound legal spend management system. But the benchmarking technology you select needs to provide attributes such as practice area, timekeeper level, work type and discounts, which will provide you with the negotiation leverage you need during conversations with your law firms.

For example, a top private equity firm saved 17% on its rates, realizing more than $27M in savings in the first year by leveraging smart benchmarking data.

Also, to ensure that you always understand the going rate for upcoming matters, make sure your benchmarking solution also has proprietary competitive cohorts of law firms based on at least 100 factors, including general firm expertise, rates and even individual partner expertise.

Conclusion

The pressure to do more with less likely won’t end any time soon, but there are ways of meeting that demand by implementing the right technology. Contact us today to learn more about how InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system can help you reduce your legal spend. And if you’re interested in leveraging the power of legal services benchmarking and market intelligence, reach out to our subsidiary Bodhala.

Leading Legal Ops Priority: Diversity and Inclusion in Law Firms

Posted on March 8, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) have taken center stage at corporations in recent years. Making D&I a priority isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also good business sense. It’s been consistently shown that greater diversity leads to stronger work quality and helps businesses remain competitive.

Nonetheless, the idea of corporate legal departments pushing for diversity among their full-time employees and in their outside law firms is still relatively new. Only 11.5% of GCs at Fortune 1000 companies in 2020 were racial or ethnic minorities, a 2% decrease from the prior year.

Efforts in this area are improving, however. Pursuing D&I initiatives in law firms is one of the top trends for corporate legal operations in 2022. Advancing D&I requires legal ops professionals to look at their internal staff and practices and make an honest assessment of the outside vendors they work with to determine where they can help spur change.

Internal Diversity and Inclusion in Law Firms

Today, many legal departments and law firms are looking to increase headcount by attracting and retaining a diverse talent pool. Legal operations professionals are a crucial part of this movement and are prioritizing diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs as companies start the process of emerging from the pandemic.

Improving D&I involves both process and data, according to Bloomberg’s 2021 Legal Operations Survey. Legal operations staff have discovered three key processes that can help enhance D&I among their ranks: internal diversity training, increasing remote work opportunities and changing recruiting patterns. On the data front, the same survey showed that 71% of legal ops teams plan to track diversity metrics going forward to push D&I even further.

Another frequently overlooked area is the pipeline from law school to law firm promotion structures to in-house legal department employment. Many would argue that disparities in the legal profession begin with law school admissions. Though overall law school admission rates have been down for all groups since 2014, the number of Black and Hispanic applicants has declined more than the number of white applicants in recent years. Focusing on D&I in recruiting can help address these disparities before they worsen.

Focusing D&I Efforts Outside

While the efforts highlighted above will go a long way toward creating a more diverse workplace, what else can legal ops do to promote diversity and inclusion (D&l)?

One crucial action is for legal departments and legal ops professionals to hold their external vendors to the same D&I standards they’ve set for themselves. Chances are, your legal ops team already uses a number of metrics to formally evaluate vendor performance before making vendor hiring decisions, and D&I should be one of those metrics.

The focus on outside vendor D&I should start as early as possible. The RFP process is a great starting point for considering whether your vendors and potential vendors share your commitment to D&I before you’ve brought them on board. Another great way to assess your vendors in the area of D&I is to have them complete the ABA Model Diversity Survey as part of the vetting and hiring process.

A Cultural Shift

Creating a diverse workforce requires efforts on multiple fronts. Legal departments concerned with D&I need to be looking in every corner to find additional opportunities to eliminate disparities. As calls for corporate legal departments to drive D&I are becoming more and more common, in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals need to pay more attention to the diversity of their own internal ranks and the staffing of their outside counsel and other vendors.

Going forward, legal operations professionals will continue prioritizing D&I programs, and in-house legal departments will increasingly be seen as a driver to improve diversity issues in the greater legal industry through outside counsel hiring. Organizations such as the ABA and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association are encouraging corporate legal departments to ensure their teams are reflecting diversity, but the real heavy lifting rests on the shoulders of the lawyers and legal operations departments.

To read more about D&I, as well as the other top trends for legal ops, download “Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.”

Corporate Legal News Updates for Corporate Counsel (March 2022 Edition)

Posted on March 3, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Welcome to the March issue of leading news and resources for in-house counsel and legal operations professionals. In this edition, you’ll read about the return of in-person Legalweek NY, GC’s and CLO’s increased involvement in technology and business decisions, the future of human-in-the-loop technologies and a new legal tech-buying directory from industry expert Bob Ambrogi.

1. The GC’s Role in Tech Decisions

We all know that general counsel are increasingly helping their companies make technology-related decisions, but just how prevalent is this new role? According to the recent General Counsel Report from FTI Consulting, which surveyed 30 top in-house lawyers, 97% reported playing a role in their organization’s technology ecosystem, with 87% saying they were “heavily involved” in tech planning and purchases. Nonetheless, only 33% of respondents believed that lawyers have adequate knowledge of technology. This leaves significant room for technology education, which will be crucial as lawyers will only be expected to be more involved with new technology for law firms going forward.

Source: Law.com

2. “Human-in-the-Loop” Solutions Will Comprise 30% of New Legal Tech Automation Offerings by 2025

AI has taken the legal industry by storm, but human lawyers aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Gartner recently predicted that, by 2025, 30% of new legal automation solutions will combine technology and human input – also known as “human-in-the-loop” offerings. This hybrid approach to technology blends staff and software, with high-level technical expertise coming from the technology supplier rather than an in-house team. As the volume of legal work has grown faster than legal headcounts in most organizations, the human-in-the-loop model frees in-house lawyers from having to devote already-limited time and resources to developing domain expertise.

Source: Gartner

3. Here’s What’s On the Mind of Chief Legal Officers (Survey)

The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) and Exterro recently released the 2022 Chief Legal Officers Survey, with results from 861 chief legal officers and general counsel representing organizations across 20 industries and 38 countries. The survey found that CLOs are increasingly playing a vital role in business and taking on more responsibilities. Legal ops pros are pivotal right now, and investment is accelerating accordingly, with 70% of CLOs listing legal ops as an area of focus for their department’s top strategic initiatives. Finally, delivering value to customers was cited as a top priority, so, not surprisingly,  contract management is the top tech area in which CLOs plan to invest going forward. CLM helps companies accelerate revenue, streamline processes and manage legal obligations – which can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Source: Association of Corporate Counsel

4. Industry Leaders Launch Information Hub for Legal Tech Buyers

Robert (Bob) Ambrogi has been a leading voice in the legal tech industry for nearly two decades. His latest venture, along with his son Ben Ambrogi, a media specialist and producer, is the release of the LawNext Legal Technology Directory. The directory is designed to provide readers with the information they need to make legal tech buying decisions, including intel on product features, pricing, independent reviews and more. “Our goal is to continue to develop this into a comprehensive directory of products, reviews, learning resources, and more, where buyers can find trusted information to guide their purchases, and where vendors can help their products be discovered and distinguished,” Bob explained.

Source: Law.com

5. Connect With Onit at Legalweek NY!

Legalweek returns in person this year! From March 9-11, Onit will be joining the legal tech community in New York to engage with our customers, share our products and discuss the growth of our company in the last two years. Our Legalweek session, Building Stronger Connections to the Enterprise (Thursday, March 10, from 1:30 – 2:30 pm ET), will feature panelists from Hearst, Corteva and MassMutual sharing their vision for why it’s imperative for legal to “connect” to the broader enterprise and how they’re implementing processes and technology to make these connections. On Wednesday, March 9, we’re co-hosting a happy hour with PwC, and on Thursday, March 10, we’re co-hosting an exclusive dinner for in-house legal leaders with Consilio. The Onit family of companies will be at the Cyber Café on the 3rd floor of the Hilton, offering demos of Onit products built on our workflow and AI platforms and offering fun giveaways. Of course, you can always schedule time in our private demo room away from the exhibit hall floor to take a deeper dive into how Onit products can help your legal department better manage legal work, costs and risks. Register for any or all of these activities now. We hope to see you in NY!

Source: Onit

We look forward to bringing you more news and insights as the new year progresses. As always, if you want to learn more about our legal business solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, AI and more, schedule a demo today or email [email protected].

Eric M. Elfman, Onit’s CEO and Co-Founder, Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

Posted on March 1, 2022 by - Company News and Events

We’re thrilled to announce that Onit’s CEO and co-founder, Eric M. Elfman, has won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 2022 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. The award recognizes career achievement in developing and adopting legal technologies and legal technology companies.

This award is especially significant, since Onit’s legal operations software subsidiary, SimpleLegal, is also being honored. Its SimpleReview, AI-powered invoice review technology, is a finalist under the category of Legal Ops.

A History of Entrepreneurialism

Eric is a serial entrepreneur passionate about building great software companies. With nearly 21 years of experience in the legal technology industry, he has deep domain experience in the legal electronic invoicing and spend management arenas and helped create industry standards including the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) and the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS).

As a teenager, he started his first business venture selling skateboard parts out of his car. After time spent in the Navy, he earned his college degree and an MBA at Rice University and returned to entrepreneurialism. He co-founded Datacert with Eric Smith (currently Onit’s COO and chief security officer), which grew into a leading provider of corporate, legal and IP spend and matter management solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Together, they steered the company to $28 million in revenue growth with more than 200 employees.

The idea for Datacert came from a simple revelation. As he explains:

“Twenty-five years ago, I consulted for a Fortune 10 law department that had no way to pinpoint how much money it spent on legal services. That conversation inspired me to co-found Datacert.”  

Now, the latest company he co-founded, Onit, has grown from a 2011 startup with two employees and $25,000 in revenue to a global organization with 600+ employees and 2,800 corporate legal customers worldwide. The company, co-founded by Eric Elfman, Eric Smith, John Gilman and Jill Black, has rapid revenue growth recognized by awards such as the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, the Inc. 5000 and the Growjo 10K. (You can hear the company’s co-founders discuss the company’s history and evolution here.)

The Lifetime Achievement Award joins others that recognize Eric’s accomplishments, including:

  • The 2002 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for emerging technology
  • The Rice Business Alumni Award in 2019, which recognizes alumni for outstanding achievements in their professional fields and exemplary leadership.
  • Being named by the Houston Business Journal as one of Houston’s Most Admired CEOs in 2021.

For many years, Eric has volunteered across a range of entrepreneurial and community initiatives. He has been a judge for the annual Rice Business Plan competition, spent hours assisting flood victims during and after Hurricane Harvey and volunteered with the Boy Scouts. He also serves on the board of the Make-a-Wish Foundation of the Texas Gulf Coast and Louisiana, a non-profit organization that grants wishes for children with life-threatening illnesses.

The Awards Ceremony

The Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards Ceremony will be held on March 10 at 6 pm ET in New York City. Those interested in attending can find more information here.

Connect with Onit at Legalweek

In addition to the awards ceremony, Legalweek attendees will have several opportunities to connect with Onit and its family of companies during the conference (March 8-11, New York City, Hilton Midtown).

Onit, SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, Bodhala, AXDRAFT and BusyLamp will exhibit on the third floor of the Hilton by the conference’s registration desks and provide demonstrations of their solutions. Visit here if you would like to reserve a demonstration time or join Onit for drinks or dinner.

You can also attend the Emerging Technology session sponsored by Onit, titled “Building Stronger Connections to the Enterprise.” Scheduled for Thursday, March 10, from 1:30 – 2:30 pm ET, panelists from Hearst, Corteva, and MassMutual will share their vision for why it’s imperative for legal to “connect” to the broader enterprise and how they are implementing processes and technology to make these connections. You do not need to register for this event if you have an all-access badge to the show.

See you at Legalweek!