Author: Onit

You didn’t have to be at LegalTech New York to hear the buzz. Legal project management is fast becoming the “it” set of business skills to infiltrate corporate legal departments trying to throttle down costs and rev up efficiency. From product launches (you heard about ours, right?) to breakout sessions to chatter in the hallways and at dinners, legal project management dominated conversations.

March continues the drum roll of legal project management interest by offering up three educational sessions on the subject varying from a friendly introduction to deep dives.

For those interested in breaking into the world of legal project management, the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute (ABA ALI) are offering a webinar titled, “LPM Update: Lessons Learned in Implementing Legal Project Management” on Tuesday, March 15 from 12-1:30 pm ET. The webinar, co-sponsored by NALP-The Association for Legal Career Professionals, features Pamela Woldow of Edge International, LLC. Pamela, who recently published an article on legal project management and blogs frequently, will tackle the basics, implementation approaches and practical lessons that have emerged from early-stage legal project management efforts. Bonus: The webinar qualifies for 1.5 to 1.8 CLE credit hours in MCLE jurisdictions that accredit webcasts and courses on law practice management.

For those who want more than a legal project management appetizer, InsideCounsel is partnering with West LegalCenter to host the Litigation Project Management Series 2011. The series features full-day sessions in Houston, Chicago and San Francisco, with New York kicking everything off on March 3. On the slate for New York are presentations focused on understanding litigation project management fundamentals and applying project management to the e-discovery process.

Finally, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is offering a whooper of a program that spans two days: Project Management for the In-House Law Department. The on-site program, held in Boston on March 30-31, features an in-depth boot camp of legal project management including:

• Project management process, business context and deliverables

• Scoping and launching the project

• Executing and controlling the project

• The dynamics of a high-performance project team

• Applying project management in the real world

Sessions are lead by faculty members of Boston University’s School of Management.

So whether you are yearning to acquaint yourself with legal project management or want to take the Nestea plunge, March offers a plethora of educational sessions to meet your needs.

And while you’re waiting, take a tour of Onit and see what all the fuss is about or read Robert Ambrogi’s recent post about our latest announcement, Onit Premium.

Drum roll please .It is my great pleasure to announce that we are officially launching Onit Premium at LegalTech New York 2011 tomorrow. Onit Premium is an upgraded version of our free product but is designed specifically for corporate legal departments. Developed with input from 12 general and corporate counsels from the Onit Advisory Group (OAG), Onit Premium addresses the market’s growing demand for affordable legal project, process and spend management technology. Onit Premium has many unique features but some of the key advantages for legal departments include streamlining business processes, reducing operational costs, unifying legal knowledge, and gaining greater visibility into legal projects.

Onit Premium gives corporate legal departments access to a powerful suite of legal project, process and spend management tools for an affordable monthly subscription. We strongly believe that cost shouldn’t be a deterrent to improving processes and managing legal projects within a corporate legal department. Onit Premium is an easy-to-use system that empowers legal departments to create processes and templates unique to their business, ultimately resulting in enhanced transparency into legal projects and legal spend cost reductions.

Onit Premium delivers real value to the entire organization by enhancing communication and collaboration between legal departments and their law firms and vendors. It also empowers legal departments to centralize knowledge and manage their legal projects with more predictability. All documents, notes, tasks, project plan items, etc. are fully searchable in Onit and users can assign multiple tags to any documents. Onit Premium doesn’t require any up-front costs and there is no software to install.

With Onit Premium, corporate legal departments can:

• Automate current manual legal processes

• Electronically review and approve electronic invoices from law firms and legal vendors

• Monitor Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) and compare monthly retainers with shadow bills

• Create custom process templates specific to a legal department’s needs (e.g. Report Potential Risk, Request Employee Termination, Report Potential IP Infringement)

• Build custom legal forms for use by all company employees (e.g. Request ReviewAI, Request NDA)

• Create project budgets and see variance reports on actual vs. projected expenses

• Create pre-built project templates with relevant notes, documents and project plan items

Pricing & Availability

Onit Premium is now available and pricing is based on the number of monthly subscribers. We are conducting demos of Onit Premium in the Cyber Café at LegalTech New York 2011 on the second floor of the exhibit hall. If you are not attending the tradeshow and wish to see a demonstration, please email me at [email protected].

It’s that time of year again. The legal community is shucking its “holiday hangover” and jumping back in to the business of law. And what better way to hone your business and technical prowess than with a visit to LegalTech New York?

On January 31, New York will open its arms to more than 13,000 lawyers, litigation support professionals, MIS directors and records management experts. The programming, which begins that same day, extends until February 2 and is punctuated with keynote presentations on United Nations War Crime Investigations and a Look at Law in the Year 2020.

It’s long been viewed as a stalwart of education for law firms, but the programming meets the healthy expectations of today’s in-house professionals – including an entire track devoted to the corporate legal department on the opening day. Here are some sessions of particular interest that you might want to bookmark (asterisks denote CLE eligible sessions):

January 31

Legal vs. IT: Turn the Battle into a Solution to Meet Compliance*

9:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Featuring Gabriel Buigas, VP and Deputy General Counsel Hewlett-Packard Company

In an organization the size and breadth of Hewlett-Packard, lawyers working in-house are constantly challenged with having access to necessary information in real-time, working globally and meeting multiple countries’ regulatory and compliance demands. Gabriel Buigas, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Hewlett-Packard, will discuss how legal worked with IT to ensure that the appropriate tools, systems and processes are in place to meet these challenges.

Why the Legal Industry Needs to Change and Embrace Technology*

12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Featuring:

Honorable Dennis M. Sweeney (Ret.), Circuit Court for Howard County, Maryland
Joseph FitzGerald, Senior Vice President, Legal and Public Affairs, Symantec Corporation
Honorable David J. Waxse, US District Court, District of Kansas

As an industry, the legal field remains resistant to change and equally resistant to the technology. This panel presentation features members of the bench spearheading the movement to increased technology adoption within the legal world. Hear first hand why they feel now is the time to step up and how this impacts the legal industry going forward. Understand why you need to be working to meet their requirements and avoid the potential sanctions and issues which could affect you, your firm or your litigation.

A Game Show: Top Concerns of the General Counsel*

3:15 – 3:45 p.m.

Featuring:

Carmen Oveissi Field, Principal, Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP
Dennis Browne, Senior Director and AGC, Capital One

Join this unique format to hear the issues and concerns facing your colleagues today. This discussion will feature in-house counsel as they discuss the challenges and issues they are facing today. Panelists will offer the top issues keeping them up at night and then discuss options and solutions they are employing in an interesting interactive format.

February 1

Efficiencies for your Bottom Line: Five Steps to Reducing Costs in the Next 6 Months

2:00 – 3:15 p.m.

Featuring:

Joy Saphla, Managing Director, Huron Consulting

Gary Nelson, Director of Operations, Medtronic

Lani Miller, Assistant General Counsel, Bank of America

Mary Pape, Legal Director, Litigation, Dell

The session focuses on moving away from the hourly rate model, cost drivers that really need to be managed, negotiating the right fixed fee arrangement and essential issues to raise while discussing fixed fee arrangements.

February 2

Intersection of Project Management and Practice Support*

10:30 – 11:45 a.m.

Featuring:
Michelle Mahoney, Director, Applied Legal Technology
Mallesons Stephen Jaques

The session will focus on project management principles, how to apply to the business of practice support and cost savings from applying project management.

A Look at the Law: 2020: A Radical Perspective on how Technology will Shape the Legal Industry 10 years from Now. Will you be Ready?*

3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Featuring Michael Rogers, New York Times Futurist-in-Residence MSNBC.com author of the Practical Futurist column

It’s 2020, and the challenges that are transforming every profession have also engulfed the practice of law. Will you still need an office? Will you meet more clients on social networks than at your club? Will courts convene in cyberspace? Will you outsource a third of your work to Mumbai? Will an MIT PhD in computer science be up for partner in your firm? Will you argue cases about virtual property‰ÛÓand get paid in virtual currency? But most important, when all this happens: will you be ready? Please join us as Practical Futurist Michael Rogers offers an enlightened look at what the future holds for the legal industry.

Cyber Cafe Visit

Stop by the Cyber Cafe on the second floor of the exhibit hall in between breakout sessions to hear about the latest Onit news and see a demo of our premium product. We’ll also be tweeting about the latest LegalTech news so follow us at http://twitter.com/dependonit.

Unable to attend this year? Catch real-time notes and comments by following LegalTech Twitter comments at #LTNY or join the LegalTech LinkedIn Group.

As we ring in 2011 and plan for yet another LegalTech New York later this month, I can’t help but reminisce about Onit’s accomplishments during the past 12 months. I first want to personally thank our users, community members, Onit Advisory Group (OAG) and industry thought leaders for their continued support and inspiration.

The legal community has welcomed us and was generous enough to tell their loyal followers about Onit. For that, I wish to give a heartfelt and personal thank you to Robert Ambrogi (LawSites), Toby Brown & Greg Lambert (3 Geeks and a Law blog), Paul Easton (Legal Project Management), Rick Georges (FutureLawyer), and Steven Levy (Lexician). We are forever grateful for their support and guidance this past year.

A “Big” Apple Launch

We have a certain saying in Texas that goes something like this, “Go big or go home.” We took that to heart and decided that nothing was bigger than launching the open beta of our legal project management tool than at the biggest legal tradeshow in the industry – LegalTech New York 2010.

For the Onit team, however, this event was much more than a product launch – it was our entry into the legal market. We also think it was significant for the legal industry because it hadn’t seen a new player in the electronic billing and matter management space since 1998. How do I know this? Onit co-founders Eric Elfman and Eric Smith were also the co-founders of that company (Datacert), now a global provider of enterprise legal management solutions.

2010 Company & Product Highlights

Market entry wasn’t the only thing that kept us busy in 2010. The year was marked with significant company milestones and product announcements, some of which are highlighted below:

• Secured more than 2,000 corporate, law firm and business beta users from around the world including 60% of America’s top 10 highest grossing law firms

• Created the Onit Advisory Group (OAG), an invitation-only group of 12 corporate legal general counsels, to assist in the strategic development of our premium legal spend and process management module

• Released new product enhancements to let users quickly add detailed information to tasks, assign to-dos to team members, set project deadlines and upload and attach multiple documents to projects

• Revamped our website to include an improved appearance, navigation and a simplified user interface with in-depth product and company information

• Released a new user interface to give users more control of how they view the information in their legal and business projects

• Created a library of product screencasts to highlight Onit’s key features in the new interface

We are excited about what 2011 holds for Onit and look forward to engaging with our customers to better understand their needs so we can deliver a superior product with the best support available. I encourage you to visit our community and give us your honest feedback about the product, team and features you’d like to see added to our product roadmap.

Are you struggling to reduce legal costs, gain greater transparency into legal projects and improve process management in your legal department?

If you’re a general counsel or associate general counsel of a corporate legal department and have at least $1 billion in revenue ……

We are actively looking for 10 corporate legal departments to participate in a beta program to review our premium legal project, process and spend management tool. Participation in the program gives your entire corporate legal department access online tools and nearly $14K worth of implementation services to create 15 templates, forms and processes that are unique to your legal department’s needs (see examples below).

Other benefits of the program include:

• Electronic review and approval of invoices from legal vendors, including law firms
• The ability to automate current manual legal processes
• Free use of the system for 3 months and discounted use afterward
• The creation of 15 custom templates, forms and processes:
  • 5 customized legal forms (e.g. Form for company employees to request legal services)
  • 5 customized processes (e.g. Process to hire a new outside law firm)
  • 5 customized legal templates (e.g. Template to report ethics violation)

Tell all your colleagues and join the beta today. Email me at [email protected] to get more information.

The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting officially kicks off today in San Antonio and runs through Wednesday, October 27. If you are not familiar with ACC’s Annual Meeting, it is the largest gathering of in-house counsel from around the world. Attendees can earn CLE/CPD credit, learn from other thought leaders in the industry, network with colleagues and browse the exhibit hall that houses more than 100 law firms and legal service providers.

Okay. This is all great but its Monday morning and it’s just not feasible to get to San Antonio. You’re in luck. For the first time, ACC will be streaming two major events live from the show and you can attend for free.

• Today at 2:30 p.m. EDT you can join in fun for a fast-paced Ethics Follies musical performance resented by ACC’s award-winning South/Central Texas Chapter. The unique and well-received musical comedy will bring current ethics issues to life in a memorable and entertaining act.
• Tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. EDT watch as the GCs of Microsoft and Google talk about technology at the Chair’s Choice Lunch Session. They’ll discuss the latest advances in technology, new ways to work and more.

On the off chance you are attending the ACC Annual meeting this week, we’ve highlighted a few sessions we think you’ll find valuable:

Monday, October 25

2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Track: ACC

310 – Outside Counsel Fee Valuation Toolbox, Part 1

Ready to move from the billable hour to value-based fee structures for at least some of your outside counsel spend? Not sure how to decide which fee structures are most appropriate for which matter types or stages of matters? Come to this session to learn how to put together your own decision tree. We’ll walk through the considerations you need to weigh when deciding fee structures – with a focus on two increasingly popular approaches: risk collars and fixed fees. We recommend that you combine this with session 401, to expand your toolkit of options.

Speakers:

Elisa Garcia
EVP and General Counsel
Office Depot, Inc.

Fred Paulmann
Principal
The Counsel Management Group, LLC

Monday, October 25

2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Track: Technology

310 – Reducing Risk for Your Company Through Cloud Computing

Companies with server networks to bring “infrastructure on demand” to their customers provide cloud computing. In busy times, customers can dramatically ramp up their computer usage without investing in equipment and software, and then quickly ramp down when the extra capacity is no longer needed. This session will address challenges faced by companies that use or provide cloud computing services. Discussion topics will include: service standards and reliability measurements, confidential information and trade secrets, data privacy, security and encryption, liability limitations, indemnification, and risk allocation and international regulatory issues.

Speakers:

Ieuan Mahony
Partner
Holland & Knight LLP

Constance Mitchell
Counsel
CSC

Thomas Molchan
Senior Vice President & Associate General Counsel
ARAMARK Corporation

Richard Raysman
Partner
Holland & Knight

Monday, October 25

4:30 – 6:00 p.m.

Track: ACC

401 – Outside Counsel Fee Valuation Toolbox, Part 2

Continue your exploration of value-based fee structure options – looking beyond what was covered in Session 301. We’ll walk through the considerations to weigh when deciding fee structures, focusing on three more popular approaches: portfolio retainers, success/incentive fees, and contingencies. We recommend that you combine this with session 301, to expand your toolkit of options.

Tuesday, October 26

9:00 – 10:30 p.m.

Track: ACC

501 – Outside Counsel Management: Staffing the Work for Value-Based Fee Structures

If you’re ready to move to value-based fee structures, you know that you need to collaborate with your outside counsel to drive efficiency. This session will focus on process management – specifically disaggregating processes to determine which pieces can be improved, making sure that legal knowledge is being leveraged (not re-invented), and making better decisions about who should be doing which piece of the work. We’ll examine internal and external staffing options, include out-sourcing and off-shoring, and connect the options to value-based fee structures that you may be considering.

Speakers:

Lisa Damon
Partner
Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Kenneth Grady
General Counsel and Secretary
Wolverine World Wide, Inc

Joseph Spratt
Director of Communications
Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Tuesday, October 26

11:00 – 12:30 p.m.

Track: ACC
601 – Outside Counsel Management: Project Management for Successful Value-Based Relationships

Make sure your new value-based fee structures with law firms are successful by focusing on forging long-term relationships, goal alignment, and solid project management. In this session, we’ll discuss how to assess firm project management capabilities, and ways to manage the outside counsel interface over the life of a matter to ensure you are satisfied with outcome. We’ll cover tools and techniques of successful project management, such as defining scope, requirements and milestones up front, conducting progress assessments along the way, ensuring the budget is on track (and how to anticipate and deal with variances), and concluding matters with assessments that foster continuous improvement.

Speakers:

Janine Dascenzo
Associate General Counsel
General Electric Company

Fredrick Dempsey
VP & Chief Legal Officer
National Investment Managers, Inc.

Vincent Gonzales
Senior Environmental Counsel
Southern California Gas Company

Randall Hafer
Attorney
Kilpatrick Stockton LLP

Byron Kalogerou
Partner
McDermott Will & Emery LLP

Aileen Leventon
President & GC
QLex Consulting Inc.

Paul Williams
Partner
Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P