Category: Artificial Intelligence

Having Contract Management Issues? Here’s How CLM and AI Can Help.

Posted on December 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Many sales, procurement and corporate legal departments struggle with contract management issues. The issues may seem mundane – too much manual work, a lack of visibility or slow responses – but together, the issues collectively (and quickly) slow down valuable revenue-generating efforts or can lead to regulatory breaches.

Comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions can defeat contract management issues by automating and standardizing processes and decreasing risk and manual work. They streamline the entire contract lifecycle and provide ease of use for all parties. With the ability to have unlimited users and an intuitive, user-friendly interface, these solutions dramatically improve supplier and vendor relationships and overall customer satisfaction.

How Your CLM Defeats Contract Management Issues

What should you look for in a CLM solution to overcome contract management issues? Consider this list of necessities.

  • Automatically generate contracts – The CLM software should allow you to save time and reduce risk by automatically creating a contract with the appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Work where you want to work – Most lawyers rely on Microsoft Word for contracts. An MS Word integration maintains seamless version control and secure links to the CLM software.
  • Let stakeholders help themselves – With a self-service portal, partners and clients can quickly request, submit or create contracts. Contracts can be automatically assigned and tracked, increasing visibility and improving turnaround time.
  • Reduce risks with less work – Manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance via a dedicated dashboard and reporting. Likewise, automated risk mitigation in a CLM identifies clauses and terms which add risk to your agreement and scores your contract repository to assist you in both negotiations and renegotiations.
  • A quick time to value – A CLM solution on an advanced cloud platform means your CLM solution can be deployed in 30 days or less.

The Role of AI in Contract Lifecycle Management – And How it Helps You

In recent years, AI has taken businesses by storm, gaining recognition for its rapid evolution and considerable accomplishments. From driving cars to diagnosing illnesses, it continues to prove its value to all industries.

Contract management is no different. Sales, procurement and corporate legal departments have the opportunity to benefit from AI during the contract lifecycle, realizing increased efficiency from technology that not only understands their organization but learns and continually improves.

As you look for AI-based CLM tools, here is what you should expect in your chosen technology.

  • Out-of-the-box functionality from day one – Your CLM AI should work for you from day one by being pretrained and coming with thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts.
  • Faster review – Need a first-pass contract review in two minutes or less? Your CLM AI can do this, quashing some common contract management issues.
  • Easy edit tracking –Open a contract in Word or PDF to view AI redlines with track changes and commentary.
  • Checklists to streamline review – AI tracks and assigns alerts for reviewers with interactive, automated tasks within Microsoft Word.
  • Identify negotiation positions – Obtain suggested primary and fallback positions directly connected to your checklists with AI.
  • Empower users – Business professionals can get an AI-assisted review of standard contracts like NDAs through email or a self-service portal.
  • Review in batches – AI can extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts. You can also automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value M&A tasks.
  • Accelerate repapering – AI will amend or redline contract details and key terms due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes or M&A activities.
  • Quick analysis and management – Your CLM AI will identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents. It can also analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.
  • Large-scale contract review – Audit compliance with AI during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.

The Results

How much of an impact can AI and CLM have on contract management issues? CLM solutions can help you save 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20% or more.

A study of how legal AI contract review software affects in-house lawyers’ productivity showed that new users were immediately 51.5% more productive and 34% more efficient. And with post-signature contract AI, you improve efficiency by increasing the amount of data analyzed while reviewing and exporting data in five seconds or less.

As an example, consider what CLM AI can do for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). NDAs are the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today, with our customers telling us that they process anywhere between 500 and 100,000 NDAs every year. Processing that volume of contracts, no matter how standardized or routine, quickly adds up in cost and creates a real risk of spreading your legal department employees too thin. However, applying AI and CLM best practices can automate NDA management and cut time spent on them by up to 70%. This blog post shows you how this works.

Reach out to us to learn more or schedule a demonstration of our contract lifecycle management and contract AI, including ReviewAI, ExtractAI and Automate NDA.

 

Introducing A New Source for the Latest Developments in Legal Ops, AI and Ideation

Posted on November 18, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Corporate legal departments and the enterprises they serve are increasingly on a mission to adopt best practices and transform them into smarter workflows, better processes and operational efficiencies.

Legal operations professionals are crucial in creating this digital transformation, something reflected in a recent CLOC survey. It outlined top-ranked priorities for legal operations, including automating legal processes, implementing new technologies and right sourcing legal work.

Over the past several months, experts and pioneers in digital transformation and legal technology have gathered to discuss some of the biggest challenges and opportunities for general counsel, in-house counsel and law departments. Their insight, covering areas such as NDA challenges and constructing world-class legal operations, is now available as podcasts on this LinkedIn page.

Some of the podcast highlights include:

  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how technology, AI and automation, including Automate NDA from Onit, is transforming the NDA process. Nick has extensive experience in leading digital transformation at large organizations, and he knows how important a quick win is to making those transformations successful.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy and Growth, shares his insights into what goes into the creation of industry-leading legal ops. While budget is an important factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Are legal and contract AI technologies giving lawyers what they truly need? Lawyer Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, discusses this question and practical uses of technology in law.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is yet another popular topic in legal tech today. Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get past the hype to CLM payoff and the ultimate ROI opportunity.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here.

The Onit Advantage

Onit is home to some of the best minds in legal technology. Our executives created this industry and ground-breaking technology including enterprise legal management more than 20 years ago – all while working hand-in-hand with corporate legal departments to make it easier to handle the business of law.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal operations, contact Onit today.

The Latest in Corporate Legal Department Trends and Resources (November 2021 Edition)

Posted on November 4, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Welcome to the November digest of the latest in corporate legal department trends and helpful resources. In this edition, you’ll find information on AI’s effect on practicing law, stringent steps to increase law firm diversity, the importance of a business perspective, how to benchmark legal technology investments and the latest in tech spending for UK law firms.

1.    AI vs. Lawyers: How Does AI Affect the Practice of Law?

There’s always the question: Will AI replace lawyers? The answer is no. But it will reduce congestion and manual work resulting from back-office administrative tasks that lawyers face every day.

In the latest episode of the Non-Eventcast podcast, host Jared Correia of Red Cave Consulting speaks with Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Together, they discuss fundamental components of AI, how it improves processes in the legal world, how it gives lawyers a valuable competitive edge and the future of AI in the next five years.

Source: Non-Eventcast podcast (Apple or Spotify)

2. Corporate Legal Departments Want Diversity, and They’re Using Money to Motivate Outside Counsel

One of the most prevalent legal department trends is diversity – and leaders are turning to the most significant penalty of all to push for compliance. They’re docking law firm fees. This can mean relocating work or reducing fees. It can also mean rewards for successful efforts.

This article from Bloomberg Businessweek discusses how Facebook, HP, Novartis and more have embraced fee-based strategies to motivate racial and gender diversity within outside counsel. Others, such as BT, reward successful diversity efforts with a chance to join their law office advisory panel.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek + Equality

3.    The Link Between In-House Tech Adoption and Legal Department Business Acumen

The concept of running the legal department like a business surfaced decades ago. It’s still one of the legal department trends zealously endorsed by many GCs, in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals. New opportunities made possible by legal technology mean there are even more opportunities to evolve this discipline.

In-house panelists gathered at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual meeting to discuss the skills sets that amplify legal technology ROI. Not surprisingly, they pinpoint the importance of a business perspective. You can read the article here.

Source: Legaltech News

4.    How to Benchmark Legal Technology Investments: One Company’s Journey

Speaking of legal technology ROI, let’s shift to benchmarking. Every legal department’s journey varies depending on priorities. In this on-demand webinar, legal ops executives from a global provider of multi-cloud services for apps discuss their mission to transform and scale legal services to accelerate its growth and simplify the customer experience. They’re joined by an expert from HBR Consulting, who breaks down legal department trends and how data plays a critical role in a successful legal tech transformation journey.

Source: Onit

5.    UK Legal Department Trends Alert: Increased Tech Spending, But Not for All of the UK 100

Here’s good news for corporate legal departments aiming to work more efficiently with their UK law firms. A recent survey, analyzed by Artificial Lawyer in this article, finds that 60% of UK 100 law firms bumped up their tech spending in 2021. Further, more law firms indicated that improving the use of technology is a top priority in the next year, with standardizing and centralizing processes not far behind. The one drawback: The publication notes that “… for a significant slice of the market that sits between 11th and 50th place by revenue, tech spending shrank a little relative to revenue.”

Source: Artificial Lawyer

Bonus Resource: How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

CLOC recently gathered a panel of experts to discuss one of the most interesting legal department trends happening now: digital transformation. Large and small companies alike have increasingly turned their attention to legal digital transformation to increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track. These CLOC experts offered valuable advice for implementing legal transformation projects, including the top-five considerations. You can read more about it and hear the recording of the presentation here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Podcast for the Legal Operations Software Market

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

Podcast highlights include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is BusyLamp?

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

BusyLamp joins Onit as an independent subsidiary.

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

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

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

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

Continued Legal Technology Disruption and Product Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

In addition to InvoiceAI, Onit also offers:

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

Learn More about BusyLamp and Onit

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

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

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

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

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

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

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

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How InvoiceAI Works

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

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

This is where AI in spend analytics enters the picture.

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

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

As a result, corporate legal departments benefit from:

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

How to Learn More About AI in Spend Analytics

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

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

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

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

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

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

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

Source: Law.com

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

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

Source: Onit blog

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

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

Source: LawSites

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

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

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

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

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

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

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actionable Intelligence for Legal Spend Management

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Complete Enterprise Legal Management Solution on the Market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pitfalls of Managing Contracts Manually

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

Signs that Your Corporate Legal Department Needs a Contract Management System

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

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

Contract Lifecycle Management Systems Quantified

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

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

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

The benefits of a contract management system with artificial intelligence infographic

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