Author: Onit

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.

Bodhala is now part of the Onit Family!

Posted on September 1, 2021 by - Legal Operations

The startup journey is tumultuous, full of highs and lows, sometimes scary – but always exciting. From raising our A round in April 2020 to growing over 400% in a matter of months, the last 18 months have been quite a ride. 

But today, I have the honor of announcing our most exciting news yet: Bodhala has been acquired by Onit, a long-time friend of the company and true innovator in legal technology. We are now an independent subsidiary of the market leader in legal technology. 

Like Bodhala, Onit is committed to innovation and disruption. They share our vision for the business of legal – where data, machine learning, and actionable intelligence drive better strategic decisions and create a transparent market for legal services. 

From day one we believed that legal business data – from rates to hours to outcomes – would be the key driver of decisions in the future. It will not only allow legal leaders to operate their departments like a business, but it will also level the playing field and force innovation. 

Onit is the indisputable market leader in enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation solutions. Bodhala’s analytics and legal business intelligence solutions not only complement their products, together we create the most complete solution for corporate legal business needs, ushering in a new exciting phase of legaltech: the era of legal business intelligence. 

I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has helped us along the way. So to our investors, families, and every member of the Bodhala team: We didn’t do this alone. Your support, advice, and hard work is what got us here today. You made this possible. 

So, what’s next? From new teammates to new features – Bodhala’s journey is just beginning. We couldn’t be more excited to create the future of legaltech with Onit. 

Below is some additional information about the acquisition, Onit, as well as top FAQs.

Sincerely,

Raj Goyle, CEO & Co-Founder

Onit Acquires Bodhala, the Leading Provider of Legal Spend Analytics, Benchmarking, and Market Intelligence

Posted on September 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

At Onit, we always look for ways to innovate for our customers. An essential part of this priority has been strategically combining with other disruptive companies that are changing the way the world does business. To that end, Onit is proud to announce its fourth strategic acquisition since 2019: Bodhala, the leading provider of  legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence.

The combination of Onit’s and Bodhala’s capabilities creates the most complete enterprise legal management solution on the market, allowing corporate legal departments to evolve legal spend data into actionable intelligence.

Hear Onit CEO Eric M. Elfman and Bodhala CEO Raj Goyle discuss the acquisition and how actionable intelligence is the next wave of business transformation.

Actionable Intelligence for Legal Spend Management

A revolution of data and intelligence has been hitting every sector in recent years, and the legal industry is no exception. Running legal departments on actionable data is the future of digital transformation.

Bodhala helps corporate counsel understand what they should be paying outside counsel, making it easier to source law firms at competitive and market-driven rates. With its data and actionable intelligence, corporate legal departments can identify whether they should be paying the amounts they’re paying, whether they’re paying market price, if they’re properly allocating their work among their various law firms and more.

How does this translate to success? Here’s one example.

The general counsel of one of the largest private equity firms wanted to address annual rate increases from outside counsel. Their rates had been rising well above inflation every year. With Bodhala, the company conducted a competitive analysis of its law firms, compared rates to other firms in the market based on the type of law and complexity of work and gathered internal benchmarking across its panels.

After this analysis, the PE firm had the quantitative, actionable intelligence needed to negotiate a decrease in proposed annual outside counsel rates by 17% and save $27 million.

The Most Complete Enterprise Legal Management Solution on the Market

The combination of Onit and Bodhala creates the most complete, full-lifecycle enterprise legal management solution on the market.

Onit customers already have access to industry-leading enterprise legal management, AI-enabled invoice review and AI-based business intelligence and business process automation platforms. Now, with Bodhala, they can leverage legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence for a quantum leap in the value and savings they can produce for their businesses.

Bodhala will operate as an independent subsidiary of Onit. It is the third acquisition for Onit in less than a year. In November 2020, Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch and then document automation leader AXDRAFT 30 days later. Onit also acquired SimpleLegal, a modern legal operations software provider, in May 2019.

If you are an Onit or Bodhala customer, reach out to your account managers for more information or you can email Onit at [email protected].

To hear the CEOs of Onit and Bodhala discuss the acquisition, the strategy behind it and what it means for Onit and Bodhala customers, tune in to this podcast.

Why Savings Isn’t Always About Money: How to Reinvest Your Bodhala ROI

Posted on August 30, 2021 by - Legal Operations

When procuring new technology, one of the first things prospective buyers want to know is — “What kind of ROI can I expect?”

Bodhala’s market intelligence has helped corporate legal departments around the world save hundreds of millions of dollars on their outside counsel spend by identifying inefficiencies and opportunities to save. But one of our key learnings along the way has been that for many GCs and legal ops leaders, ROI isn’t just about dollars and cents. Sometimes streamlining operations to save time or resources is the number one goal or reallocating spend for an important (and expensive) matter. Ultimately, it’s about each department’s goals, which can run the gamut from financial to operational — and everything in between.

Here are the top four benefits of a quality legal spend management system (beyond just banking the savings): 

1. Operational Efficiency

Ever find yourself wishing there were more than 24 hours in the day? Manual reporting and analysis – digging through spreadsheets – can be extremely time–consuming when it comes to legal data. From aligning data to consolidating various file formats, it wastes incredibly precious time and resources.

Sophisticated legal spend management systems allow in-house teams to run reports and analyses with ease. The best ones (ahem, Bodhala) also clean and structure the data as it enters the system, ensuring you get the most accurate data and best analytics possible. 

The right software can streamline your department’s internal reporting – everything from QBRs to panel analysis – saving your team hundreds of hours (or more). 

Crunching numbers doesn’t have to take all day — you just need the right tools.  

2. Investing in Key Players

Without data, in-house teams have long struggled to effectively allocate work and make the appropriate staffing decisions, like whether to hire internally or use outside counsel. 

But data is changing this narrative.

A smart, sophisticated legal spend management solution will illuminate the granularities of your outside counsel spend, enabling you to dig into the key metrics that influence budget allocation.

Armed with these insights, you can analyze key metrics, such as average practice area spend or average partner rate, to identify areas where you’re spending a significant amount of your budget. As a result, you can determine if it’s a more financially sound decision in the long run to make an internal hire in the relevant domain rather than continue outsourcing work.

Digging into other key metrics, like top lead partner or average partner hours per matter, can highlight your top performers. Knowledge of who’s billing hours on the most pivotal portions of your matters will enable you to identify partners who are highly specialized and critical to your success – and who should be compensated accordingly. Yes, that’s right — you should actually pay your “Lebrons” more. But you will want to know where to get those extra dollars – and the data can tell you that. 

3. Investing in New Technology

It’s no secret that the legal industry has long shied away from technology. And even when there is a need or desire to onboard a new tool, there’s no technology budget — it’s a lament in-house teams share far too often.

That’s why actively and effectively managing your outside counsel spend is critical. In-house teams are throwing precious dollars out the window each year by assuming they have zero leverage in pricing negotiations with law firms. But that couldn’t be further from the truth when you have data on your side!

Data gleaned from a sophisticated legal spend management solution will highlight areas where your spend can be reined in. For example, are you paying above-market rates for the partners or associates handling your matters? Did an esteemed partner log hours on a task that really should have been handled by a first-year associate? Did you unnecessarily blow budget dollars on a matter that should have cost you far less?

Armed with these insights, you can make strategic and data-driven decisions that will not only yield savings but also enable you to invest in the technology you need. 

Of course, you’ll want to understand the ROI you can expect from the next solution you onboard, but in the case of a legal spend management software investment, it will be a catalyst for savings and long-term benefits.

4. Rainy Day Fund

Although savings isn’t always about money, having some extra cash set aside never hurts. You never know when the economy might take a turn for the worse, or when you’ll get hit with an unexpected expensive lawsuit.

It’s a smart, strategic move to set aside some of the ROI realized from your legal spend management technology towards a “rainy day fund”. Having some cash set aside can provide you with peace of mind when the unexpected gets thrown your way.

Going Beyond the Dollars

Data should play a critical role in your budgeting and forecasting processes. Although data cannot account for everything, the ROI realized from data-driven spend management should provide you with a safety blanket of savings. 

A good legal spend management solution will save you money. But a great legal spend management solution will allow you to identify opportunities to streamline processes, improve law firm relationships, invest in new tools, and save you money.

With data and a smart, sophisticated legal spend management solution on your side, you can run your legal department like a business and meet your management goals — whatever they may be.

How Legal Hold Software Supports Litigation Peace of Mind

Posted on August 26, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Legal hold software plays a vital role in the litigation process, helping companies preserve forms and relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Companies have a duty to demonstrate the proper care to preserve digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk.  This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is considered possible, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Simply put, companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercise the proper care to preserve and collect electronically stored information (ESI).

The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization. Potential consequences include penalties, evidentiary sanctions, adverse rulings or fines.

The History of Legal Holds

In the case of Marsulex Envt’l. Tech v. Selip S.P.A., we see an example of the repercussions of failure to implement a legal hold (also known as a litigation hold). The plaintiff Marsulex sued the defendant for a defective product. After the plaintiff requested that the defendant produce certain documents, the defendant resisted providing particular vital records. The plaintiff maintained that the defendant had not put in place a formal legal hold, and thus did not preserve pertinent evidence. Ultimately, the court found that the defendant’s CEO failed to implement a legal hold. The court then granted the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions and ordered a forensic investigation of the defendant’s computers.

Some of the lessons learned from this case include:

  • Companies must quickly take all necessary steps to adequately implement a legal hold as soon as litigation or a subpoena is reasonably anticipated.
  • Robust legal hold software must be in place so the company is prepared for the threat of legal holds.

Interestingly, even if a company issues a legal hold in a timely manner, other things can go wrong if something gets missed along the way. For example, if the issued legal hold was not broad enough in scope, some employees failed to comply with the order or the company’s legal hold software was simply “broken,” severe court sanctions and financial penalties may result.

The Role of Legal Hold Software

Fortunately, help is readily available. A robust legal hold software solution offers a quick and highly cost-effective way to reduce the ever-present risk of costly court sanctions. The best solutions will feature real-time dashboards, automated workflows, real-time status tracking, custodian record repositories and advanced audit capability. With just the right solution, you can streamline the legal hold process, easily create new holds, gather information from custodians and have the peace of mind of ensured compliance, swift deployment ability, enhanced visibility and maximized performance.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Software

If you would like to learn more about legal holds and legal hold software, here are three resources. They discuss the significance of legal holds in today’s corporate environment, why you need gold-standard legal hold automation software and strategies to fuel your company’s path toward a robust legal hold process.

How Does A Contract Management System with AI Improve the Way Lawyers Work? Let’s Look at the Numbers [Infographic]

Posted on August 24, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract lifecycle management systems allow companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. It eliminates data silos, automates workflows and reduces the overall time spent – which means it adds to business value.

When you add AI, the value of a contract lifecycle system increases drastically as technology continuously learns and improves to support in-house counsel.

The Pitfalls of Managing Contracts Manually

Many corporations rely on manual (or mostly manual) processes to handle contracts from inception to execution and beyond. Not surprisingly, these methods include cutting and pasting into templates, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. The process is inefficient and poses risks such as a failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, inadequate delivery to customers, errors and a reactive vs. proactive approach to contract management. These challenges increase drastically considering that the contract process extends across multiple departments, geographies and external participants.

Signs that Your Corporate Legal Department Needs a Contract Management System

How can you tell if you need a contract lifecycle management system? Start by taking a look at your overall contract management methodology. If these problems keep occurring, it’s time to explore new options:

  • Inability to manage changes – Businesses need to be up to speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that require discussions with customers or vendors specifically about the contractual relationship. The ability to manage contracts – particularly changes over time and the renewal process – can directly impact customer retention rates.
  • Information silos and manual processes – A business can impair contract management progress and quality if it can’t maintain everything in a centralized location, accessible with permissions to involved parties and with changes tracked in real-time.
  • Inconsistent legal language – Gaps in standardized language introduce risk and confusion. If participants can’t determine if contracts contain accurate language or what is different between them, lawyers might have to get involved in every single deal. This also increases the risk of being noncompliant or leaving revenue on the table.
  • Lack of insight into contract processes and variables – Agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged. When corporate legal doesn’t have insight into contract terms, obligations and value, it cannot ensure the business is getting the correct value for deals and money may be lost.

Contract Lifecycle Management Systems Quantified

Businesses that implement a seamless contract lifecycle management process compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction.

How do the numbers add up? We’ve collected the latest statistics in a new infographic to demonstrate the impact of CLM and AI.

Please include attribution to https://onitprostg.wpengine.com with this graphic.

The benefits of a contract management system with artificial intelligence infographic

Onit’s AI-powered CLM solution can change the way your corporate legal department does business. Schedule a demonstration or email us at [email protected] to learn more.

Automated NDA: Speed Up Non-Disclosure Management for In-House Counsel

Posted on August 19, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today, with our customers telling us that they process anywhere between 500 and 100,000 NDAs every year. Processing that volume of contracts, no matter how standardized or routine, quickly adds up in cost and creates a real risk of spreading your legal department employees too thin.

Onit is transforming automated NDA with the introduction of Automate NDA, an easy-to-implement, best practice solution that automates NDA management and cuts time spent on them by up to 70%. Automate NDA brings together the best aspects of Onit’s workflow and AI platforms, Apptitude and Precedent, to automate drafting, review, negotiation, execution and management of NDAs at a price that won’t break the bank. All of this happens in an accessible, simplified legal portal that enables self-service.

Hear about NDA Automate and how it helps corporate legal departments from Nick Whitehouse, the GM of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. He discusses what it does, why it’s important and how it works in this podcast.

The Challenges of NDAs

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456.1 Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year and the price tag skyrockets easily.

Despite this volume and expense, NDAs are still frequently considered to be low-value work, even though they’re often the most frequent touchpoint between the legal department and the wider organization. This is a low-value dynamic that serves as a great source of frustration and friction – and is usually a lose-lose situation for the legal department.

There’s a widespread misconception out there that NDAs are always straightforward. That is most definitely not the case, particularly in increasingly competitive environments. This increasing complexity, when added to the sheer volume of NDAs at most organizations, creates a perfect storm of pressure and time demands on those reviewing the NDAs.

Finally, the mental toll this type of work takes on attorneys deserves consideration. In 2018, the American Bar Association conducted a study of 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout.

The study cited these culprits: tedious, boring work, long hours and overwork, and high-stress situations. Voluminous routine processes like NDAs contribute to all three.

A Step-by-Step Look at How Automate NDA Works

Automate NDA is a cost-effective solution that requires minimal effort to implement and speeds up the end-to-end NDA process by 70%.

The process starts with online submission. Anyone in your organization can visit the Automate NDA portal and request an NDA to be drafted or reviewed or ask for help.

Automate NDA Portal

When a request is submitted, Automate NDA automatically routes it through the appropriate workflow, be it generating your standard NDA and sending it for e-signature, or reviewing and redlining a third-party NDA.

In the example of a third-party NDA review, once you upload the NDA, Automate NDA will review and redline the contract based on the corporate legal department’s contract playbook and provide a link to the edited Word document. If there are major issues, Automate NDA will instead escalate the NDA to the legal team.

Automated NDA reviews and redlines contracts

The legal team can track all of this work from the Automate NDA dashboard.

Automate NDA dashboard

Interested in creating a streamlined, automated NDA experience? Schedule a demonstration today to learn more about Automate NDA.

1 Based on 1-4 hours of work per each NDA and the average rate per hour for an in-house attorney of $114 according to the 2019 Association of Corporate Counsel Global Legal Benchmarking Report.

How to Intentionally Design World-Class In House Legal Operations

Posted on August 17, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The rise of in house legal operations is changing the way organizations approach and structure their legal function. As the discipline of legal operations continues to evolve, so does the conversation on what world-class operations should look like and how to intentionally design them to meet that status.

Last month, we sat down with Brad Rogers, Onit’s Vice President of Strategy and Growth and a former leader of operational excellence in Fortune 500 companies, to discuss what it takes to build world-class legal operations in today’s demanding legal environment. (You can find his full podcast here.)

In our first installment, we discussed the goals of an in house legal operations transformation journey and how to secure the funding to build the legal ops function your organization needs.

Now, we turn our attention to what that legal ops function should look like.

Legal ops should deliver productivity back to lawyers, significantly reduce and reallocate legal spend and future-proof the environment your lawyers are working in. But what would that legal ops function look like if it were intentionally designed?

Brad laid out three elements that are crucial to world-class legal ops: technology, support services and partnerships and business discipline.

In House Legal Operations Technology

Technology is a major factor in any legal ops transformation journey. We live at a peak time for innovation, with capabilities for legal professionals that are constantly evolving through advancements in areas like AI.

When you’re building your in house legal operations function, you should be thinking about your entire technology ecosystem – that means not just your foundational tools like matter management, e-billing and document management, but the surrounding technologies as well. You want to structure a solution set for your lawyers, not simply gather a collection of disparate tools for them to learn how to use.

A successful transformation journey requires a road map that connects all your capabilities to give you a better understanding of the nature and trends of your business. Once you understand that, you can start considering things like how AI would enhance your capabilities even further or where there are additional workflow efficiencies to be gained.

Support Services and Partnerships

One of the most beneficial capabilities a mature in house legal operations team can bring is the ability to leverage support services and strategic partnerships. When you’re first building out legal ops, however, this might look a little different.

You might start by approaching the lawyers and telling them to refer any nonlegal work they’re handling to legal ops. Even further, you can help them identify that work and cement your legal ops department as a valuable support team for legal. Going forward, legal ops should be involved in projects from the start and serve as proactive problem-solvers. Lawyers should be practicing law, not focusing on things like project management and business improvement. A strong legal ops team should also offer support for billing, which historically leads to significant lost time and inefficiency for legal departments.

The final aspect is managing the legal department’s internal partnerships with other departments, such as HR, risk compliance and security, and its external partnerships with vendors. Legal departments shouldn’t have to do everything by themselves. The point of legal ops is to let the lawyers focus on the law while ops handles the rest.

Business Discipline

One thing people often overlook when building world-class legal operations is the ability of in house legal operations to harness the power of data – both your internal data and data that exists outside the organization. Data analysis is key to understanding your business and trends in the market, allocating resources and making strategic plans for your organization.

Legal ops should be looking at all the available data and making informed decisions for the business. This can include outsourcing work, vendor management, strategic hiring and more. The goal is to get as much nonlegal work off the lawyers’ plates as possible to allow them to practice better law. Every legal department has hidden factories – pockets of inefficiency – that prevent them from being the most effective, disciplined legal function possible. Legal ops should ideally always be looking for those areas and figuring out the best way to eliminate or transform them.

For more legal ops insights, you can listen to the full podcast discussion with Brad here. You can also subscribe to the Onit podcast anywhere, including through Apple and Spotify or any service you use to listen to podcasts.

Discover the Latest Workflow Automation Apps for Accounting, Finance and Procurement

Posted on August 12, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Apps for accounting, finance and procurement professionals have spurred a significant digital transformation in recent years – especially those focused on workflow automation. Workflow automation Apps are making headway in these professions, streamlining tasks that were once purely manual and gathering and analyzing valuable data.

Members of our Onit Nation – Fortune 500 customers, industry partners and employees who build on Onit’s platforms – have identified process challenges in these departments. To address them, they did what comes naturally. They quickly made Apps for accounting, finance and procurement on Onit Apptitude that do everything from expense management to PO requests.

Apptitude is a workflow automation platform that allows users to easily create, modify and deploy Apps without special technical training or expertise. Any business user can access its visual, drag-and-drop interface to quickly build the Apps needed to address an organization’s biggest (and smallest) challenges. How fast does this happen? We’ve had customers complete builds within an hour.

Apps for Accounting, Finance and Procurement

As with legal, accounting and finance are professions that require precision. Errors can have significant consequences that can complicate business.

With these Apps for accounting, finance and procurement, the Onit Nation has found ways to streamline processes and improve accuracy by automating reporting, balance sheet reviews and more. They include:

  • Board Approval: An App that tracks and manages internal board of directors appointments and approval workflows
  • Balance Sheet Review: An App that runs a quarterly review of a company’s balance sheet for various businesses, allowing balance sheets to be circulated, reviewed and approved worldwide
  • Application for Expenditure: An App that handles the approval of expenditures, including tracking for costs and benefits over time
  • Fund Management: An App that oversees the asset transfer between receiving and contributing entities within a company and includes various steps that are approved through e-signature workflows
  • PO Request: An App that facilitates request and payment approval for purchase orders

The Onit App Catalog – Representing More Than 5,500 Apps

These Apps, and many others, are now collected in one place – our new App Catalog.

The App Catalog showcases the breadth of Apps built on Apptitude and represents a decade of innovation creating digital transformation one App at a time. The 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.

With the App Catalog, all of our customers can now draw from the innovation of others to find the inspiration they need to build the tools that will automate processes and solve their most pressing issues.

Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. If you’d like to see these Apps in action, you can schedule a demonstration here.

Celebrating 10 Years of Onit: A Podcast With Our Four Co-Founders

Posted on August 10, 2021 by - Company News and Events

2021 marks 10 years of Onit! In honor of our 10th anniversary, we sat down with Onit’s co-founders, CEO Eric M. Elfman, COO Eric Smith, VP of Marketing Jill Black and VP of Products John Gilman. The quartet, who have known each other for more than 20 years, chatted about how Onit began, pivots and successes along the way and what customers can expect to see from Onit in the future.

 

How Onit Started

Onit was born out of two early ideas:

  1. Finding ways to read invoices and get more value from them than existing rules engines
  2. Exploring how project management and workflow could be used with legal technology software.

“We were using some early natural language processing and concluded that we couldn’t extract the value [from invoices] at that time. The tools were not really at a point where we could do that,” explains Smith in the podcast. “We moved from what was the straight value proposition around the billing into something that we thought was a little more interesting, and it was around how project management and workflow could be used with legal technology software.”

Discussions with newer general counsels at the time underscored a growing priority for process improvement.

“We started heading down a path that was somewhat similar to support workflow and with a real sense that this needs to be ad hoc,” shares Gilman. “The problem with the business process tools at the time was that they were not flexible at all. We baked in some notions that anybody can add anybody else.”

Ultimately, they created a low-code business process automation platform – Apptitude – that allowed Onit to quickly build solutions such as enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, legal holds and legal service requests.

The Onit Nation, which includes Fortune 500 customers, partners and Onit employees, has also built more than 5,500 Apps and solutions on Apptitude that handle process challenges across the entire enterprise.

As Gilman summarizes in the podcast, “Our customers and partners are building apps that we’ve never even thought of. It’s really exciting to see.”

Building from 20+ Years of Entrepreneurial Experience

As with any business, there was some trial and error over the past decade. However, the co-founders have dedicated themselves to not repeating mistakes that had happened with past startups. This includes Datacert, the enterprise legal management company founded by Elfman and Smith in 1998 where all four worked together.

“It felt like we made every first-time entrepreneurial mistake possible at Datacert. The exit was great for all of the investors, but we felt like we could do it better. That’s what we dedicated the last 10 years trying to do at a minimum – not repeat those old mistakes. We’ve made plenty of new mistakes, but we don’t want to make any of those old ones again,” describes Elfman.

Award-Winning Legal Technology

Onit launched at a tradeshow and secured approximately 2,000 beta users – one of several proud moments for the co-founders. According to Black, an inspiring moment came from the industry’s validation of Onit and its customers’ work.

“About five years ago, we submitted a pretty prestigious award on behalf of one of our customers and he won. Not only did he win that award, he actually won four awards that year for legal technology and innovation in this space. For me, that was the pinnacle because I thought not only are we helping advance the industry, but our customers are seeing the value in this and the industry is taking notice,” she recounts.

The industry recognition continues to this day, with Onit and its customers winning titles including ACC Value Champion, Legal Innovation Awards, Legal Procurement Awards, Corporate Counsel Best Legal Department of the Year, Transatlantic Legal Awards and more.

Ten Years of Onit (and Beyond)

Since its launch, the company has gained more than 10,550 Fortune 500 and law firm customers and has grown into the only two-platform company in the market. Apptitude focuses on workflows and business process automation, and Precedent uses AI to drive business intelligence. More than 450 employees call Onit home and the company has a global presence with offices in Texas, California, New Zealand, Ukraine, the UK and India.

During the past 12 months, Onit has launched three AI offerings – Precedent and ReviewAI, ExtractAI for pre- and post-signature contract management. It debuted InvoiceAI, its AI-enabled invoice review tool, to customers in May, with a broader launch happening later this year. It also acquired two companies (McCarthyFinch and AXDRAFT) and its rapid revenue growth has been recognized in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, the Inc. 5000, the Inc. Private Titans and the Growjo 10K.

“We are building something significant here,” Elfman explains in the podcast. “I think that transcends any of us as individuals.”

To learn more about Onit, its founding and what to expect in the future, listen to the podcast embedded above or find the Onit podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify or anywhere you listen.

If you’d like to see Onit’s technology in action, you can reserve a demonstration here or email [email protected].