Author: Onit

The Role of Data in VMWare’s Digital Transformation Journey

Posted on October 4, 2021 by - Digital Transformation

As technology continues to advance, the data it generates has become increasingly important to the functioning of today’s corporate legal department. Data is central to prioritizing and justifying investment in technology at companies of all sizes as exemplified by the VMware digital transformation.

For our customers, Onit functions as their department’s “central nervous system,” driving the collection and presentation of that data. To help explain just how important data is to companies today, Onit recently hosted a webinar with executives of HBR Consulting and VMware to discuss trends in the legal space and how data played a critical role in VMware’s successful legal tech transformation journey.

The HBR Survey

The most recent HBR Law Department Survey focused on the technology investments law departments are currently making and plan to make going forward, looking at areas like staffing, spending, process, technology, and compensation.

The survey results show that 2.1% of the internal budget across all participants was allocated to technology, a very slight increase from the previous survey. The top three areas where companies are currently implementing technology are e-billing, legal hold, and matter management, whereas AI, a previous hot technology, is now being considered as something to implement down the road. E-signature technology saw the biggest increase in implementation due to law departments’ need to figure out how to deal with a remote workforce. While AI has taken a bit of a downshift in terms of priority, it’s expected to pick back up in the years to come.

The survey highlights the importance of not just the amount of money that departments are spending, but of what actual technology categories those companies are spending money in and prioritizing.

The VMware Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is sweeping the legal sphere, but every company’s journey looks a little different depending on what its priorities are. For VMware, the mission was to transform and scale legal services to accelerate the company’s growth and simplify the customer experience.

VMware resisted the temptation to simply turn to the latest tools on the market, and instead took a step back first and figured out what business problems they were trying to solve and what the best path to solving them was. As VMware will tell you, transformation is not something that can be rushed.

An important part of the VMware digital transformation was to analyze the challenges and establish baseline metrics. Next, you need to simplify your infrastructure and workflows to resolve process problems that can’t be treated with a quick technology fix. Only after both of these steps should you start to implement technology.

Data plays a huge role in making the journey a successful one. While the technology you choose matters, it should also be viewed as an enabler to get information and benchmarking data. You always need to understand the baseline metrics of the problems you’re trying to solve.

Despite their success, VMware will be the first to admit that you should expect to see failures and mistakes along the journey. Relying on data will allow you to measure the impacts your changes are having on the business and whether you’re meeting the necessary benchmarks that will drive adoption and value.

The VMware digital transformation involved a number of pieces. Among other things, they created an enterprise contract repository that served as a single source of truth for the organization. They also automated their core contracts that generated the most revenue.

Perhaps most importantly, though, VMware took a platform approach, using the Onit platform, Apptitude, to consolidate all matters in a single place. Within that platform, VMware was able to leverage Onit dashboards to drive proactive strategic decisions and monitor both risks and trends. They also created a self-service NDA portal that allowed for nimble and agile processes, real-time visibility, and a reduction in time, cost, and errors in the NDA process.

Ultimately, the reason VMware chose to double down on Onit is because they truly believe that platform solutions, rather than single-point solutions, are the future. When you can take advantage of AI that’s embedded in a platform, you can amass data in one place, rather than implementing and justifying more and more disparate solutions. Onit’s platform also gave VMware confidence that they were adequately handling all their privacy and security concerns.

At the end of the day, VMware’s success depended on investing in a change management strategy that aligned its data transformation journey with its business priorities. Success depended on defining metrics upfront and establishing baseline benchmark metrics. Data was pivotal to it all.

These are just a few highlights from the discussion about the VMware digital transformation. You can listen to the entire webinar here.

For more information on how Onit can help with your transformation journey, contact us today and schedule a demo.

How to Find the Latest Updates in the Legal Operations Software Market

Posted on September 30, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The legal operations software market is rapidly evolving, thanks to technologies such as AI and the ever-growing operational sophistication of corporate legal departments.

Fortunately, a slew of resources are available for those interested in legal operations and the technology that turbocharges it, including:

  • The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) – A community of legal operations experts focused on redefining the business of law. In addition to releasing its yearly State of the Industry Report, it offers programming worldwide, educational resources and online connections for its membership.
  • The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) – Founded in 1981, this legal organization represents, guides and supports the global in-house counsel community in over 85 countries. In addition to valuable programming and online resources, it hosts the annual ACC Value Champions awards program, which highlights leaders in improving costs, predictability and outcomes.
  • Corporate Counsel – This magazine explores corporate legal department trends and challenges and how innovative legal leaders respond to them.

These are only a few of the resources available. And now, there’s one more.

A Podcast for the Legal Operations Software Market

Over the past several years, we’ve been tackling some of the most significant issues in legal ops, automation and more through a series of podcasts. Now, we’ve collected them all in one place, so that anyone in corporate legal can hear candid discussions on some of the latest news and advances in the legal operations software market.

Podcast highlights include:

  • How BT Enacted its Award-Winning Digital Transformation – In less than a year, BT transformed its global legal department, creating award-winning operations that judges described as admirable “not only due to the speed of their roll-out of the platform, but by taking an existing process and migrating it into a streamlined, efficient platform.” In less than three months, the company has been awarded the Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and joined the shortlist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law awards. In this episode, David Griffin, Head of Legal Technology and Change at BT, shares how this happened.
  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Reviewing and managing NDAs is a pain in the neck for in-house counsel. They’re the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today. In fact, some corporate legal departments tell us they process between 500 and 100,000 a year. That’s a lot of time and cost that can be redirected to other contributions. Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how AI and automation are transforming the NDA process – in some cases shaving the time spent on NDA processing by 70%.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, former Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune 100 global financial services company with more than $1 trillion in assets under management and 14,000 employees globally (and now SVP of Strategy and Growth for Onit), shares his insights into what goes into creating world-class legal ops. While budget is an essential factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Everyone from tech companies to industry influencers tells lawyers what they need from AI. And, if there’s one thing about lawyers, they don’t generally like being told what they like. Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, a lawyer and technologist, talks about ways legal and contract AI technologies are actually giving lawyers what they need.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Surveys – both formal and informal – show a rising interest in contract lifecycle management (CLM). As interest grows in this technology, how can legal operations professionals cut through the hype to find ROI? Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses unique ways to find CLM ROI.
  • Ten Years of Onit: Stories from the Companies’ Co-Founders – How do four very different and strong-minded people come together to create one of the leading companies in the legal operations software market? Well, there’s success in dysfunction. In this podcast, Onit’s co-founders share their journey from startup to scaleup.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here. Be sure to like our podcast LinkedIn page to get the latest episodes. You can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal ops through AI and automation, schedule a demo or reach out to [email protected].

3 Times You Should Be Benchmarking Your Firms

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Corporate legal departments are increasingly expecting more from their firm relationships. In-house teams are now feeling executive pressure to effectively manage their budgets, save where possible, and demonstrate the value their firms deliver for the prices they’re paying. 

So how are they doing that? Innovative in-house teams are using analytics and sophisticated benchmarks. Armed with “smart benchmarks” that are informed by market data and purpose-built to establish apples-to-apples comparisons, corporate legal departments are leveraging AI-backed benchmarks to influence their law firm relationships for the better — and you can too.

But when do benchmarks give you the leverage you’re looking for? 

Here are three ideal opportunities, and some simple tactics to help you get started with benchmarking: 

1. Rate Negotiations

Rate negotiations can be uncomfortable — but with data, they don’t have to be. Though your firms may describe your rates as “great”, is that actually the case? Are they in alignment with the going market rates for similar firms doing similar work? You’re not going to get the answer from your firms — they’re inherently biased. It’s important you look to trusted third-party sources for market data. 

A smart benchmark will provide you with actual market rates for similar work from similar firms — which is critical. Comparing claims litigation rates to complex litigation rates, or an AmLaw 25 firm with a hyper-regional firm won’t result in usable data. They’re not meaningful comparisons. Make sure your benchmarks leverage contextually relevant competitors executing on similar matter-types and practice areas. 

Benchmarks also help you know when it’s worth the effort to negotiate at all. If it’s clear that the firm you used for all complex litigation matters is charging marginally more than similar firms handling similar matters, then perhaps the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.  

If you don’t have access to smart benchmarks from trusted third-party sources, you can still drive value by conducting a rate card RFP. That can help you at least benchmark firms’ bids against each other, and give you leverage with individual firms based on other firms’ bids. 

But be aware that the bids you receive are only telling you your law firms’ self-evaluated price — what they think they’re worth — not what they should cost. 

Benchmarks, on the other hand, are clear, objective, irrefutable data. Armed with that kind of data you’ll have the negotiation leverage you need to get the rate reduction you want.

2. Measure Outside Counsel Value & Effectiveness 

It’s no secret that law firms can be expensive and it can be hard to determine the value you’re getting for the rates you’re spending. But benchmarks are a great starting place for ascertaining law firm value. 

It’s understandable to want to work with a firm you like and trust, but your legal department should evaluate law firm relationships through a mix of qualitative and quantitative factors, like benchmarking. 

Beyond smart benchmarks, Firm Report Cards are another way to do basic benchmarking. Firm Report Cards allow you to drill down by practice area, matter type, timekeeper level, and even tasks to analyze the firms in your panel. From there, you can benchmark your panel firms against one another to determine who will deliver the most value to your organization and do so efficiently.  

Leading a data-driven discussion with your law firms will enable you to incentivize improvements — or even reward your top-performing firms by paying them more (yes, paying more isn’t always a bad thing).

3. Determining a Matter’s Should-Cost 

Law firms are notoriously vague when scoping costs for upcoming matters. Like many elements of the law, it’s not always clear upfront how complex a matter may be or how contentious your opponent will be. That said, law firms have the data to give you estimates – otherwise, how would they be able to make bids for large matters? They have the data – they’re just not sharing it. 

Having your own benchmarks for matters — estimated hours, allocation of tasks, and rates — is an incredibly valuable tool. By combining a smart market benchmark with historical data on similar matters, you can make a reasonable estimation of the expected cost — within a tolerance of course.

Market benchmarking will help your legal department set realistic and competitive expectations for your matters. With this knowledge, you can make data-driven, strategic decisions when it comes to matter allocation, ensuring you’re retaining counsel that delivers maximum value and acts in your best legal and financial interests. 

Benchmarking is critical to more strategic, informed decisions.  

Organizations are increasingly leaning on General Counsels and their teams to not only mitigate risk for the business but also act as a strategic partner. To be a true strategic partner, you don’t just need data — you need insightful, smart benchmarks.

Relevant benchmarks based on your own historical data, or third-party sources are indispensable and are a key ingredient for strategic success. The insight gleaned from benchmarks is the required ammunition to enable effective negotiation, improved firm management, and more accurate forecasting to keep your department on budget and be the strategic partner the business demands.

3 Ways You Should Be Using Benchmarking Data

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Smart rate benchmarks offer corporate legal departments a wealth of knowledge — but just knowing the benchmark only gets you so far. To truly make the most of your rate benchmarks, you have to draw insights, develop a strategy, and then action it. 

Here are three key ways to strategically leverage rate benchmarks (and make sure to check out our recent post on when you should benchmark!): 

1. Improve Performance with Data-Driven Discussion 

Working with law firms can be tricky, especially when it comes to conversations about rates or performance. Many in-house teams have a hunch when their law firms aren’t operating as efficiently or effectively as they could be, but lack the evidence to prove their suspicions

Benchmarks — both amongst your panel and against the market — are a valuable starting place for meaningful discussion with your firms. Data doesn’t lie — which immediately negates many tired arguments. With quantitative analysis like benchmarks, it’s simple to highlight areas where improvements could be made — and indisputable. 

Plus, the data lends itself to actionable insights. It’s easy to spot outliers and ask the right questions about why their numbers are so far off from the pack. They may have perfectly acceptable explanations — or they may have to make changes to how they work to fall more in line with norms.

If there’s one thing your law firms do not want, it’s to lose your business. Using benchmarks will help you to drive transparency through data-driven conversations. 

2. Make More Strategic Decisions on Law Firm Selection & Matter Allocation

Firm selection and matter allocation are other areas where benchmarks can make a huge difference in cost, value, and quality of service. It’s no secret that law is a relationship-driven business. Hiring decisions are often colored by old work relationships or law school friendships. Having a history with a person — or a firm — doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right for an upcoming matter, or for your business in general.  

One easy way to improve firm selection is to leverage benchmarks during your annual rate card review process. Conduct a Rate Card RFP, asking firms to re-submit rates across all or specific practice areas. Then benchmark the firms to establish the bid’s relationship to market prices — but make sure the benchmarks are contextually relevant and level-specific. Your market benchmarks must only compare a firm against similar firms for similar work, and that you’ve got specific benchmarks for each timekeeper level. 

Comparing the rates from the different bids, along with the market rate, will help you understand which firms deliver the most value. For example, certain practice areas may have very complex casework or subject matter and therefore require more specialized (and expensive) expertise. Regardless of the practice area, benchmarks and bids will put you in the driver seat to get the best firm at the best rate for your panel or matter.  

3. Negotiate Fair Market Rates

When it comes to rates, law firms are always adamant that you’re receiving a “really good” rate — even “lower than what other clients pay!”.

But we all know that seeing is believing — or as Cuba Gooding Jr. put it in Jerry McGuire — “Show me the money!”.

The apples-to-apples comparisons gleaned from smart benchmarks enable in-house teams to analyze exactly how their rates stack up against other firms that handle similar matters for similar clients within the same domain. 

As we all know, law firm objections are commonplace throughout rate negotiations. With this information, you have all the ammunition you need to lead data-driven conversations with your law firms and justification as to why you should pay a lower rate.

After all, competition is healthy. If your law firms really value your business, they will see the indisputable logic in your data and adjust their pricing to reflect a more fair market rate in order to keep you as a client.

Benchmarks Fuel Better Business Decisions

You cannot effectively manage what you do not measure. Benchmarks should play an integral role in your legal department’s operations — from relationship management to firm selection to rate negotiations and more. 

Onit Acquires BusyLamp, a Premier Provider of Enterprise Legal Management Software in Europe

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

The Onit family of enterprise legal management software providers has grown today with our acquisition of BusyLamp. We are now one of the largest enterprise legal management conglomerates globally, with more than 600 implementations completed worldwide by Onit and its subsidiaries.

Who Is BusyLamp?

BusyLamp, based in Frankfurt, Germany, serves in-house counsel with the information, data, trust and tools they need so they can focus on the strategic tasks that matter most. Founded in 2012 by co-CEO Dr. Michael Tal, co-CEO Dr. Manuel Meder and CTO Konstantin Tadrowski, the company has been recognized by Hyperion Research as “highly innovative” and a “market leader.” Corporate legal leaders across sectors including automotive, telecommunications and banking rely on its award-winning eBilling.Space and recently launched matter management solution Matter.Space every day.

BusyLamp joins Onit as an independent subsidiary.

What Does This Mean for Onit and Enterprise Legal Management Software?

The acquisition of BusyLamp makes Onit one of the largest ELM software providers in the world, capable of meeting the requirements of any corporate legal department.

It also aligns with several of Onit’s top strategic priorities, including continuing to innovate through disruption, expanding our presence worldwide and pursuing rapid growth. This acquisition, along with the acquisitions of SimpleLegal and Bodhala, positions Onit as one of the largest global conglomerates of ELM software providers and offers an even broader pool of best practices and best-of-breed technologies to help us serve customers around the world.

BusyLamp expands Onit’s existing presence in Europe with some of the brightest minds in legal technology abroad – experts deeply embedded in the local community who understand the challenges and complexities of the business of law in Europe and beyond. To complement the expertise, BusyLamp also brings an industry-leading offering well-equipped for considerations such as VAT, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and regional tax policies.

Continued Legal Technology Disruption and Product Innovation

Onit is continually looking to innovate and expand our offerings for our customers and throughout the legal space. Acquisitions play a pivotal role in our commitment to this.

The BusyLamp acquisition is the fourth for Onit in less than 12 months and the fifth overall.

In 2019, Onit acquired SimpleLegal, modern legal operations software provider. Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch in 2020, establishing its AI Center of Excellence. Thirty days later, document automation provider AXDRAFT joined the Onit family of companies. Most recently, Onit announced the acquisition of Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence company.

Like BusyLamp, SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT and Bodhala all operate as independent subsidiaries of Onit.

In addition to acquiring disruptive companies, Onit also continues to innovate its product offerings – especially for AI. In less than 12 months, Onit has introduced five AI-based offerings to optimize critical business processes for corporate legal departments.

Onit’s InvoiceAI, which debuted to customers in May, uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments increase potential savings and reduce time reviewing invoices from outside counsel and legal vendors. Onit released the news in this video announcement. On average, InvoiceAI identifies an extra 10-20% in potential savings in addition to enterprise legal management and bill review savings.

In addition to InvoiceAI, Onit also offers:

  • Precedent, an AI-based business intelligence platform
  • ReviewAI, AI technology that reviews and redlines contracts in less than two minutes
  • ExtractAI, which analyzes, reviews and exports contract data in seconds
  • Automate NDA, a best practice solution that helps automate and manage the NDA process, reducing end-to-end processing time by 70%

Learn More about BusyLamp and Onit

To learn more about BusyLamp, visit www.BusyLamp.com, or you can request a demo here.

You can request a demo of Onit’s highly configurable platforms and solutions here.

Customers of Onit and BusyLamp can reach out to their account managers to find out more about the acquisition.

The Top Risk and Compliance Automation Tools Created by Legal Operations

Posted on September 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Managing risk and compliance are critical tasks for keeping companies safe, which is why corporate legal departments are turning to compliance automation tools.

Between an ever-changing regulatory landscape, an increased focus on data privacy, the need to monitor internal policies and guidelines and more, risk and compliance represent a challenging task. It spans multiple departments within an enterprise, requiring collaboration and management of often manual tasks. These elements increase the possibility of the proverbial dropped ball and, in turn, increase the likelihood of noncompliance with external or internal protocols or higher risks for companies.

Take, for example, data breach incident reporting for GDPR and other data privacy regulations. Organizations must take immediate action to report potential data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours. However, this can be a challenging timeline for large organizations relying on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails as tools for compliance.

What if legal operations could build their own compliance automation tools? It’s happening – and quite often. Here’s how.

The Power of Business Process Automation

As a general rule, the lower the number of tools needed to manage a process, the higher the overall efficiency. That’s where business process automation and compliance meet.

Corporate legal departments of all sizes across the globe are rethinking how they work. They are looking for ways to radically improve their process performance to optimize compliance activities. Technology is rapidly accommodating this need through the rise of no-code platforms and visual interfaces. These innovations have made it possible for almost anyone to build and deploy solutions and applications without writing a single line of code.

Let’s return to the example above of data breach incident reporting. Automation vastly streamlines this process. One team of legal operations experts, which included BT and Standard Chartered, built an App on a no-code business process automation platform to streamline the process. The resulting App reports, manages and tracks data breaches and notifies regulators. It collects data breach information, automatically sends a notice to the security and compliance team and offers a rules-based dashboard and a quick entry point to review records. It even generates ICO reports and submits them in addition to collecting feedback from the organization. (You can see the App in action in this video.)

Risk and Compliance Automation Tools and Apps

The Onit Nation – a group of Onit Fortune 500 corporate legal customers, partners and employees – has built an impressive range of Apps on our business process automation platform. These 5,500+ Apps cover a wide range of industries and practices, including accounting, finance and procurement, enterprise operations, general and administrative, human resources, IT, legal operations, marketing and IP and risk and compliance.

Here are some of the risk and compliance automation tools the Onit Nation has created:

  • Compliance Questionnaires: Creates, distributes and keeps track of responses to questionnaires for various compliance-tracking needs.
  • Directors’ Stock Election Unit Form: Assists with distributing, collecting and tracking annual Board of Director’s instructions for stock options.
  • Employee Incident: Provides a secure intake mechanism for employees to report incidents, both named and anonymous.
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations, collecting all ethics cases together for better oversight, collaboration and management.
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation for company-wide gift and business entertainment to improve compliance with relevant policies.
  • Internal Investigations: Traces internal allegations end to end and creates capture points for intake.
  • Power of Attorney Agreements: Handles the approval and management of power of attorney contracts used when a company needs to act on behalf of an employee.
  • Whistleblower: An anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought by employees that allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution.

These are just some of the tools that make risk and compliance tasks easier. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. You can also learn more about no-code platforms by reading this white paper – No-Code Platforms: How They Are Transforming Legal Operations and Their Enterprises.

To get started with building your own Apps, request a demonstration of Onit’s Apptitude platform or email [email protected].

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

Posted on September 21, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Has your corporate legal department been struggling to figure out ways to cut down time spent on contracts, reduce the average sales cycle and find a better way to manage buy-side, sell-side and corporate contracts? Contract management platforms offer the ideal technology to help on all counts.

You may be at the stage where you’re considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to help you reach these goals, but are unsure about how to proceed. You’ve likely already heard and read about all the benefits of using a premier CLM solution. After all, it’s a technology many corporate legal departments have prioritized, and you’ve probably already reviewed resources or spoken with vendors. We’d like to take a different angle here and tell you about four common mistakes to avoid when evaluating a CLM solution.

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

  1. Believing That A Cutting-Edge CLM Solution Is Not Worth The Cost Of Investment.

For several years, the new paradigm has been to do more with less money and fewer resources. Technology has increasingly played a prominent role as legal operations focus on achieving objectives with “less.”

Driving efficiencies and controlling costs in the legal department are being borne, to a significant degree, by well-chosen technology solutions and legal operations managers who understand this are taking action. For example, Onit’s contract management platform streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk in the process and enables departments to save an average of 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce by 20% the average hours spent on contracts.

  1. Assuming That Staff Reduction Will Be Possible With Your CLM Implementation

It’s true that a good CLM offering streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk and enabling departments to save valuable time. The ideal contract management platform also makes quick work of many processes, relieving staff of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Having said that, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can save even more money with staff reductions. It’s a better strategy to remember that while you’re automating many processes and some staff functions may change or even be eliminated, staff reductions are usually not the best option in many cases.

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

Many legal departments already know how well CLM products empower legal and business teams with an enhanced contract management process. Some key benefits are conditional contract generation, MS Word integration, document management, secure collaboration and eSignature integrations.

With all that, what could be missing? Integrated artificial intelligence.

For example, in the pre-signature contract phase, the AI engine provides a first-pass review of the contract and annotates it based on your company’s checklist, playbook and information learned from AI models. By allowing a lawyer to focus on the medium- to high-risk areas, your legal team can reduce contract lead times, automate guidance and proactively address common pain points in the legal workflow.

In the post-signature contract phase, AI-driven data extraction allows you to complete projects at scale and at a fraction of the time manual processes take. Additionally, you can gain powerful insight from your contracts in real-time when coupled with a contract lifecycle management solution.

  1. Implementing a CLM Solution That Doesn’t Have All The Bells And Whistles

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process and are ready to implement your new CLM technology. It’s zero hour, and one of the staff asks you if the solution provides for automated risk mitigation – which somehow didn’t come up during the selection process. You learn that this system doesn’t have that feature, and now you’re wondering what other vital elements may be missing. Depending on your specific needs, here are five other features that are must-haves:

  • Conditional Contract Generation: Automatically generate a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Routing and Approval Workflow: The ability to design and build simple to complex workflows to generate and route your contracts.
  • Obligation Management: Give your users the power to manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance.
  • Clause/Template Library: Manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in a centralized and secure cloud-based location.
  • Partner and Client Self-Service: Provide partners and clients an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts.

It can undoubtedly be overwhelming trying to determine the best route to take in your digital transformation project. There are contract management platforms out there for practically every budget – meaning there is no longer a good reason not to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Still, the best advice is to go into your implementation with realistic expectations, a good understanding of exactly what your department needs and a plan to avoid common mistakes.

If you’d like to learn more about contract lifecycle management, here are some additional resources:

CLOC Panel: Legal Department Operations Experts Weigh in on Transformation Best Practices

Posted on September 16, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Today’s legal department operations teams significantly impact how corporate legal functions daily, spurring transformation through innovation. A CLOC Ask the Experts panel (you can view the session here) gathered recently to discuss this phenomenon and best practices for legal digital transformation. Presenters included:

  • Danielle Antil, Director of Legal Operations at Barings LLC
  • Tony Curzio, Program Manager Legal Technology & Projects at MassMutual
  • Sarah Mintz, Legal Operations Analyst at Barings LLC
  • Brad Rogers, SVP of Strategy & Growth at Onit

The presenters drew from their extensive experience to offer listeners advice for successfully scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization. Whether companies are just starting with transformation or are well into the process, the panelists offered up best practices, lessons and learned perspectives to help with success.

How Legal Department Operations Can Drive Transformation

The following is a summary of some of the biggest takeaways from the panel.

  • Include legal operations projects in the regular corporate budget and the roadmap of transformation programs. Start by establishing a high-level strategy and roadmap that articulates your business case for funding the transformation initiatives. Then, make that business case clear to the people who need to hear it.
  • Help your team develop a process-based mindset. It’s important to realize that lawyers may not be fluent in the language of process. When you implement training to support your transformation efforts, you want to make sure it speaks to the specific audience you’re trying to reach. In addition, after you start to implement change, you should have support materials available and offer yourself as a support resource for the department and the organization as a whole.
  • Start transformation from scratch. If you’re starting your transformation journey from nothing, an excellent first step is to inventory the current state of your infrastructure. Look at technology from the perspective of what isn’t compatible with your plans going forward. Also, evaluate its usability and whether it will lead to adoption. Before you can move forward, it’s essential to understand what your current processes are.
  • Ensure you have the right talent available when you need to quickly scale. You should always be networking to build a collection of internal and external resources to tap into. Consider bringing in consultants and subject matter experts that can help you prepare the groundwork or pitch in when you need additional help on short notice.

Listen to the On-Demand CLOC Session

These are just some of the insights the legal department operations panelists shared. To hear more, including discussions on what best-in-class legal operations support looks like, how to decrease your staff’s workload without increasing outside spend and more, you can listen to the entire presentation: CLOC Ask the Experts – Legal Transformation Projects and How to Scale Up or Down to Your Needs

Additional Legal Operations Resources

Brad, who served as Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company before joining Onit, has executed more than 10 significant transformations at five different Fortune 100 companies. You can hear more digital transformation advice from him by listening to his Onit podcasts:

The Latest Advancement For AI in Spend Analytics: Finding Legal Invoice Errors “Between the Rules” with InvoiceAI

Posted on September 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Legal Management

Legal invoice review is rarely a top-ten task for corporate legal departments, meaning it’s the ideal process for AI in spend analytics to improve. That’s why Onit has announced the general availability of its AI-enabled invoice review offering – InvoiceAI.

Onit’s InvoiceAI analyzes historical and real-time legal invoices to find errors “between the billing rules.” It uses AI and machine learning to support outside counsel guidelines, looking into common invoice areas of note such as non-working travel, block billing, vague descriptions and work done by improper staff class.

How InvoiceAI Works

Before the rise of e-billing and legal spend management, paper ruled the invoice process. Law firms sent substantial bills – think hundreds of pages – to their corporate clients. In-house counsel, in return, rarely had the time, tools or resources to scrutinize line items.

The transition to e-billing opened the door for more technologies to improve bill review – namely, billing rules. Billing rules rely on specific descriptions and context provided (or not provided) by in-house legal professionals to evaluate line items. However, descriptions for line items can vary based on the biller and service. Invoices without the exact language or terms outlined in billing guidelines may evade review and be approved for payment. There is simply no way to code billing rules to cover every possible permutation of language that might populate future invoices.

This is where AI in spend analytics enters the picture.

InvoiceAI has been trained on millions of legal invoice charges. It fully integrates with Onit’s enterprise legal management system and works with billing rules to look for areas where overpayment is common. When these issues are flagged, InvoiceAI can automatically adjust an invoice to comply with guidelines or bring the item to reviewers’ attention.

Essentially, InvoiceAI allows machine learning to do what it does best, looking for discrepancies and continually learning and improving its invoice review. It also allows Onit’s existing e-billing rules to continue doing what they do best – focusing on compliance with outside counsel guidelines and flagging issues for additional expert review. Finally, it allows legal operations teams to do what they do best: reviewing trends for compliance, managing vendor relationships and implementing best practices across outside counsel guidelines.

As a result, corporate legal departments benefit from:

  • A reduction in invoice review time due to better recommendations and less manual work
  • The ability to review past invoices and have AI identify errors and unnecessary payments
  • Insight into legal spend trends and vendor performance
  • Access to Onit’s partner Sterling Analytics, the leader in third-party invoice review.

How to Learn More About AI in Spend Analytics

To learn more about InvoiceAI, hear Matt DenOuden, Senior Vice President of Sales, and Mary Fuzat, Vice President of Product Management, discuss how AI in spend analytics boosts efficiency and saves money in this podcast.

InvoiceAI is now available to all Onit customers. Reach out to us today at [email protected] to learn more about InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system. You can also schedule a demo here.

Creating Custom Legal Software: The Apps and Solutions Legal Operations Pros Are Building Themselves

Posted on September 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To meet the needs of today’s modern corporate legal department, many legal operations professionals are creating their own custom legal software. And here’s what they’re building.

But first, let’s take a look at the past year and a half.

Corporate legal departments completed many nimble adjustments as they’ve faced new challenges and demands. Legal operations professionals play a vital role in this success, finding ways to make it easier for lawyers to work while bringing in more efficiency, cost savings and other benefits of operational excellence.

Technology undoubtedly plays a role in supporting these endeavors, bringing automation and AI to systems like enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. However, even the most customized solutions must have the flexibility to evolve with a corporate legal department’s needs – especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise.

Building Your Own Custom Legal Software

Custom-built software for legal traditionally seems like a luxury, requiring precise planning, contributors across multiple departments and a good piece of the budget. But now, with technology innovations, legal operations pros can create Apps (and combine Apps into solutions) quickly and efficiently. They do this with tools that simplify the process and offer no-code-needed interfaces.

Business automation platforms and App builders with drag-and-drop visual interfaces make the creation process more accessible for those unfamiliar with coding. Instead of relying on developers, they can use a platform and its simplified interface to program the software. The key is indeed the underlying business process automation platform, which acts as a blank canvas. While it supports large solutions for legal spend, contract management and matter management, it also supplies the flexibility to enhance those solutions with complementary Apps, create new Apps altogether and combine Apps into solutions to tackle more complex challenges.

A perfect example of this in action is Hack the House, our inaugural virtual hackathon. Five teams comprised of in-house legal professionals, consultants and business analysts identified business cases and built Apps to solve complex workflow challenges in less than three weeks. They created solutions for data breach incident reporting, career development, diversity and pro bono program management. The winning team took it a step further by creating multiple Apps and combining them into a solution to streamline trademark renewal decisions and track trade secrets.

As impressive as that sounds, we’ve seen custom legal software built even faster – with Apps up and running in as little as an hour.

What Legal Operations Is Building

To date, the Onit Nation – Onit’s master App builders, customers and strategic partners – have used the Apptitude platform to build more than 5,500 Apps to solve everyday business problems. Among them are several custom legal software solutions that are helping to automate and accelerate nearly all aspects of legal operations, and we’ve collected many of them in our new App Catalog.

Our corporate legal customers have been prolific in building Apps and solutions. In addition to the Apps mentioned for Hack the House, other Apps have been created to handle:

  • Board Kit Distribution: Centralizes board of director information and notifies board members of new or revised documents while giving them access to the most current information
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations and consolidates all ethics cases in one place for better oversight, collaboration and management
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation on gift and business entertainment requests company-wide to improve compliance with relevant policies
  • Settlement Authority Request and Approval: Provides a workflow for approving documents that detail settlement authority requests
  • Task Assignment: Handles task assignments made to non-departmental resources
  • Whistleblower: Provides anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought to you by employees and allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution

These are examples of just some of what our customers have created to automate processes and solve pressing issues. In fact, the Apps work across the enterprise, automating processes with HR, marketing, risk and compliance, accounting, finance, procurement and more. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration to revolutionize workflows and increase efficiency.

To get started with building custom legal software on Onit’s no-code business process automation platform Apptitude, schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].