Category: Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenges of NDAs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automate NDA Portal

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

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

Automated NDA reviews and redlines contracts

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

Automate NDA dashboard

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

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

Getting Started with Legal Contract Management Software and AI

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

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

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

The Challenges of Contract Management

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

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

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

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

How Legal Contract Management Software Helps

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

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

CLM + AI: What Is the AI Difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guide includes information such as:

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

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

Legal Billing Review: How to Right-Size Invoice Charges

Posted on July 8, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

When it comes to legal billing, corporate legal departments often have a baseline expectation: Charge my company the correct amount.

What sounds like a simple premise (and one that should be easy to meet) comes with serious challenges. Invoice review is a rigorous process. Due to the work they represent, law firm bills are often long and complex and contain entries from numerous timekeepers. With hundreds of thousands of line items, vague descriptions or block billing may be missed by busy in-house reviewers. Violations of outside counsel guidelines, such as copy charges or work, may be hard to pinpoint. To top it off, in-house counsel and other professionals usually count invoice review as one of their many responsibilities – a list that has grown as work increases and resources remain stagnant or decrease.

Technology, such as enterprise legal management, has helped to alleviate some of the challenges. Paper invoices have moved to electronic billing. Billing rules, built to scour for specific terms in invoices, flag charges for review. Legal spend analytics identify trends and help to frame performance.

However, even with these additions, many reviewers often default to hitting approve. Who has time in the department to dig deeply into every questionable charge? Is there another approach to invoice review that will ensure companies aren’t overcharged?

We dug into these questions in a recent webinar.  Jonathan Weber, Chubb’s Vice President, Claim Optimization and Legal and Operations Lead, Marci Waterman, President of Sterling Analytics (and the newest member of Onit’s strategic alliance program), and Matt DenOuden, Onit’s SVP of Global Sales, explored the ideal approach that adds efficiency and expertise to invoice review while still honoring the company’s relationship with law firms.

Three Categories of Invoice Review Violations

Potential violations during invoice review often fall into three categories.

First, you have basic facts. For example, is the math correct? As Weber illustrated in the webinar, this is along the lines of getting a bill at a restaurant that is added correctly. Does your bill for two $25 entrees show $50?

Next, you have black and white decisions. For example, is the bill consistent with litigation management guidelines? Going back to the restaurant analogy, were you charged with what you ordered? Or did charges from another table end up on your tab?

Finally, you have gray areas. Are the charges reasonable? When we return to the restaurant idea, one way this might look is being charged for food that was ordered but was served cold. Generally, in a situation like that, the restaurant will comp the meal or replace it with another at no charge. Or perhaps you have three servers working your table. For a party of two, that makes no sense. But for a party of 25, it fits perfectly.

How can corporate legal ensure they’re billed properly in each of these categories? By combining AI and human review.

The Ideal Approach to Legal Billing Review: AI + Third-Party Human Expertise

Webber provided his insight on combining AI and third-party bill review. The company pays hundreds of invoices every day and has a sizeable legal spend. Meeting their goal of always being sure they’re paying the correct amount is a difficult task. They’ve defined strict processes for the flow of invoice review that allows them to look at their data in an organized way.

Part of that process is relying on AI and third-party legal billing review.

AI identifies non-compliance for things like wrong math, improper descriptions and block billing.  These are the kinds of basic or black-and-white decisions that machines handle well. As a bonus, the AI continues to learn so it will get more adept each day at identifying these types of issues.

For the gray areas, the human element comes in. This is where judgment is required. Sometimes the AI might flag things for a valid reason, but humans (such as the lawyers at Sterling) can understand the context and circumstances that make certain charges acceptable or unacceptable.

The result? Chubb is better able to accomplish its goal of always paying the right amount. You can hear the entire discussion, which goes more in-depth into this topic and its benefits.

The Benefits of AI and Third-Party Invoice Review for Legal Billing (and More Resources)

Combining AI-powered invoice review with human third-party review decreases the burden of invoice review while offering:

  • More consistent enforcement of outside counsel guidelines
  • A better understanding of the work being performed by outside firms
  • More time for in-house staff to focus on important, high-value work
  • Substantial cost savings

Here are resources for those who would like to learn more about this:

 

 

The Latest in Corporate Legal and Legal Operations News (July Edition)

Posted on July 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to Onit’s July compilation of some of the most pertinent and timely articles for corporate legal and legal operations news.

In this month’s digest, we explore corporate legal departments as profit centers, CLM ROI, the latest ACC benchmarking survey results, how to build a more resilient legal department and an approach to evaluate and control legal spend.

1. Are Corporate Legal Departments the Next Profit Centers?

Is litigation the next big revenue generator for companies? According to a study by a finance firm, companies with inadequate affirmative recovery programs are 27% more likely to leave money on the table. Meanwhile, 73% of CFOs say they have adequate programs to capture value through affirmative litigation, but 46% responded that they needed improvement.

According to the report:

“The research suggests that companies are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how they approach legal assets and that financial officers understand their value and have new opportunities to unlock them.”

As a result, we may see more corporate legal departments shifting some focus from managing risks and controlling costs to collaborating more closely with CFOs.

(source: Legaltech News and Burford)

2. Finding ROI for CLM

The latest legal tech darling – for a good reason – is contract lifecycle management (CLM). If you’re up-to-date on legal operations news, you’re probably all too familiar with the technology. Contract management is an area ripe for digital transformation.

Yet, the buzz around CLM is sometimes more hype than substance – especially when you consider CLM ROI. In this podcast, Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get a CLM solution from hype to payoff and an innovative approach to CLM technology with all the rewards and none of the risks.

(source: Onit blog)

3. One in Four Corporate Legal Departments Are Dedicating Spend to Contract Management Technology (and Other ACC Survey Insights)

Speaking of CLM technology and its popularity, you might not be surprised to find out that the top legal tech area by allocated spend is contract management solutions. This is according to the 2021 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report. Rounding out the top five are compliance, legal research services, IP management and matter management.

The survey includes responses from 493 legal departments in organizations across 24 industries and 40 countries.

Other interesting findings from a legal operations news perspective include:

  • The mean legal department composition is 66% lawyers, 12% paralegals, 6% legal operations professionals and 8% admin/secretarial staff.
  • The median total legal spend for companies is $1.2M for small companies, $8.4M for mid-sized companies and $64M for large companies.
  • 77% of the participants have a list of preferred law firms, ALSPs and other legal service providers. In 2020, they worked with 36 law firms and two ALSPs on average.

(Source: ACC Law Department Management Benchmarking Report)

4. Build a More Resilient Law Department With These Six Tips from Gartner

The pandemic has been one of the most significant disruptors in recent history. According to Gartner, persistent disruption can be expected over the next five years, leading to further risks. To counter these effects, legal departments must be able to provide timely guidance by evolving their departments.

How can they do this?

Gartner offers six shifts that will be critical in the coming years. These include assessing issues rapidly, prioritizing legal’s service portfolio by the impact of decisions, experimenting to deliver business outcomes and more. Conquering these attributes will lead to a more flexible and effective legal department.

(Source: Gartner)

5. Keep an Eye on Corporate Legal Spend

Nowadays, there is increasing pressure to run the legal department like a business – all while doing more with less and containing costs.

Enter the challenge of outside counsel invoices. The bills are often long, complex and can have differing or vague descriptions of charges. With limited resources, in-house professionals don’t always have time to dig deep into each line item.

How can you evaluate this facet of legal spend and ensure invoices are sticking to outside counsel guidelines?

PYMNTS.com explores viable and easily attainable solutions to counteract unnecessary overspending, offering an opportunity to support external legal service providers’ cash flow and optimize corporate’s legal spend.

(Source: Pymnts.com)

Bonus Resource for Legal Operations News: How CLM  and AI Pay Off for Corporate Legal, Sales and Procurement

This Quick Start Guide offers a bite-sized approach for exploring CLM and AI benefits and how they extend beyond in-house lawyers to sales and procurement. Learn how the technology can help you close deals faster, improve business outcomes and decrease risks. You can find the guide here.

To AI or Not to AI: The Great Debate on Legal AI Tools

Posted on June 29, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

From invoicing to contract review, you’ve probably heard how much legal AI tools can help you with routine, time-consuming tasks.

Is legal AI always the right answer, though? On June 9th, Onit hosted a webinar with Consilio and Buying Legal Council to answer precisely that question. Titled “To AI or Not to AI? The Big Debate Part II,” the webinar presented this challenge to two different teams:

There is no budget for additional headcount this year, even though your legal department is faced with the daunting task of repapering a massive number of contracts due to LIBOR, data privacy and other regulatory changes. Not to mention, you still have mounds of legal invoices to review. At the same time, strategic and risk management demands are higher than ever. What should be done? The GC has asked you to present a solution.

Team one, led by Onit, argued that AI tools for lawyers were the answer. Team two, led by Consilio, focused on outsourcing the work to an alternative legal service provider (ALSP).

Team Legal AI Tools

Team one’s main objective was to leverage AI to accomplish goals and improve operations. They argued that implementing legal AI tools internally would allow them to maintain control over their technology and use it to its greatest advantage.

The job of a general counsel at a multi-billion dollar global company is to increase the quality, consistency and velocity of every matter they touch while providing the team with resources that drive efficiencies throughout the enterprise. The question is which investments – whether humans or AI – will ultimately yield the returns you need down the road.

Team one aimed for standardization via legal AI tools to provide knowledge and data that would allow the organization to operate effectively, efficiently and consistently. They also dispelled lingering myths that legal AI tools are complicated to configure and implement. With Precedent, Onit’s AI platform, team one could configure their AI solutions within 15 minutes with no specific technical knowledge or training.

Team one noted, however, that the human/AI choice doesn’t have to be binary. Humans will always be a critical part of practicing law. But even superhuman employees need some help – specifically, they need legal AI. When you hire the best and the brightest and then allow them to use legal AI tools, you optimize your opportunities for success and retain your top talent. Institutional knowledge plus the processing power of AI is the winning combination.

Team ALSP

Team two presented a very different argument – that AI tools for lawyers are not always the answer because you’ll always need people. While legal AI tools have seen great advances, it’s not a sufficient replacement for humans. They also argued that it costs too much to train, takes too long to implement and demands too many resources for training.

Therefore, Team two advocated for outsourcing to ALSPs, rather than implementing legal AI in-house. ALSPs, they argued, save significant costs while offering faster start-up times, higher quality and more transparency.

In Team two’s experience, standing up a technology solution at a global company takes at least six months from the negotiation stage through implementation. If you’re lucky, you have your complete AI solution up and running in a year, which isn’t helpful for addressing your current, pressing needs. While implementing AI might certainly have long-term benefits, that wasn’t the challenge at hand. They believed going the AI route would delay ROI and sidetrack employees from their high-value work to focus on training the AI.

ALSPs, on the other hand, they argued, offer flexibility. An ALSP can serve as either a stop-gap or a more permanent part of a long-term, flexible model. You get instant access to top talent and expertise without investing in hiring or stretching your resources. Going the ALSP route still gives you access to legal AI tools – you just don’t have to train it yourself or invest in it. Those responsibilities fall to the ALSP.

Who Won The Great Debate Over Legal AI Tools?

Both teams presented worthy arguments pro and con legal AI tools for lawyers, but there can be only one winner. Listen to the debate to hear both sides’ full arguments and see which group the audience voted to win.

Many thanks to Consilio, an Elite partner in the Onit Strategic Alliances Program, and Buying Legal Council for participating in our second great debate!

This is the second debate event Onit has held. Explore our first debate, in which three teams argued different approaches to reduce outside counsel expenses. See the on-demand recording or read more about it.

Quick Start Guide: AI-Powered CLM Tool for Corporate Legal, Procurement and Sales

Posted on June 15, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Corporate legal departments are increasingly relying on AI and other technologies like a CLM tool and automation to reduce costs, boost efficiency and better collaborate with other business units on contracts.

While many organizations have started to focus on how contract AI benefits the corporate legal department, the right CLM system offers advantages beyond legal to other contract stakeholders in your organization like sales and procurement. To explain how AI-powered CLM benefits all these different groups, we recently put together our handy Quick Start Guide: Contract AI: How it Pays Off for Corporate Legal, Sales and Procurement.

Here are just a few of the AI and CLM benefits covered in the Quick Start Guide.

Better Productivity and Insight for Legal with a CLM Tool and AI

A CLM tool powered by AI improves productivity by handling much of the scut work related to pre-signature contract review. AI manages the first-pass review, makes recommendations and delivers a risk profile. One study showed that new users of legal AI contract review software were immediately 51.5% more productive and 34% more efficient. When you multiply those gains across all the lawyers in an average midsized organization (55, according to this survey by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), it’s the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to your team without actually increasing headcount.

AI-powered CLM tools are also transforming the legal ops role by standardizing and automating legal processes and creating a single point of truth for contract data. Contract AI empowers legal ops professionals to have better visibility into deals, keep drafting and negotiations on track, reduce risk and improve governance, accelerate turnaround time, cut costs and more.

Shorter Sales Cycles

Legal doesn’t have to serve as a black box for sales departments, where requests go in and responses come back with zero insight into progress or process. AI-powered CLM tools allow sales departments to break free from using disparate systems and instead operate in a single repository and workflow for all their contracts.

Inefficiency and lack of transparency are two of the biggest roadblocks for sales departments, and contract AI removes them. This allows sales professionals to close deals faster, automate contract requests, have real-time insights on active contracts, have access to the information they need when they need it, and engage in newfound levels of self-service.

Better Spend Management for Procurement

Much like it does for sales, the right AI-powered CLM tool serves as a single point of truth for all procurement activities across an enterprise. Procurement can’t function without contracts, and contract AI allows procurement to be flexible enough to tackle all the contract-related tasks essential to the procurement function.

Among other things, AI-powered CLM systems empower procurement professionals to improve business outcomes, decrease risk, manage spend against budget, have insight into contract negotiations and engage in self-service for routine contracts like NDAs.

For more insight into how AI and CLM are revolutionizing day-to-day business for legal, sales and procurement, you can download the complete Quick Start Guide for an AI-powered CLM tool here.

Legal Industry News: Current News and Trends in Legal Department Operations, June 2021

Posted on June 8, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Welcome to Onit’s June industry run-down, where we share with you some of the most pertinent and timely articles on legal department operations news. We hope this roundup of legal industry trends provides some useful takeaways.

In today’s digest, we share a recap of CLOC’s annual State of the Industry Survey and its recent virtual Global Institute, words of advice for corporate legal transformation, how AI finds even more billing guidelines violations and more.

#1 AI in the Legal Sector by the Numbers

More and more corporate legal departments are turning to AI every day to handle manual tasks, boost efficiency and gain insights for informed decision-making. You’ve likely already incorporated AI into some aspect of your day-to-day practice. After all, we’ve all heard the claims about how much it transforms everyday tasks. But just how much of a difference does AI really make?

This blog post breaks down the numbers and outlines some of the most significant gains to be gained through AI in the legal sector, including:

  • A 24% reduction in the average sales cycle and a 9% annual cost reduction by using an AI-powered CLM solution
  • A 51.5% increase in user productivity and the ability to redline a contract in under 2 minutes with legal AI software for contract review
  • The ability to review 6,000 contracts at once and access over 500 contract data points with AI for contract extraction
  • A 5-10% reduction in outside counsel spend with an AI-powered ELM solution

(Source: Onit blog)

#2 CLOC Sets Benchmarks for Legal Department Operations

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) recently released the 2021 State of the Industry Survey report, the organization’s annual review of trends to watch in the legal ops space. This year’s survey, conducted in collaboration with the Association of Corporate Counsel, garnered responses from 200 organizations (including 48 Fortune 500 companies) across more than 22 industries in 31 states and 21 countries.

The 2021 report highlights how priorities have shifted through the uncertainty of 2020, with legal ops growing, legal spend increasing and more work coming in-house. Some of the most notable survey results include:

  • 39% of respondents said they brought more work in-house in 2021, compared to only 28% the year before
  • Nearly all respondents reported using the same number or more ALSPs than the year before
  • 40% of respondents increased their number of dedicated, full-time legal ops employees
  • 61% of respondents identified implementing a Diversity and Inclusion program as a top priority for 2021

You can read the entire survey report here.

(Source: CLOC)

#3 Workflow Automation, Return to Office Top “Big Picture” Plans for Legal Department Operations

On the final day of CLOC’s recent virtual Global Institute, one legal department operations panel took an in-depth look at why organizations need a well-defined plan for implementing new technology and preparing to handle business in a post-pandemic world.

Legal ops professionals will play a huge role in that planning and implementation. They’re pivotal in big-picture technology adoption because they’re often the most on top of innovation and the latest trends in the legal tech market. Legal ops will also be integral to making sure the rest of the legal department and the business as a whole actually adopt the new technologies they find.

(Source: Legaltech News)

#4 Legal Department Operations Leaders Share Their Best Strategies for Transformation

Change is a constant in our world, especially in the last year and a half. While workloads continue to increase in-house, the need to work quickly and effectively remains a common goal. But how can legal operations professionals spur change – especially technological change  – in corporate legal?

Corporate legal department operations experts from Mastercard, McKesson, Microsoft and GlaxoSmithKline sat down at the CLOC Global Institute to explain their best approaches, including:

  • Understanding the reasons for resistance
  • Communicating the vision of change and what that means
  • Conveying the importance of transformation on a personal level to team members
  • Understanding what resources are necessary to enact change, including people, tools and priorities

Bonus: What’s driving transformation in legal? Operations expert Brad Rogers digs into the topic, breaks down what is accelerating the need for change in corporate legal. Scroll to the bottom of this blog post to hear the podcast. You can also find the Onit podcast on Apple, Google Play, Spotify or other podcast platforms.

(Source: Corporate Counsel)

#5 How to Find Up to 11% More Non-Compliant Charges in Legal Invoices After Billing Rules and Standard Review

Growing workloads and other priorities limit the time in-house counsel can devote to reviewing outside counsel bills spanning hundreds of pages and thousands of line items. Enterprise legal management, matter management, e-billing, billing code standards and automated billing rules reduce the burden of invoice review. However, AI offers the opportunity for even more technological innovation.

On May 26, Onit announced the debut of InvoiceAI, an AI offering for first-pass legal invoice review and analytics that’s now available to customers. InvoiceAI handles first-pass legal invoice review to identify errors better and increase the consistency of application of billing guidelines and spend management best practices.

On average, InvoiceAI has identified 6-11% of unactioned errors in historical invoices, above and beyond what had already been identified by standard invoice review. Even in a year when travel was significantly restricted, InvoiceAI uncovered an average of $100,000 worth of savings on travel-related time and expenses that had been improperly submitted to customers.

For a free AI analysis of 90 days of historical billing data, Onit customers can reach out to their account managers and other interested parties can email [email protected].

(Source: LawSites Blog)

Get the inside track on legal department operations trends, the very best events and helpful content from the legal community by joining Lean Into LegalOps today. The program unites the legal community, providing them with a forum to share and learn from one another and get the latest news and trends in legal operations and technology.

CLM AI: Does Your Contract Software Redline Contracts for You?

Posted on June 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

When you ask today’s busy lawyers what they most need from legal AI, the answer is tools that help them be more productive like CLM AI contract redlining software.

While much of life might have gone on pause in the last year, contracts didn’t. In fact, lawyers have been handling more contracts than ever. For most companies, hiring more staff just to handle contracts isn’t a viable option. How, then, can lawyers speed up the contracting process and boost their productivity? The answer is having the right technology and features, like the features you can find in the right legal AI contract lifecycle management solution.

Take, for example, redlining contracts.

There are a lot of products and software that claim to help increase the efficiency of your contract review, but does your current contract AI redline your contracts for you? It should.

Contract Redlining Software to Help Protect Your Company From Risk

In a typical legal team, junior lawyers can be tasked with first-pass contract review, with the goal of flagging any issues that appear problematic or go against company standards. For example, if a third-party contract has a questionable clause, the junior attorney will usually circle the clause in red pen or mark it digitally and send it up the chain to senior lawyers for review. The senior lawyers would then review the clause and determine whether it’s something the company is willing to accept.

It doesn’t always go that smoothly, though.

Today’s busy lawyers are handling multiple tasks at once, while also juggling the demands of an increased workload and remote collaboration, meaning that errors can happen. If that clause is on page 45 of a 50-page contract and the lawyer has been reviewing it for several hours, it might not always get the attention it deserves due to fatigue or other priorities.

AI legal document review supports the contract review process and reduces the chance of human error. The contract redlining process is critical to protecting company interests. It’s also a fairly standard process, though it has historically been inefficient and time-consuming. All these factors make redlining a prime candidate for CLM AI.

What if there is a way to automate that first-pass review, better flag potential issues and get the whole job done in less than two minutes?

The Benefits of Redlining by CLM AI

Tapping into legal contract AI with automated redlining software is an incredible advantage when it comes to keeping up with increasing contract demands. It also creates a legitimate solution for reducing attorneys’ low-value, busy work.

Contract AI redlining isn’t only a tool that’s useful for lawyers – it’s also a great way to allow other business units, like sales or procurement, to engage in self-service. These other departments touch the company’s contracts all the time, but they typically have to wait in line to have their contracts reviewed by legal when they come in.

With ReviewAI contract management, business users can run an AI-powered redline in less than two minutes, spot potential issues right away, determine if there are problems to solve and then automatically escalate critical issues to legal as necessary. The redlining provided by CLM AI essentially allows business users to self-service the review of common contracts such as NDAs.

As with any contract AI, automating the redlining process isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s helping them be better at their jobs. It even performs a critical training function for junior lawyers and new legal team members. Company playbooks are based on decades of institutional knowledge. As junior lawyers see the AI data extraction results the software produces, they learn the playbook, essentially learning from the company’s best and brightest.

ReviewAI contract management from Onit redlines and automates your contract review, applying your playbook to find the things humans might miss and looking for any crucial terms that are missing. CLM AI takes less than two minutes, speeds up contract review by up to 70% and increases productivity by more than 50%.

Schedule an Onit demo today to learn more.

Meet InvoiceAI: Onit’s New Artificial Intelligence Offering for Legal Invoice Review

Posted on May 26, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Legal invoice review is a necessary process for corporate legal departments and also notoriously complex and time-consuming – even with business rules applied. Nevertheless, legal departments spend countless dollars every year for in-house counsel and other professionals to manually inspect invoices, whether flagged or not. That’s time wasted on administrative tasks that in-house professionals can reallocate to higher-value work and strategies.

That’s all about to change.

Today, Onit announced the debut of InvoiceAI for its customers. The artificial intelligence offering for first-pass legal invoice review and analytics decreases the burden of invoice review while providing insights into spend analytics.

An Intelligent Review

The sheer volume of legal invoices has pummeled Fortune 500 corporate legal departments for years, challenging corporate counsels’ ability to understand and control legal spend and build productive partnerships with law firms.

Even with flagged invoices, corporate counsel can face a large number of line items on each invoice to reconcile and miss noted issues or errors. Enforcing outside counsel guidelines is complicated even further with issues like vague or incomplete invoices, improper block billing, incorrect coding and more.

InvoiceAI builds off Onit’s existing billing rules engine, enhancing the invoice review process by incorporating machine learning and natural language processing to more accurately and efficiently identify invoice issues that need further review. Our machine learning models identify potentially problematic billing issues like administrative tasks or travel and integrate with existing eBilling, legal spend management and enterprise legal management technologies. What you get is an intelligent review that learns more as you process more invoices, plus all the advantages of our configurable rules engine – the best of both worlds when it comes to understanding legal spend.

AI-Powered Invoice Review Leads to Significant Cost Savings

While InvoiceAI’s models continue their training, the offering is already used to analyze past invoices and identify potentially non-compliant charges under company billing guidelines and legal spend management best practices.

A select group of Onit Fortune 100 customers ran InvoiceAI through historical bills with significant results. InvoiceAI uncovered on average of 6-11% unactioned errors for invoices submitted in 2020, above and beyond the savings that Onit’s rules-based invoice review tools had already found.

For example, even though 2020 was a notably slow year for travel, InvoiceAI identified travel charges in the high six-figure range that should not have been billed.

On top of better invoice review, you also get powerful analytics. The results generated by InvoiceAI can serve as a learning tool for outside counsel, giving them a clear report on the core commercial expectations of the companies they represent. The reports are also beneficial for demonstrating immediate savings in outside spend to internal stakeholders.

The Future of Legal Invoice Review, Ready Now for Customers

InvoiceAI is available to Onit customers now and will be generally available to the public in the fall.

AI-enabled invoice review from SimpleLegal, Onit’s subsidiary, will launch this summer, with availability open now for select existing corporate legal customers.

If you’re currently an Onit or SimpleLegal customer and you want a complimentary AI analysis of the last 90 days of your billings, contact your account manager today.

If you’re not currently a customer but want to learn more about how InvoiceAI can improve your legal invoice review and legal spend management, contact [email protected] today.

AI in the Legal Sector by the Numbers

Posted on May 13, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Legal AI software has commanded the attention of corporate legal departments worldwide, thanks to its ability to offload manual work, increase efficiency and provide more insight into day-to-day tasks and strategic endeavors. As a result, more and more corporate legal departments are investing in AI and starting to discover its benefits.

By now, in-house counsel have been inundated with countless claims about how AI can increase productivity and efficiency, cut costs and boost revenues, and generally make work better. But, if you’re anything like us, numbers matter. They go beyond hyperbole and illustrate how effective legal AI software can be.

Here are data points to illustrate the difference AI is making across other businesses – and especially in the legal sector.

The Overall Use of AI

In November 2020, McKinsey & Company released a comprehensive report on The State of AI in 2020, and the results showed a commitment to AI across industries. Half of the 2,400 participants responding to the survey indicated that their organizations had adopted AI for at least one internal function or business unit. Not surprisingly, businesses in the telecom and other hi-tech sectors reported the highest rates of AI adoption.

As for the business functions seeing the most AI traction, service operations, product and service development, and marketing and sales topped the list. Over two-thirds of the respondents who said they incorporated AI into these functions also credited that adoption for increasing revenues.

Notably, 22% of the respondents said that they could attribute over 5% of their enterprise’s earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to the use of AI. An additional 48% attributed at least some EBIT to using AI.

Legal AI Software Numbers

The overall enterprise-wide benefits of AI seen in organizations worldwide are certainly playing out in the legal arena. AI has now been applied to many routine but critical functions in the legal sector, with impressive results.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Contracts are one of the largest areas where legal organizations can benefit from AI.

According to Gartner, by 2023, legal AI software will bring 30% more efficiency to organizations that deploy CLM solutions, with 90% of multinational global enterprises and 50% of regional midsize organizations investing in CLM solutions by that year.

Onit has discovered comparable results with its own CLM solution (which is powered by business process automation and AI-powered business intelligence platforms), finding that corporate legal departments can expect to see the following savings:

  • A 24% reduction in the average sales cycle
  • A 20% reduction in the average hours spent on contracts
  • A 9% annual average cost savings

With legal AI software for contract review, data shows that in-house attorneys and legal operations professionals can expect to:

  • Increase contract review and approval speed by 60-70%
  • Improve user productivity by 51.5% on average
  • Redline contracts in less than 2 minutes

Of course, contract lifecycle management doesn’t end when your contract is signed. Each signed contract contains valuable data that can be extracted to improve your contracting processes going forward and allow you to make better, more informed business decisions. AI for contract extraction can help corporate legal:

  • Review 6,000 contracts at once
  • View over 500 contract data points
  • Export contract data in 5 seconds

Legal AI Software for Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

AI performance extends beyond contracts to managing legal spend. For example, Onit’s ELM solution will help in-house counsel save 5-10% on outside counsel spend. Those savings increase when AI is applied to the first-pass invoice review. We’ll have more data illustrating this point coming soon with our upcoming announcement for InvoiceAI for enterprise legal management.

To learn more about how Onit’s AI solutions are changing the way legal professionals do business, contact us today or email [email protected].