Author: Onit

A Serious “Bug” in Volkswagen’s Legal Hold Process

Posted on March 31, 2017 by - Business Process Management

Fortunately, legal holds don’t appear very often, but companies need to take them very seriously and have a secure plan in the event that one happens. Equally important, companies must not veer away from the plan when a hold is triggered. Take the recent case surrounding Volkswagen (VW). In a nutshell, VW in-house attorneys tipped off employees about an upcoming litigation hold. One in-house counsel apparently indicated to employees that they should destroy certain documents and a hard drive that pertained to VW’s emissions cheating issues.

In light of the impending litigation hold, 30 to 40 employees were told that emissions-related data should be kept on USB drives and put on the company’s computer system “only if necessary.” Thousands of documents were deleted, but many were later recovered during the investigation. The not-so-elaborate cover-up finally broke down when a VW employee admitted it to regulators. Six current and former employees—one top compliance officer and five department heads in product development and engineering—were indicted.

In our white paper, “Is it Worth the Risk?  How to Implement a World Class Defensible Legal Hold Process” we 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.

Download this new white paper to discover how a cutting edge legal hold platform allows team members to gain real-time access to the status of collection requests, know when actions were issued, which tasks are in progress and which legal actions require immediate attention.

Our new white paper offers the following insights:

  • Why you need a world class legal hold process
  • A little history of recent landmark legal hold cases and why they should concern you
  • Current best practices of legal holds
  • Essential features to know before shopping for legal hold software
  • The problems associated with using antiquated or inappropriate legal hold tools

A powerful legal hold solution offers a quick and highly cost-effective way to supercharge your automated business processes, as well as your bottom line. Reduce the ever-present risk of costly court cases. The stakes are high, and the time to act is now.

Contracting Shouldn’t Be a Nightmare

Posted on March 22, 2017 by - Business Process Management

Remember the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” If you can honestly say that about your contract lifecycle management process, then you’re wasting your time reading this. But we’re hoping that you’ve stopped by for a reason – perhaps your contract management system isn’t all it should be, or even worse, you don’t have a system at all.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, agreements get bogged down in antiquated contracting processes that frustrate corporate counsel and their clients alike. When counsel rely on tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint as their contract management suite, it leads to a lack of transparency. Drafting, review and approval workflows come to a standstill as emails fly back and forth between stakeholders desperately trying to determine the status and versioning of their contracts. Disappointed business units point the finger at corporate counsel for delays that can extend negotiations and damage relationships with suppliers, vendors and customers. Meanwhile, the legal team loses opportunities for insight into the contracting process and data, making risk management and compliance more challenging.

Fortunately, hope is within reach in the form of a quickly deployable, user-friendly solution.

Our new white paper, co-authored with Consilio, offers the following insights:

  • The problems associated with using antiquated and cumbersome contract management processes
  • How the lack of transparency during the contract review and approval process affects a company’s bottom line
  • The legal and contractual obligations of contracts and its affect on compliance and risk
  • How technology can optimize your contract management process with workflow and collaboration

Download this new white paper, Making Contracting Easier for Legal to learn how to streamline and supercharge your contract management process today.

2017 Hyperion Research Enterprise Legal Management Benchmarking Survey

Posted on March 10, 2017 by - Company News and Events

10 Minutes of Your Time Can Benefit a Charity for Life

Hyperion’s Survey Program helps contribute broad and on-going empirical data and analysis to legal operations managers and decision makers about the current trends, activities and best practices you and your peers are most concerned with.

As part their work on the Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) research agenda, Hyperion is currently circulating a benchmarking survey to law department operations managers, analysts and attorneys to gain perspective on their use of ELM technology and their attitudes about a number of legal operations and related functional competencies.

Corporate law departments are in the midst of an active period of transformation. Driven in large part by the new demands on the general counsel, today’s law departments are expected to serve a business function as much as they are traditional legal roles. Since 2010, when Hyperion first endorsed the term Enterprise Legal Management, ELM has become a recognized management discipline and a strategic objective for corporate law departments. Today, ELM and the operational capabilities that comprise it present an acute set of both challenges and opportunities for legal practices worldwide.

This survey is focused on understanding the prevailing trends in legal operations, including values, priorities and investment in Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) capabilities. Hyperion is looking at how legal operations professionals and attorneys are implementing, using and getting the most out of ELM, and what capabilities they value and prioritize most.

But there’s an added incentive in completing their survey. Hyperion Research honors your investment of time with a deeper investment in our communities with their Donations for Data program. For every survey completion they receive, Hyperion will donate $10 to accredited charities benefiting youth and education.

Please click this link to begin the 10 minute survey:  http://www.hgpresearch.com/ELMSurvey

Paradigm Shifts Shouldn’t Be Ignored: The Case for Enterprise Legal Management

Posted on March 1, 2017 by - Enterprise Legal Management

For quite a few years, enterprise legal management (ELM) has focused on matter management and legal spend management. It’s fair to say that effective ELM platforms were, and still are, good at what they do best – only matter and spend management. But many of these platforms were designed solely for storage and access of data; not a whole lot more than that. This is the problem and these systems need to be laid to rest.

Have a look at our new article in Corporate Counsel Magazine, An Evolutionary Paradigm Shift in Enterprise Legal Management. This article highlights the importance of using state-of-the-art ELM platforms that:

  • Empower a better way to work
  • Offer an environment where user experience is key
  • Are focused on process
  • Can be augmented to manage other legal processes

Thought leaders across the country understand there has been a distinct paradigm shift and evolutionary branching off from those older e-billing and matter management systems. More importantly, they’ve taken action to optimize their ELM processes to the extent possible.

If you haven’t already, isn’t it time to make the move to a cutting edge ELM system? Your team and bottom line will thank you.

Avoid the “Black Hole” at All Costs: Revive Your Ailing Contract Management Process

Posted on March 1, 2017 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Contracts are the lifeblood of all business agreements – whether it’s buying or selling products, services or consulting agreements. As part of this process, someone must create a contract, negotiate the terms and ultimately store it where it can be accessed by other team members.

Unfortunately, most professionals do not adhere to a consistent process – which can lead to unnecessary company risk exposure and unenforced or unmet contract terms. While there are a variety of methods to manage contracts, companies of all sizes can benefit by centralizing their contract data and taking steps toward standardizing the way contracts are processed, approved and managed.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is an integrated system that applies business rules to manage an enterprise’s contracts on a worldwide basis. A CLM system typically manages the request through the entire contract lifecycle, including negotiation, execution and storage in a central repository. CLM systems allow people within an organization to access, analyze and act on contract-related information to improve efficiency, consistency, reporting and control.

Our new white paper offers the following insights:

  • What a CLM system is
  • Key features of a CLM system
  • How to avoid the “black hole” where information is disorganized or lost
  • Benefits of implementing an efficient CLM system
  • How to solve problems instead of creating new ones
  • How enterprise solutions can be quickly developed and scaled to your business

Download our new white paper, Simple Contract Management to learn how to find a better, process-driven way to run and optimize your contract management process.

Dear GCs: The Business Thinks You’re Throwing Away Its Money

Posted on February 17, 2017 by - Legal Operations

Admit it — GCs have few friends when the company budget is being discussed. Everyone thinks the GC is giving money away to his or her former law firm.

When the legal department is seen as a cost center, even GCs who are lawyer’s lawyers spend too much of their time playing defense on costs. This reputation as a cost center is an impediment to the GC’s ability to perform her job and a blow to her status in the C-Suite.

Legal is not recognized as a full business partner. Legal spends its time defending costs diluting its message on the value it brings and how its substantive advice supports the business goals.

As the industry rapidly moves away from the misconception that higher and higher legal costs are unavoidable and unquestioned, the risk to the GC’s job is rapidly rising.

GCs need to play offense and show that they are running their department in a business-savvy way by gaining control of the data.

Top GCs have introduced accountability and competition to their management of the legal budget by commanding a full 360 degree view of data on outside counsel spend, giving them the data to defend choice and management of counsel.

Through that control, GCs can demonstrate:

  • That legal has the data and business tools to drive improvement;
  • How certain costs may be driven by choices of the business rather than legal;
  • That legal has the data to pursue business cases for success and improvement.

A legal department that is seen as a full business partner receives less blowback. According to former Sabre Corporation General Counsel, Sterling Miller,

“Being able to demonstrate that you are paying close attention to costs and that you are thoughtful in what you are spending and why, will make conversations with Finance (and the CEO) go much easier. In-house lawyers who run their matters, teams, or department like a business have more credibility at budget time –-and during those really tough times when the business is looking for more difficult cost cutting measures.”

Dread Managing Legal Service Requests? Not Anymore.

Posted on February 17, 2017 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In our new eBook, “Streamlining Legal Service Requests” we explore the problems and headaches associated with processing legal service requests (LSR), the importance of allowing the legal department to focus on “real” legal work, and strategies to not only fix the problem but to supercharge your LSR process.

Today’s legal departments are oftentimes inundated, and sometimes overwhelmed, with the myriad of issues that crop up daily. Legal service requests should be relatively simple affairs to handle, but in reality they are a frequent and major contributor to a legal department’s organizational chaos. Business partner requests for legal services are often tossed into the legal department sporadically by email, text or informal conversations from various departments.

With no standard legal service intake process, tracking and assigning these requests is nearly impossible. To complicate matters, business partners typically do not include all the resources or documents in the initial request. Often, an email or phone conversation must ensue to obtain the relevant materials before the “actual” legal work can even begin.

Fortunately, there is one solution that can relieve a large portion of this angst. By implementing an intelligent, self-service portal to initiate legal service requests, the first phase of the battle is already won. The company will also be able to leverage their new system, since information can be shared across departments and systems. Fewer staff members will need to spend time entering data for the same client and matter, which saves money. All of this will allow the legal department to spend more time focusing on the needs of business consumers – not following up on paperwork and other purely administrative and time-consuming tasks. Optimizing the LSR process is crucial to the legal department’s success and to the organization’s bottom line.

Legal departments are often understaffed and have limited resources and legal service requests simply add more to their already stressful workload. But there is another problem that can be easily overlooked, unless you are the one needing legal assistance. The scenario often plays out like this: a business consumer of legal services needs assistance, but doesn’t know where in the organization to go, or the best way to initiate the request. This is where problems begin for the legal department.

As mentioned previously, requests for legal services are sometimes thrown at the legal department as a hodgepodge of emails, texts, phone calls, and informal conversations. Trying to sort through such an assortment of “requests” would prove daunting under any circumstance. And all of this before the “real” legal work even begins.

Another factor that may be troublesome is simply forming a good, old-fashioned relationship between the business consumer and the legal service provider. For legal assistance matters, the intake process is where the relationship often begins.

Recent legal market trends can be highly revealing not only for what’s happening now, but also as extraordinary indicators for future developments as well. We’ve discussed the serious problem of corporate legal departments getting bogged down in routine administrative tasks, with LSRs placing high on the list of troublesome processes. If organizations are not driving and implementing positive changes to eliminate such problems, the problems won’t go away.

It’s crucial that the legal department be allowed to focus more on the real legal work, without sinking deeper into the administrative quagmire. In most cases, a well-chosen and effective technology solution is the best answer. But driving and implementing change is another key element in the solution. Keeping up to date with the latest technology is always good, but to implement technology changes requires buy-in from leadership and IT, as well as an unwavering commitment to see the project through.

According to Blickstein Group’s 9th Annual Law Department Operations Survey, we discover some enlightening statistics. 81% of respondents agree that corporate law departments will be the primary driver of innovation and change in the legal sector. This is an encouraging number.

But when we drill a bit deeper into the survey, we learn that the top challenge facing law department functions is driving/implementing change. Taking a close second place is “identifying opportunities for business improvement and cost savings.”

When asked, “Do you have a plan to develop a legal department technology strategy or three-year road map which addresses how you integrate, evolve and replace your systems to support the legal department’s processes and needs?” only 18% of respondents answered “yes.”

In light of these facts, a compelling question arises:

If corporate law departments are expected to be the primary shakers and movers of innovation, shouldn’t they be equipped with the proper technology to do so?

Onit’s Legal Service Request solution simplifies this intake process and provides a simple portal that allows business partners to interact and engage with the legal department. In doing so, the legal department obtains a more holistic view of the legal portfolio and the ability to better serve their clients. The legal department also gets a comprehensive view of all legal service requests and can report on request types (i.e. by department, region, phase, due date, etc.)

Client requests can be directed to the appropriate legal practitioner, even if the requester is not aware of the most appropriate recipient of the request. Clients can also self-serve to keep track of status and resolution of legal service requests. In fact, the requestor of legal services gets an automated email that allows them to track the status of their request directly from the email. The built-in feature to generate automated notifications exemplifies the very best in legal process solutions.

The chaotic world of emails, phone calls, and informal conversations to initiate legal service request is now gone and business process automation has ushered in a new era of cutting-edge customer service and efficiency. It’s worth reiterating that optimizing the LSR process is crucial to the legal department’s success and to the organization’s bottom line.

For organizations that already have other automated processes, that’s a good head start. Now it’s just a matter of implementing an effective LSR solution to complement their existing automated business process arsenal. For companies new to business process automation, a LSR platform is an excellent first choice since legal service requests are literally the “front line” where most legal matters begin.

Download this new eBook to learn how a premier, user friendly legal service request solution can streamline and optimize this process in your department.

Our new eBook offers the following insights:

  • The problem of using outdated or inappropriate legal service request processing tools
  • Current market trends concerning legal service requests
  • Best practices of managing legal service requests
  • A logical and powerful solution that can be quickly deployed

It’s time to let the legal department do what it does best – the “real” work of handling legal matters. And they can’t do this if they’re spending endless hours on day-to-day tasks that could be handled in seconds via an intelligent, self-service portal for legal service requests.

Life at Corporate Legal Just Got Easier with a Legal Service Request Solution

Posted on February 14, 2017 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Imagine working in the legal department trying to keep up with the flood of “real” legal work. On top of that, you have legal service requests coming at you in no real organized fashion. They could be in the form of an obscure, confusing email, a phone call, an informal conversation in the break room, or an abrupt text message. In any case, you’ll likely have to follow up with these requestors just to get all the preliminary required information. And that’s just to get started. It’s frightening to think just how much time you’ve spent on this purely administrative drill, all the while taking your time from real legal work (which, of course, you’ll need to catch up on later).

Onit’s Legal Service Request (LSR) solution provides a legal department with an intelligent and user-friendly method for engaging with business partners. Oftentimes, business consumers of legal services don’t know where to go in the organization to obtain the assistance they need. By providing the business with an intelligent, self-service portal to initiate a request for the legal department, legal can reach more of the organization’s needs and provide better legal service to the business.

Client requests can be directed to the appropriate legal practitioner, even if the requester is not aware of the most appropriate recipient of the request. Clients can also self-serve to keep track of status and resolution of legal service requests. In fact, the requestor of legal services gets an automated email that allows them to track the status of their request directly from the email. The built-in feature to generate automated notifications exemplifies the very best in legal process solutions.

The chaotic world of confusing emails, garbled phone calls, and informal conversations to initiate LSRs is now gone and business process automation has ushered in a new era of cutting-edge customer service and efficiency. It’s worth reiterating that optimizing the LSR process is crucial to the legal department’s success and to the organization’s bottom line.

For organizations that already have other automated processes, that’s a good head start. Now it’s just a matter of implementing an effective LSR solution to complement their existing automated business process arsenal. For companies new to business process automation, a LSR platform is an excellent first choice since legal service requests are literally the “front line” where most legal matters begin.

Download this new eBook to learn how a premier, user friendly legal service request solution can streamline and optimize this process in your department.

Our new eBook offers the following insights:

  • The problem of using outdated or inappropriate legal service request processing tools
  • Current market trends concerning legal service requests
  • Best practices of managing legal service requests
  • A logical and powerful solution that can be quickly deployed
  • A company’s success story using Onit’s intuitive, agile and user friendly solution

It’s time to let the legal department do what it does best – the “real” work of handling legal matters. And they can’t do this if they’re spending endless hours on day-to-day tasks that could be handled in seconds via an intelligent, self-service portal for LSRs. In our new eBook, “Streamlining Legal Service Requests” we explore the problems and headaches associated with processing legal service requests, the importance of allowing the legal department to focus on “real” legal work, and strategies to not only fix the problem but to supercharge your LSR process.

Law Firm Discounts: If Everyone Gets One, Do They Really Exist?

Posted on February 9, 2017 by - Legal Operations

The changing business model of law has focused attention on certain key metrics that capture the economic pressures that legal providers face. Now, we turn our attention to a metric — discounts on law firm rates — that is misleading as a signal of legal department efficiency.

Prior to the rise of legal spend analytics, corporate clients often relied on “discounts” from their law firms to prove to business leaders that they were getting “value” from their firms. Today, however, non-legal business units are relying extensively on analytics to show value. Consequently, legal departments are under increasing pressure to show real value with data analytics, rather than merely stating that their law firm gave them a “discount.”

Indeed, savvy in-house counsel and legal operations professionals know all too well that all law firms give corporate clients “discounts.” For example, The Wall Street Journal reported that large firms typically discount their rates by 17%, with “sophisticated” law firms using annual rate increases to make up for such discounts. As the WSJ reported, the aggregate discount increased from 8% a decade ago. Similarly, the ubiquity of law firm discounts was covered by the Economist, which noted that law firm discounts are now common even among the most prestigious of law firms. Many law firms have stayed ahead of this discounting by raising their general rate card at a higher rate than the discounts.

Thus, savvy in-house counsel and legal operations professionals are asking: if everyone is getting a “discount,” isn’t my discount illusory?

Additionally, savvy in-house counsel and legal operations professionals have realized that law firms who provide “discounts” often make up the lost profits in other ways. For example, many law firms who discount their rates will staff additional timekeepers on a matter to the point that the additional hours have erased any “discount” that the client negotiated.

Likewise, many law firms who provide discounts may work less efficiently to the point that the same work may be handled less cost-effectively. Indeed, clients who use data analytics often find that there are systematic differences in how law firms and individual partners handle legal matters.

As a result, many savvy legal departments and CFOs have concluded that while discounts are helpful, they are hardly an indication that a law firm is truly providing value.

Show Me the Data! Why GCs Need Real Data

Posted on February 7, 2017 by - Legal Operations

In speaking to legal departments, a common theme is fear of falling behind as innovators in legal department management — from General Electric to Google to the legal operations innovators at CLOC — come up with creative approaches to demonstrate data-driven approaches to legal spend. 

Specifically, the features of the new legal landscape pressuring legal departments are:

  1. Data is Redefining Legal Management: Leading legal departments are breaking old norms of managing legal work — where few constraints were imposed on outside counsel — with creative approaches using data and other tools to get the most for their money while also increasing the quality of the legal services provided
    to them.
  2. As a Result, There is a Widening Gap in Performance Between Leaders and Laggards: A big gulf in results is beginning to separate these modern legal departments who use data and legal operations tools with those doing it the old way.

A forthcoming paper in the Fordham Law Review by Professor Morris Ratner discusses this widening gap in the litigation market.  

Data-Driven Management Example: Breaking Litigation Into Phases

Ratner highlights how data is allowing clients to break up single matters into manageable phases with tools including data and procurement principles.
Instead of looking at litigations as a whole, clients are attaching different fee structures to different phases –whether motion practice, discovery, trial preposition, or other elements of litigation.

This approach can save a legal department millions of dollars a year by removing unfettered discretion from counsel in smart strategic ways.
Professor Ratner says:

“Clients looking to control legal spend, supported by changes in information and project management technologies and competition among law firms, are unbundling legal work to assign tasks rather than cases to individual lawyers or firms, applying procurement principles to source legal projects to the most cost efficient providers.

These same forces have increased the prevalence and commitment to litigation budgets and have pushed flat and other “value-based” pricing into a variety of litigation settings.

Both mechanisms better align the financial interests of lawyers and clients and facilitate client input into the tasks undertaken to achieve litigation aims.”

By breaking up the matter, clients can successfully focus their counsel on tasks that create value by aligning economic incentives and move away from the traditional approach where the client handed over the keys on how a legal matter was handled and awaited a final bill.

Consequence: Legal Departments Falling Behind

Professor Ratner worries that many clients are falling behind and consequently achieving worse results in cost and quality from their legal providers.

He says that currently, only sophisticated clients have the tools, knowledge, and manpower to use such techniques currently. He notes that it is imperative that all clients benefit from such techniques:

What we need to cultivate is a shift in legal ethics that requires all lawyers to pay as much attention to value as sophisticated clients demand.

Indeed, we hear from GCs that they are increasingly being asked by their colleagues on how they are implementing “value-based” systems. Consequently, GCs are doing what they can to catch up.
In a forthcoming post, we will explain how the approach of breaking matters into phases extends well beyond litigation using examples from Bodhala’s work.