Author: Onit

Trending Legal Operations Podcasts

Posted on August 9, 2021 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Podcasts have become the listening content of choice for many people worldwide, providing engaging audio on the way to work, during daily workouts or as part of a morning routine. Podcasts enable their listeners to gain new insights, expand their existing knowledge and keep track of trends in our fast-evolving world. Legal is no exception. Many exciting Legal Tech podcasts have emerged in recent years. However, finding the perfect series for you without listening to every episode can be tricky.

But don’t worry — we’ve got you covered! Our industry experts have compiled a list of leading legal operations podcasts to help you learn and stay up to speed on the latest legal tech, operations and innovation news and developments.

LEGAL TECH MADE SIMPLE, SYKE

Dom Burch, VP of marketing at SYKE, is neither a lawyer nor a tech expert, which makes him ideally qualified to make legal tech simple. Join him as he interviews expert legal engineers, software developers, and personnel in law firms and large corporations implementing legal tech. He aims to provide listeners with diverse views and opinions by speaking with thought leaders and innovators across the legal tech spectrum.
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LEGALTECH ARCADE, ROB MACADAM

Legaltech Arcade is a series of long-form interviews hosted by Rob MacAdam. The podcast focuses on tech-enabled legal service delivery and the people and products that make it happen through in-depth discussions with legal tech founders and senior industry leaders. Topics of discussion include legal platforms, no-code automation, digital transaction management, creating digitally driven law firms, professional services 2.0 and computational contracts. If you want to know more about what goes into setting up a legal tech start-up and gain insight into the latest industry developments, then be sure to check out this podcast.
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FRINGE LEGAL, ABHIJAT SARASWAT

Aimed at law firm leaders and influencers, each Fringe Legal episode is a thoughtful discussion with a diverse range of voices about ideas impacting the evolution of the legal profession. Along the way, listeners will learn about the challenges to overcome, what’s worked in the past, and expert tips on what could make a difference.
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LEGALTECH WEEK, BOB AMBROGI

LegalTech week presents a weekly round-up and review of legal technology and innovation news hosted by lawyer and journalist Bob Ambrogi, with commentary from a revolving panel of industry experts. It releases every Friday, all in 15 minutes or less.
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THE LEGAL OPS PODCAST, ALEX ROSENRAUCH AND ELLIOT LEIBU

The Legal Ops Podcast is about all things legal operations, legal business, and legal technology. The hosts are Alex Rosenrauch and Elliot Leibu, legal ops professionals with experience and passion for this subject and deep connections in the industry. Every episode covers a new aspect of transformation, operationalization, and technology implementation, overlaid with the human elements of change management and organizational psychology. If you’re interested in the changing nature of legal services delivery and want to be a part of it, this podcast is for you.
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FÜHRENDE LEGAL OPERATIONS PODCASTS IM JAHR 2023 

Posted on August 9, 2021 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Niemand kann sie ignorieren; sie haben sich als Lebensretter während des Lockdowns erwiesen. Ob auf dem Weg zur Arbeit, während des täglichen Workouts oder als Teil der Morgenroutine – Podcasts sind für viele Menschen auf der ganzen Welt zum bevorzugten Hörinhalt geworden. Viele Podcasts sind nicht nur unterhaltsam, sondern ermöglichen es ihren Hörern auch, neue Erkenntnisse zu gewinnen, ihr vorhandenes Wissen zu erweitern und die Trends in unserer sich schnell entwickelnden Welt zu verfolgen – und das gilt auch für den Bereich Recht. 

In den letzten Jahren sind viele spannende Legal-Tech-Podcasts entstanden. Wir wissen, dass es schwierig sein kann, die richtige Serie zu finden, ohne in jede einzelne Folge hineinzuhören. Deshalb hat unser Team von Branchenexperten eine Liste führender Podcasts zum Thema Legal Operations für Sie zusammengestellt. Diese Legal Operations Podcasts werden Ihnen dabei helfen, über die neuesten Nachrichten und Entwicklungen in den Bereichen Legal Tech, Legal Operations und Innovation informiert zu sein und auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben. 

In dem Podcast „EY Law – Legal Operations“ dreht sich alles um die Zukunft von Rechtsabteilungen in Unternehmen. Erfahren Sie, wie Rechtsabteilungen sich effektiver organisieren und sich in einer zunehmend dynamischen und digitalen Umgebung erfolgreich positionieren können. 

Carina Smolik-Fischer, Produktmanagerin unsere Matter Management-Lösung, war zu Gast im EY Law Podcast und berichtet von ihrer langjährigen Erfahrung im Legal-Tech-Markt. 

Legal Technology Panel mit Bryter, Busylamp und Luminance – Folge 1 

Eine spannende Folge über die Entwicklung und Zukunft von Legal Operations.  

Legal Technology Panel mit Bryter, Busylamp und Luminance – Folge 2 

Hier wird unter anderem beleuchtet, welchen Mehrwert Rechtsabteilungen zur Wertschöpfung eines Unternehmens beitragen können und wie Legal Tech bei der Messung von rechtlichen Leistungskennzahlen (Legal KPIs) unterstützend wirkt. 

Dom Burch, VP of Marketing bei SYKE, ist weder Anwalt noch Techniker. Daher ist er perfekt qualifiziert, um Legal Tech einfach zu machen. Begleiten Sie ihn bei seinen Interviews mit Experten aus der Welt der Rechtsingenieure und Softwareentwickler sowie mit Anwaltskanzleien und großen Unternehmen, die Legal Tech einsetzen. Sein Ziel ist es, den Zuhörern durch Gespräche mit Vordenkern und Innovatoren aus dem gesamten Legal-Tech-Bereich ein breites Spektrum an Ansichten und Meinungen zu vermitteln. 

JETZT ANHÖREN 

LEGALTECH ARCADE, ROB MACADAM  

Legaltech Arcade ist eine von Rob MacAdam moderierte Reihe von Interviews in Langform. Der Podcast konzentriert sich auf die technologiegestützte Erbringung von Rechtsdienstleistungen und die Menschen und Produkte, die dies alles ermöglichen. Rob führt ausführliche Gespräche mit Gründern von Legal Tech Unternehmen und führenden Vertretern der Branche. Zu den Diskussionsthemen gehören juristische Plattformen, No-Code-Automatisierung, digitales Transaktionsmanagement, die Schaffung digitaler Kanzleien, professionelle Dienstleistungen 2.0 und computergestützte Verträge. Wenn Sie mehr über die Gründung eines Legal-Tech-Start-ups erfahren und Einblicke in die neuesten Entwicklungen der Branche gewinnen möchten, dann sollten Sie sich diesen Podcast unbedingt anhören! 

JETZT ANHÖREN 

Jede Folge richtet sich an Führungskräfte von Anwaltskanzleien und an einflussreiche Persönlichkeiten und ist eine durchdachte Diskussion mit einer Vielzahl von Stimmen über Ideen, die sich auf die Entwicklung des Rechtsberufs auswirken. Dabei erfahren die Zuhörer, welche Herausforderungen es zu bewältigen gilt, was in der Vergangenheit funktioniert hat und welche Expertentipps in Zukunft den Unterschied ausmachen könnten. 

JETZT ANHÖREN 

LEGALTECH WEEK, BOB AMBROGI  

Ein wöchentlicher Überblick über Neuigkeiten im Bereich Rechtstechnologie und Innovation. Moderiert von Rechtsanwalt und Journalist Bob Ambrogi, mit Kommentaren einer wechselnden Gruppe von Branchenexperten. Jeden Freitag, in 15 Minuten oder weniger. 

JETZT ANHÖREN 

Der Legal Operations Podcast befasst sich mit allen Themen rund um rechtliche Abläufe, Rechtsgeschäfte und Rechtstechnologie. Moderiert wird er von Alex Rosenrauch und Elliot Leibu, Fachleuten aus dem Bereich Legal Operations mit Erfahrung und Leidenschaft für dieses Thema und guten Verbindungen in die Branche. Jede Folge behandelt einen neuen Aspekt der Transformation, Operationalisierung und Technologieimplementierung, überlagert mit den menschlichen Elementen des Change Managements und der Organisationspsychologie. Wenn Sie sich für den Wandel in der Bereitstellung von Rechtsdienstleistungen interessieren und daran teilhaben wollen, ist dies der richtige Podcast für Sie. 

JETZT ANHÖREN 

Corporate Legal Market Trends for August 2021

Posted on August 5, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Welcome to the August edition of our monthly look into corporate legal market trends. In this edition, we share some thought-provoking articles covering innovative GCs, the digital transformation of BT’s legal operations and how AI and contract lifecycle management help legal departments run like a business. We hope you find some practical takeaways in the following articles.

1. Examples of Operational Excellence from Legal Teams Running the Department like a Business

Running corporate in-house legal departments like a business is quickly gaining traction in legal departments around the globe. The age-old complaint that lawyers are holding up critical processes is rapidly turning into a thing of the past. Technology solutions have significantly contributed to alleviating this problem, providing faster processes and newfound collaborative abilities at unforeseen levels. Of particular note: Lenovo’s contract management transformation, which happened thanks to a strong vision and the adoption of contract lifecycle management technology and AI.

According to the article:

Lenovo has recently digitised its contracting processes and is now able to measure how much time is spent on a contract, how many lawyers worked on it, and how much a template has been modified. “Data analytics has enabled insights we never had before,” says [Marcelo] Peviani [legal director at the centre of excellence for Lenovo].

Source: Financial Times

2. The Next Legal Market Trend to Put on Your Radar: Running the Post-Award Phase of Contract Management

According to a World Commerce & Contracting Association and Deloitte survey, contract professionals are shifting their focus to the post-signature phase of contract management. The results show a growing emphasis on the post-award stage of contract management. According to the survey, “less than 30% of organizations currently have centralized or center-led post-award contract management resources” and “only a little over 20% attempt to monitor or calculate the costs or overall benefits associated with contract management.” It also discovered that nearly 40% of the participants are looking to improve post-award processes, and more than one-third are striving to introduce more “robust approaches to obligation management.”

Source: World Commerce & Contracting Association

3. Hear BT Discuss Its Award-Winning Legal Operations Digital Transformation  

David Griffin, head of legal technology and change at BT, joined the Onit podcast recently to discuss his company’s award-winning legal operations transformation. He shared how the company led legal market trends by replacing manual and disconnected process and management tools. The change helped the department handle workload and matters across the teams from inception to closure.

Judges for the Legal Innovation Awards took note, sharing with Law.com that BT stood out “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.”

BT won the Legal Innovation Award for “Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations” and was named a finalist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. You can hear David’s story here.

Source: Onit

4. Thinking outside of the Box Reaches New Level among In-House Lawyers

The Financial Times has featured 20 highly experienced GCs who are directly challenging traditional legal roles. By redefining themselves as strategic thinkers, they are making market-leading headway when it comes to sustainability and digital transformation. Companies are now operating in ways that require lawyers to use their skills and experience in new ways. The continuing proliferation of implementing legal technology gives these lawyers more time to focus on high-impact legal work.

Source: Financial Times

5. AI and Contract Lifecycle Management: What Should You Expect?

If you’re following legal market trends, you’ve probably already heard how contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management. But now that AI is in the mix, how does that affect contract lifecycle management? A new visual guide tackles this topic to get you up to speed in no time. It explores questions such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Source: Onit resources

Bonus Resources: The Latest on CLM and AI

Year after year, legal market trends have pointed to lawyers and legal departments finding ways to be more efficient while controlling costs. Adopting cutting-edge technology, thinking outside of the box and running the department like a business are important ways to achieve these objectives.

Combining contract lifecycle management tools with AI is a prime example of working toward those means. When paired, they offer streamlined processes, a decrease in friction for employees across the enterprise and deliver more business value. If you’d like to learn more about legal market trends for contract lifecycle management tools, check out some of our recent blog posts:

Bodhala Named One of New York’s Most Innovative Machine Learning Companies

Posted on August 4, 2021 by - Legal Operations

We’re excited to share that Futurology has recognized Bodhala on its list of New York’s Most Innovative Machine Learning Companies. Futurology’s list recognizes cutting-edge startups and established brands that are innovating the machine learning industry and excelling in innovation, growth, and societal impact. 

As we continue to grow our team, enhance our product, and scale the business, we’re proud to see our team’s hard work and innovation recognized. It has been an exciting summer for us here at Bodhala and we look forward to continuing building on our mission, delivering unparalleled service to our clients, and educating the industry on how data can transform the antiquated legal services market.

Interested in joining our team? Check out our open positions!

Ensure Accurate Legal Billing By Avoiding These Four Common Invoicing Problems

Posted on August 3, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

While having accurate legal billing is something all parties involved can agree on, it’s still a complicated process for large corporate legal departments. A single law firm bill may have hundreds of pages, clock in at millions of dollars and cover multiple matters, tasks and timekeepers. Outside counsel guidelines, billing code confusion and the sheer volume of bills further complicate invoice review.

As a result, charges can routinely fall in a gray area or violate outside counsel guidelines. They can slip past first-pass reviewers who are short on time and have multiple responsibilities. Even the most stringent automated billing rules may not flag some costs because of a wide variation in descriptions and billing tactics.

Take travel, for example. With lockdowns over the past year, accurate legal billing for travel-related costs should be a given. You logically expect that travel charges from law firms substantially decreased during that time. However, that wasn’t the case.

When Onit’s AI-enabled invoice review tool scoured historical invoices from a set of Fortune 500 customers, it discovered an average of six figures of savings in travel-related billed time and expenses submitted to customers. These are “gray area” charges that surpassed what had already been found by traditional billing rules and standard invoice review.

Common Invoice Errors That Make Accurate Legal Billing Challenging

Corporate legal departments want to know what services they’re paying for as part of their law firm partnerships. Otherwise, it’s difficult to make proper efficiency and cost control refinements.

We recently conducted an informal poll, asking corporate legal customers to name problems they encounter when reviewing invoices. Each of the following top-four improper e-billing and invoicing practices is a significant barrier to understanding and controlling legal spend.

  1. Vague or insufficient details in invoices

“For services rendered” or other vague descriptions are insufficient explanations of legal services. While each poor description may not seem like a pressing concern, the cumulative costs of this practice over several invoices reveal a much larger problem. Vague billing descriptions make understanding and controlling legal spend a nearly impossible task to undertake.

  1. Block billing

Block billing, or the practice of putting multiple work segments on multiple dates into one line item description, is raising red flags at corporate legal departments – especially when “going lean” is the name of the game. While it was a somewhat accepted standard for years, the dollars add up quickly and are difficult to catch. The practice also acts against conveying the value of law firm contributions since there is no transparency for the work they undertook.

How much of an impact can block billing have on spend? One legal operations leader reported a block billing charge of more than a million dollars – one that AI caught but only after it had made it past first reviewers.

  1. Improper coding of invoices

While it sounds like a simple task, you’d be surprised how often improper coding happens in a single day. Often the mistake is as simple as billers failing to select appropriate codes on dropdown menus. When work is attributed to the wrong billing code, it may trigger an additional review, taking extra time while also skewing legal spend analytics.

  1. Work being done by wrong staff class

How often have we done other people’s work and vice versa, whether above or below our pay grade? Not a real problem, right? Wrong. Sure, it happens, but it can add up quickly and work against accurate legal billing.

Certain types of work are better suited to a paralegal, legal assistant or intern than an attorney. Too often, though, those work efforts are being done by an attorney at a much higher rate. Or perhaps a task that would take a higher-billing partner five minutes to complete would take an associate much longer and so cost more. At the end of the day, corporate legal departments want the work performed by the appropriate level of staff.

Alleviating the Pain of Legal Invoice Review

Lean legal – doing more with less money and fewer resources while maintaining the same high quality – is the new paradigm at corporate legal departments. Technology plays a prominent role in achieving legal ops objectives with “less.” As hard as we try, law firm billing errors still happen, and corporate in-house legal teams will struggle to catch them. Well-chosen technologies – like AI and automated billing rules – bolster the opportunity for accurate legal billing.

If you’d like to read more about alleviating invoice review challenges, here are some resources:

Onit Portals: The Welcome Mat for Your New Business Intake Process

Posted on July 29, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Streamlining the new business intake process and automating inefficient processes are high on the list of priorities for most busy corporate legal departments today. Any technology that can help with legal service requests and allow users from other business units to engage in self-service tends to be welcomed with open arms.

Enter Onit portals. They’re powerful dashboards with Apps that let users solve their problems without wasting time finding the proper channels to reach legal. From legal service requests to contract review to audit help, a portal puts the functions your company needs most front and center for the entire organization.

You can think of your Onit portal as the welcome mat for your legal department: the best, most efficient way to enable self-service or route work to the legal professional most suited to handle it.

How Portals Streamline the New Business Intake Process

Your portal acts as the main landing page for legal (that welcome mat to your legal department we mentioned). On it, you can include as many Apps as you want that allow users from across your organization to submit workflow requests like audit requests, employee incident reports, investigations, legal service requests and more. The Apps then automate the new business intake process for each submission, delivering the project to the right legal contact, tracking progress and notifying appropriate parties.

Onit portals are customizable for the needs of any organization, from small businesses to the largest Fortune 100 corporations. We can build out the portal that works for both your organization’s size and the types of workflows you most need.

Better yet, we don’t charge per user. Under our flat-rate user model, you can open up the power of Onit to everyone in your organization, whether you have 200 employees or 20,000 employees. It also means your workflows don’t have to be strictly tailored toward your legal staff. Your portal represents a powerful opportunity to increase collaboration between legal and other units and allow business users to engage in a higher level of self-service than ever before.

Building the Perfect Portal

When it comes to building your portal, your options are nearly limitless. No two legal departments are the same, so your portal shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all.

Think about your most significant pain points regarding the new business intake process for your legal department. Is handling and routing legal service requests your biggest headache? Do you need a better way for sales and procurement to redline routine contracts? Do your users struggle to open new matters in your matter management system?

Whatever workflows you need can be linked in your portal. With over 5,500 Apps currently available in Onit’s new App Catalog, all of which can be connected in your Onit portal, the possibilities are endless.

Workflow requests submitted through the portal don’t just disappear into the ether. As part of the portal process, some rules help to route specific requests to the right department or employee whose job it is to handle the task at issue. This can be as simple as a standard assignment for certain types of work, as complex as an auto-assignment system based on attorney capacity, or anything in between.

Via your portal, Onit does the heavy lifting of making sure the workflows are directed properly and the work is being assigned as efficiently as possible. This triage component, coupled with notifications that are sent to the responsible party, creates a centralized system for handling legal requests.

There’s no workflow too big or too small – if you need it, your Onit portal can handle it. Portals give your organization better access to your legal department while making workflows more efficient and streamlined for your legal employees.

Schedule an Onit demo today or email [email protected] to learn more.

CLM Process Flow: Making Contracting Easier for Legal

Posted on July 27, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The contract lifecycle management (CLM) process flow challenges many corporate legal departments. While contracts play a critical role in the success of any business, getting them to execution can be an uphill battle, thanks to antiquated processes and outdated tools. Popular software like Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and SharePoint doesn’t offer the transparency you need during drafting, review and approval to keep contracting processes moving forward in a timely manner.

That’s where contract lifecycle management (CLM) software comes in. Managing your contracting doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The right contracting tools create a CLM process flow that allows corporate legal departments to eliminate delays, keep relationships with suppliers, vendors and customers running smoothly and gain insight into the contracting process to help with risk management and compliance.

Eliminating Contracting Bottlenecks In the CLM Process Flow

When the legal department is responsible for drafting, reviewing and approving even the most routine agreements, bottlenecks inevitably happen. Without a proper system for keeping track of contract volume and status, legal will inevitably be overwhelmed by contract requests from other departments, causing a backlog and frustration that will reverberate throughout the organization.

With the right CLM process flow, however, you speed up the creation and review process and free your lawyers to focus on high-value matters rather than administrative tasks. CLM software can remove delays in all stages of the contracting process, including creating intake forms configured to specific contract types, using data from those forms to automate the contract assembly process via templates, tailoring workflows to a contract’s subject matter, prioritizing contracts for review based on risk and more.

Gaining Transparency Into Review and Approvals

In the past, contract review occurred via inefficient emails between all the various stakeholders, making the approval process unclear and leaving contracts stagnating in inboxes for far too long. A better collaboration tool is necessary for legal to properly coordinate with procurement, sales and other departments, regardless of location or contract complexity.

Cloud-based CLM that’s designed and implemented to meet the needs of a specific organization can allow all parties in the approval chain to access the current status of contracting no matter where they are. More sophisticated CLM systems can create parallel approval processes incorporating e-signatures, eliminating hard copies and significantly accelerating the contracting timeline.

When you add AI to the CLM process flow, it accelerates it even more. Contract AI lets business users can run an AI-powered redline in less than two minutes. It can also identify potential issues and then automatically escalate critical issues to legal as necessary. The AI redlining essentially allows business users to self-service the review of common contracts such as NDAs.

Keeping Track of Executed Contracts

Many organizations lack a centralized contract repository, meaning that contracts are typically tucked away after being signed, too often in a place where they’re difficult to find again when they’re needed. Hard-copy storage and scattered electronic filing cabinets create disorganization, which in turn creates the risk of missing important dates or necessary compliance updates.

Having a single, designated repository for all contracts as part of your CLM process flow eliminates these problems. Contracts are simple to find, even after those who were originally involved with them have moved on. The right repository will be searchable across all document formats, so less time is spent trying to find contracts and more time is spent focusing on high-value work.

A CLM Process Flow that Stays on Top of Compliance

Compliance is critical to minimizing organizational risk. That means complying both with legal and regulatory requirements and complying with the terms of your contracts themselves. The best way to ensure compliance on all fronts is to implement CLM tools that track the terms of all your contracts, including conditions and pertinent dates, rather than leaving that task open to manual processes and costly human error.

CLM software with AI can extract the necessary data to have a clear picture of all your obligations and relevant legal standards. It can also track all changes to contracts and generate reports to create a reliable audit trail to lower your risk. For example, the contract AI can identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes and extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.

To capitalize on all these benefits of CLM process flow, you need a CLM solution that’s flexible enough to work the way your department works and can meet the needs of your entire organization, not just legal. Onit CLM is the simple, flexible, agile solution you need to stay on top of your contracting and boost your efficiency.

Contact Onit today to schedule a demo or email [email protected] to learn more.

Legal Operations Manager Advice: How to Self-Fund Corporate Legal Transformation (Podcast)

Posted on July 22, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

A legal operations manager stepping into the role will probably face many of the same challenges peers do, according to the 13th Annual Law Department Operations Survey.  These include cost containment (60%), business process improvements (56%) and departmental resources, including funding for personnel and technology (38%).

As a result, corporate legal departments are building up their operations teams. CLOC reported that the average size of legal ops teams has increased compared to last year – one of many data points that illustrate the movement to transform how in-house counsel and legal professionals work. The ultimate goal is to spark transformation and create operational efficiencies that reduce low-value work for attorneys, save money and produce greater insight into legal spend.

Operational excellence comes with a price tag, though – one that may not be budgeted for. So the challenge is: How can corporate legal create world-class operations and self-fund the transformation?

According to Brad Rogers, Onit’s Vice President of Strategy and Growth, it requires a longer-term rethinking of how in-house counsel and legal professionals work. He recently shared his insight in a podcast (embedded below and available anywhere you listen to podcasts including Apple, Google, Spotify and more) on how to start a transformation journey and build a modern legal operations function. He draws this information from nearly three decades’ experience with operations excellence at companies including one Fortune 100 global financial services company with $1 trillion in assets, Bank of America, GE and JP Morgan Chase.

Goals of Transforming Legal Operations

Building world-class legal ops isn’t about changing what you do. In-house counsel will still give legal advice and manage matters. The concept focuses more on how this is accomplished by leveraging state-of-the-art capabilities – like automation and AI – to make work more streamlined and efficient.

A legal operations manager can lay the foundation needed for world-class legal ops by meeting these three goals:

  1. Protect the enterprise by practicing good law.
  2. Assemble a team of highly engaged top talent.
  3. Be efficient along the way.

It’s crucial to keep all three goals in mind. Too often, companies focus solely on efficiency and implement technologies that ideally save some time in day-to-day work. Ignoring the first two goals, however, is a misstep. Without keeping a purpose of protecting the organization in mind and strategically hiring the staff to meet that goal, technology alone won’t get you where you want to be.

When implementing new capabilities, legal operations should aim at building an environment that’s more engaging for lawyers and helping them get work off their plates so they can spend more time practicing.

Three Ways a Legal Operations Manager Can Self-Fund Transformation

Building world-class legal operations requires investment. You need to attract and mobilize the right resources that will help you accomplish your goals. However, when you’re starting from scratch, budget restrictions will likely make it harder to put the pieces together. There are three primary ways organizations can explore funding their journey.

  1. Examine legal spend. The first source of funding is to review your current spend and free up some dollars. Suppose you can find a way to cut your outside counsel spend by even 5 or 10%, either by better managing your outside counsel guidelines or finding other areas where you’re overspending. In that case, you can leverage those savings to self-fund part of your transformation.
  2. Redirect dollars. The second way is to keep an eye on the turnover in the legal department. If someone leaves, you might be able to leverage the money budgeted for that position into a few strategic, lower-price hires that can help you start the legal ops journey.
  3. Find investment funding. The third source, and typically the hardest one to tap, is to come up with a compelling business case to finance in an attempt to secure some investment funding. While it may be a long shot, it’s worth it if you can find any extra money to invest in legal ops.

Listen to the full podcast now.

If you’d like to hear more about legal operations transformation, here are some resources to explore:

Getting Started with Legal Contract Management Software and AI

Posted on July 20, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management – processes that are often fraught with complications and errors.

Data from the World Commerce & Contracting Association supports this idea. The organization recently surveyed its 70,000+ members about their contract challenges and priorities and found that 85% experience pressure for contract simplification. Another 81% said they have plans to implement contract automation. These points speak to the fact that poorly managed contracts lead to lost revenue, higher costs and more time devoted to manual tasks for all parties involved.

The Challenges of Contract Management

To understand the actual value of legal contract management software, it’s helpful to recap the inefficiencies associated with contract handling.

Manual processes open the door for errors and slow down overall contract execution. For example, approvals and negotiations done via email are often sluggish or overlooked. Untracked revisions can lead to confusion, conflict or non-compliance and a lack of standard legal language may result in lengthy review times or require lawyers to get involved.

Disparate repositories result in inefficient reporting and reduce contract visibility. Contracts spread out over different repositories, departments and geographical locations make monitoring corporate contracts holistically almost impossible. Without tracking expiring contracts and renewals, companies run the risk of compliance exposure as well as revenue loss.

Changes occur over the lifetime of a contract, including renewal dates, pricing, emerging legal requirements and other events. They require amendments and approvals from the contract parties. If these changes aren’t managed, implemented  and communicated correctly and quickly, organizations can increase compliance risks for themselves and all parties involved.

How Legal Contract Management Software Helps

Legal contract management software can reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20%, accelerate review and save on costs. It does this by:

  • Automating the contract lifecycle and maximizing speed and control. Workflows can be configured and automated to support how your company interacts with the contract lifecycle. Clause libraries in CLM automatically create new and approved contract language quickly, and pre-approved templates dramatically reduce creation time. Additionally, contracts can be delivered to all appropriate parties from the CLM solution and integrate with e-signature capabilities to maximize contract execution.
  • Centralizing contracts in one repository in the cloud. This makes them easier to find for appropriate parties and provides a real-time configurable dashboard that shows business-critical contract information at a glance. The legal contract management software also applies the proper metadata when a new contract is created or captured to ensure tracking and sends alerts to notify parties of key events, obligations, milestones and expiration and renewal dates.
  • Allowing lawyers to work where they’re comfortable working. In this case that means enabling them to manage contract changes with a Microsoft Word Add-In. They can receive contracts in a Word doc format with change-tracking locked, save the contract directly into the CLM solution and leave remarks while checking it back in.

CLM + AI: What Is the AI Difference?

CLM centralizes contract storage and automates the request, creation, negotiation, execution and management of any type of contract.

When you combine AI with CLM, you can lower the number of contracts needing to be reviewed. This gives the reviewer the ability to speed up a review and provide consistency across processes. AI also significantly enhances contract management after execution by extracting and obtaining usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

AI and Legal Contract Management Software: What to Look For and How to Get Started

Not all CLM AI is created the same. To get the full benefits of contract lifecycle management solutions, you should carefully evaluate AI for both the pre- and post-signature phases of contract management.

If you’re not sure what to look for in an AI-powered CLM solution, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve prepared a Quick Start Guide that highlights the ideal legal contract AI features you need if you want to reduce inefficiencies, errors and time spent on contracts without sacrificing compliance or visibility. It also provides valuable expert tips to help you get started.

The guide includes information such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Download the guide today to discover how AI can enhance your legal contract management software, what to look for and how you can get started quickly.

Onit Honored by the 16th Annual IT World Awards for its Business Continuity Apps and Lean Into LegalOps Virtual Learning Initiative

Posted on July 15, 2021 by - Company News and Events

The 2021 IT World Awards have honored Onit with Globees for our business continuity suite of Apps and legal community support during the pandemic. As the IT industry’s premier excellence awards program, the IT World Awards honor achievements in every facet of the information technology industry and recognize technology companies with advanced, ground-breaking products, solutions and services.

An Online Legal Community Devoted to Connecting Peers

First, Onit won the Gold Globee Award for Company Response of the Year in the category of “Creative Ways Companies are Giving Back During COVID-19.”

In March of 2020, we introduced a comprehensive thought leadership initiative, Lean Into LegalOps. The program’s original goal was to connect in-house legal professionals to share best practices during the pandemic via masterclasses, webinars, small virtual gatherings and more. Lean Into LegalOps had more than 3,000 registrations in 2020 alone and has now expanded into a vibrant offering the includes Europe and shared wisdom from Fortune 500 legal operations leaders (examples of past programs can be found here and here.)

Corporate legal professionals are welcome to join the complimentary program and can sign up here for the U.S. and here for Europe.

A Free Suite of Business Continuity Apps

Next, we earned the Bronze Globee Award for Best Technology in the category of “To Combat and Reduce the Impact of COVID-19.”

In response to the pandemic and the challenges it presented for corporations, Onit offered a free suite of COVID-19 business continuity and workflow solutions built on its automation platform Apptitude. These Apps were intended to help companies navigate new challenges such as managing a remote workforce. They included:

  • The Return-to-Work Risk Assessment App, which surveys employees regarding risk factors for COVID-19 transmission and allows human resources and management to determine return-to-work dates and protocol.
  • The Contract Compliance Issue Tracking App, that provides a mechanism for companies to log and manage issues reported by external parties, such as force majeure clauses, that impact the ability to deliver on a contract.
  • The Work Delegation App, which collected and reported information from employees having to unexpectedly leave work due to illness, lack of childcare or other personal issues.
  • The Business Standup/Situation Reporting App, that enables managers and leadership to quickly establish a framework for offsite team communications, including managing agendas and aggregating updates for management reporting.
  • The COVID-19 Self Reporting App, which empowered employees to self-report when they have experienced symptoms or been diagnosed with COVID-19.

An Award-Winning Year

Onit is honored to add these Globee awards to our growing list of awards this year, which include:

  • Joining Inc.’s list of the Top 250 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in Texas at #44.
  • Ranking #4 on the Houston Business Journal’s Middle Market 50 list
  • Being named to the Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers
  • Landing #78 on the Austin Business Journal’s List of Tech Employers
  • Named as a finalist, along with customer BT, for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards

For more information about Onit, its platforms Apptitude and Precedent, its business continuity Apps and its solutions (including enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management), schedule a demo here or email [email protected].