Category: Artificial Intelligence

An AI Checklist for All Stages of Contract Lifecycle Management

Posted on March 18, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Since contracts are the primary source of risk and obligations that corporate legal teams need to manage, all stages of contract lifecycle management should be managed properly. Failure to do so can lead to complications such as failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, regulatory breaches, inadequate delivery to customers, time lost, revenue leakage and inflated costs.

Many legal departments are struggling to find effective solutions for handling contracts for all stages of contract lifecycle management, with 71% of in-house lawyers reporting that they are stuck doing manual work which should be automated. Another 86% say that they need to modernize the way they deliver legal services. The industry is seeing legal departments making moves to adopt comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions to standardize processes and obtain a single source of truth for all their contracts.

However, not all CLM technologies are created equal. Many require time-consuming manual entry and maintenance, putting further burden on already stretched teams. AI-powered CLM systems abstract away much of this manual work, giving corporate legal departments the ability to control their contracts from start to finish and free up lawyers to focus on higher-level tasks that will help grow the business.

But what exactly should the combination of AI and CLM look like? It should intelligently augment, assist and automate manual activities throughout the entire contract lifecycle, improve consistency, save time and surface insights that allow the legal team to become much more proactive.

As legal teams incorporate this new technology, there are several functions they should expect when it comes to pre-signature contract management and post-signature contract management.

AI for the Pre-Signature Contract Management Stage

Pre-Trained

AI contract management solutions should come pre-trained, meaning you aren’t doing the “heavy-lifting” on the implementation side. To learn a task, AI often needs large data sets to analyze, which is a highly specialized and technical process. Modern legal AI providers should handle this training, giving lawyers out-of-the-box functionality to use it within days – not weeks or months.

The real value of AI is that it is always learning and improving. Pre-training will have it ready to use quickly, giving you a faster return on your investment. As you use it more, it should identify and enforce preferences unique to your corporate legal department. This pre-learning also gives the legal team the space needed to improve the overall CLM process.

First-Pass Review

For the pre-signature contract management stage, AI should function as a human lawyer for the first-pass review. It should scour Microsoft Word or PDF contracts like NDAs, MSAs and purchase agreements, flag key contract issues, apply contract review templates, suggest edits and provide an overall risk profile.

The AI should also work where your people work, ensuring that the intelligence you’ve invested in slots into your existing processes, be it from email, Microsoft Word, Web portals or third-party systems. This ultimately maximizes the benefits and impact of AI.

Self-Service

AI should also enable self-service for non-legal business professionals during this stage. For example, business users should get an AI-assisted contract review in minutes through email or a self-service portal. The AI runs the contracts by the company’s playbook, helping to enforce corporate standards.

AI for the Post-Signature Contract Management Stage

The contract process doesn’t end once you’ve signed. Contracts offer a wealth of usable data that you can, and indeed should, harness to save time, reduce risk and make more informed business decisions. Proper management of contracts in this stage also ensures that the terms of the agreement are fulfilled and helps to assess if the company is meeting expected business results. For most teams, this work is currently done manually or not done at all.

When added to contract lifecycle management after execution, AI dramatically increases the efficiency and scope of data extraction. It quickly and securely extracts valuable, high-quality data from all the contracts in your CLM system and turns it into actionable information in several ways, including:

  • Batch review, by extracting data from multiple legal documents at once
  • Repapering, by amending or redlining contract details and critical terms to comply with regulatory changes or M&A activities
  • Contract abstraction, by identifying critical legal clauses, terms and details in documents for easy analysis and syncing with your CLM.
  • Audit compliance by automating large-scale legal contract review when regulatory changes occur and exporting relevant details in notes and reports
  • Due diligence through the automation of batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, freeing up resources
  • Legacy contract migration by rapidly analyzing and extracting legacy contract metadata, including critical dates, terms, and clauses, to assist in importing

AI tools empower you to simplify contract data extraction and get your hands on the valuable intelligence you need to make the best-informed decisions for your company.

How quickly does it accomplish this?

Imagine the highly manual process of data extraction from contracts. Now, imagine AI technology that can review thousands of contracts at once, view hundreds of contract data points and export relevant data in seconds.

The Benefits of Contract AI

Using AI in all stages of contract lifecycle management provides sizeable benefits. For example, legal professionals reported in this study that AI increased productivity by more than 51.5% and led to cost reductions of 33% related to contract processing. During the post-signature contract management stage, you should be looking to reduce manual entry in CLM by upwards of 80%.

The legal profession is continually evolving, getting faster and more complex as demand increases and resources decrease. AI can help you meet those demands without adding resources – especially when it comes to contract lifecycle management.

The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo

If you’d like to learn more about AI for CLM, access the replay of “The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo.” Legal operations executives from Lenovo shared their strategy for a global rollout of contract lifecycle management technology and why artificial intelligence is considered a key part of the services delivery model of the future.

How Contract Automation Tools with Legal AI Reduce Processing Time by 60-70%

Posted on March 10, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

By some estimates, contract processing time can take up to 70% or more of an in-house counsel’s work hours. The often manual and collaborative process – if not properly managed – can lead to complications such as failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, regulatory breaches, inadequate delivery to customers, revenue leakage and more if not properly managed.

That’s where Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) comes in. Contract automation tools with legal AI can streamline all phases of the contract lifecycle from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management, often resulting in an average of 9% average cost savings and reducing the average sales cycle by 24%. It also offers a single source of truth for all contracts, whether buy-side, sell-side or corporate contracts.

Now, Onit is pleased to announce that contract processing times are shrinking even more, thanks to our enhanced integration between Contract Lifecycle Management and ReviewAI, which uses legal AI on legal contracts to review and redline documents in two minutes or less. The integration combines the power of contract automation and AI-based contract management into one tool that accelerates contracts at management phases. Plus, it ensures that corporate legal departments have everything in one CLM workflow.

Legal AI for Contract Automation and Lifecycle Management

With the newly enhanced, seamless integration, business users can submit contracts to corporate legal via an online intake form. ReviewAI handles the first-pass review, noting recommendations and offering a contract risk assessment – freeing corporate counsel from a highly manual process. In fact, when paired with Onit Contract Lifecycle Management, legal AI from Review AI increases productivity by 50% or more.

Onit’s Ongoing Commitment to AI

The robust integration of Onit CLM and ReviewAI is one of many AI product innovations. In November, we launched our AI Center of Excellence, the AI-powered business intelligence platform Precedent and ReviewAI. In May, we’ll release InvoiceAI, an AI-assisted invoice review for legal spend and enterprise legal management. Between now and then, you can also expect more AI and product announcements.

Reduce Contract Processing Time Now. Here’s How.

Deploy contract automation tools and leverage the power of legal AI to improve your contract lifecycle management. Free up legal counsel from a manual, time-intensive legal contract management process. Find out how you can use automated contract analysis tools and risk assessments with legal AI contract automation tools.

To learn more about contract lifecycle management, ReviewAI and Precedent, reach out to your account manager or schedule a demonstration here.

 

Platforms for Corporate Legal Departments: What They Are and How They Expand Influence

Posted on March 9, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Platforms for corporate legal departments have proven critical to digital transformation in the past year, as companies have worked hard to figure out how to meet the uncertainties and challenges stemming from the pandemic.

The right platforms will empower your corporate legal department to better manage the day-to-day aspects of any legal matter while also gaining better insight into operations and improving collaboration by offering real-time visibility into tasks and processes. Making the switch to a platform approach starts with understanding:

  1. What is a platform?
  2. How can platform technologies benefit a legal department?

What is a Platform?

At its core, a platform is an environment in which other pieces of software function and are executed. The term “platform,” however, is both overused and underrepresented by technology providers. In a market saturated with many different types of technology products, people all too often use terms like platform and solution interchangeably, even though they function very differently and serve different purposes.

Here’s the difference:

With the right platform, a corporate legal department can build any solution it needs for either internal use or cross-collaboration with other departments in the organization. Platforms allow you to take advantage of preexisting solutions that have already been built on the platform or build additional solutions as new needs arise.

For legal departments, platforms serve as the foundation for enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management solutions, intake forms and self-help portals, among other things. Basically, a platform is the best of both worlds in the solutions vs. platforms discussion.

Some platforms incorporate artificial intelligence for corporate legal departments. AI platforms help automate routine tasks and boost efficiency. In other words, they help legal departments meet the constantly mounting pressure to do more and do better with fewer resources and a shrinking budget.

How Platform for Corporate Legal Departments Enhance Efficiency and Collaboration

Adopting a platform approach to technology offers a wide range of benefits for today’s corporate legal departments. Some of the biggest include:

  • Limitless building opportunities – Platforms give you the greatest possible ability to support your department’s vision by building solutions to address nearly any need, from accounting to compliance to HR concerns and more.
  • Unlimited scalability – Platforms allow you to right-size your technology as needed because they can grow along with your company and adapt to meet whatever changes arise.
  • Customization – When you build solutions on a platform, you can customize them to work exactly how your corporate legal department needs them to work and continually adjust those customizations over time.
  • Flexibility – Legal departments learned the value of innovation this past year, and platforms offer the flexibility required to keep innovating in the future as needs continue to change.

Better yet, you get all these platform benefits regardless of your level of technical proficiency. While platforms were once the exclusive province of IT experts who knew how to code, things have evolved significantly with the rise of no-code platforms. Today, even those with little or no technical training can master platforms and use them to create new solutions. These no-code platforms allow corporate legal departments to engage in levels of technological self-service that were previously unheard of.

For further reading on how platforms benefit corporate legal departments, you can download The Power of a Platform: Building Corporate Legal Influence Across the Enterprise.

Onit’s Apptitude and Precedent platforms have helped countless businesses enhance efficiency with automation and AI. Contact us today to learn more about how a platform approach can benefit your corporate legal department.

Will AI Replace Lawyers & Other Myths: Legal AI Mythbusters

Posted on March 5, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

AI is a hot buzzword right now, but with buzz always comes a whole host of misconceptions about a technology’s capabilities. There’s considerable confusion about what artificial intelligence can do and widespread misinformation about how it works, particularly in the area of managing legal contracts and if AI will replace lawyers.

Onit recently hosted a webinar to debunk these common myths. Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, and Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, dispelled common misconceptions about everything from will AI replace lawyers to who can benefit from AI.

The goal is to help legal professionals decipher marketing-speak to determine what’s genuinely AI and what’s just software.

Here’s an overview of some of the common legal AI myths Nick and Jean debunked.

Myth 1: Will AI replace lawyers? No.

Lawyers being replaced by AI is the classic fear and, fortunately, it’s unfounded. Rather than replacing lawyers, AI will automate certain aspects of lawyers’ jobs, typically the most routine ones. As a result, lawyers will have more time to focus on other tasks and accomplishments. This means that lawyers’ jobs will continue to evolve and change as more AI capabilities are introduced, but those jobs will never be eliminated.

That’s not to say that lawyers should ignore legal AI. Yes, AI won’t replace them. However, lawyers using legal AI will replace those that don’t, thanks to increased productivity and efficiency provided by the transformative technology.

Myth 2: Is AI hard to implement? No.

AI learns, but to accomplish that it needs training. Typically, that is a monumental task that requires large pools of data, time and specialized technical skills.

The industry has matured now. Much of that work is done in advance by the vendor, meaning the technology is largely ready to implement and use right out of the box. For example, this AI for contract review comes loaded with a library of legal knowledge and can be up and running in a matter of days.

Myth 3: AI and machine learning can be used interchangeably. No.

Many people use the terms AI and machine learning interchangeably, but that’s not entirely accurate. AI is a technology that enables computers to learn and mimic human intelligence and it covers a wide range of techniques. Among those techniques are machine learning, natural language processing and more. The terms are used interchangeably, even though that’s incorrect, because machine learning is one of the AI techniques that we encounter most often in our day-to-day lives. Machine learning is integral to AI tools that make automated legal contract review possible.

Myth 4: AI is only for large legal departments. Not True.

While there may have been some barriers to entry in the early days of AI, we’re now at a point where AI solutions can be affordable for everyone – especially if your AI provider offers solutions capable of scaling to meet your needs for the size of your organization. The right AI solution will work just as well for the smallest legal department as it will for the largest global corporation.

Myth 5: AI will require too much training. No, AI will create less work, not more.

Many people worry that implementing AI will create more work for their department because they’ll frequently have to fix the technology or invest too much time learning how to use it.

Thankfully, we haven’t seen those fears play out.

Studies show that, on average, users are 51% more productive when they use AI for contract review. The more experienced they become with AI, the more their productivity improves. Additionally, as AI has become more mainstream, AI solutions require far less training, need far fewer corrections, and are much easier to use without extensive training.

But Wait – There are More Legal AI Myths to Expose

These are just some of the AI misunderstandings we dispel in the webinar. Our panel also talks about crucial issues like data security, retaining control over reviews and negotiations, why pre-built AI solutions are less effective, and why every team can benefit from AI. You can listen to the entire webinar here.

Free Yourself from Legal Invoice Review with InvoiceAI

Posted on March 3, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

What’s the best part of the day for in-house counsel? Probably not legal invoice review.

While it’s often necessary to ensure adherence to outside counsel billing guidelines, it still consumes valuable time on highly manual work.

That’s why we are introducing InvoiceAI to our enterprise legal management – to free in-house lawyers from the manual labor of tedious legal invoice review.

Onit announced this next significant phase of innovation at Legalweek(year) with our first InvoiceAI video. Launching in May for both Onit and SimpleLegal, InvoiceAI harnesses AI’s power to increase the efficiency of the invoice review process. It handles the first-pass review of incoming bills and sets up a framework that will continuously learn as invoice corrections are refined in the system. The result: General counsel and in-house counsel can transfer rediscovered bandwidth and energy to higher-value work for their companies.

This second InvoiceAI video shares more about the InvoiceAI.

To learn more about InvoiceAI from Onit and how AI can streamline your legal invoice review, contact your Onit account manager today or email [email protected].

Legal Invoice AI Joins Our Contract AI

AI-enabled invoice review from InvoiceAI modernizes the legal operations function and automates the review of law firm billing for corporations. It perfectly illustrates our founding principle: To help lawyers more effectively practice law.

When InvoiceAI launches in May, it will join an impressive roster of AI solutions already on offer from Onit, including:

  • Precedent, Onit’s AI-powered business intelligence platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals and procurement teams.
  • ReviewAI, contract AI for pre-signature contract review that reviews, redlines and edits all types of contracts in minutes, increasing contract review speed by 60-70%.
  • ExtractAI, contract AI for post-signature contract management that extracts usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

You can schedule a demonstration of any of Onit’s AI solutions here.

A Legal AI Refresher

The field of AI is continually evolving, and it’s essential for today’s legal professionals to stay ahead of the curve. If you’re looking to bone up on AI, here are some great places to start:

Remember: AI won’t replace lawyers. But lawyers using AI will replace those that don’t.

Thanks for your time and stay tuned to our blog. We’ll have more InvoiceAI and contract AI announcements coming soon.

Six Features of the Best Matter Management Software

Posted on February 25, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

Matter management software puts critical matter, financial and performance data at the fingertips of corporate counsel and legal operations. But what features should a corporate legal department prioritize to gain the best return on investment? In the first blog post on this series, we explored essential legal spend management technology features for enterprise legal management. Now, we follow up with an exploration of the critical components of matter management.

According to Deloitte’s 2020 Legal Operations Survey, 74% of the corporate legal professionals surveyed felt they did not have clear or accurate metrics on work performed internally or externally. Additionally, 71% said that manual tasks take up a “significant amount” of their teams’ time.

Yet, technology – specifically matter management software – is designed to address challenges such as these.

Catherine Moynihan, associate vice president of legal management services with the Association of Corporate Counsel, told Legaltech News that GCs have seen growing interest from corporate leadership for technology investments. As she explains:

“While budget restraints have constrained the implementation of technology, I think we’re now approaching a tipping point where it’s budget challenges that will help make the case to make that short-term investment because the ROI is there.”

Fortunately, there are advanced enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions available, including matter management tools specifically designed to address issues such as the ones mentioned above.

What to Look For in Matter Management Software

From a high-level perspective, corporate legal departments need data that can show how their internal or external resources are leveraged. This is where matter management technology comes in. With this technology, corporate legal departments gain visibility into an overall matter portfolio and real-time data and dashboards to monitor and track all matters throughout their lifecycle. Legal team members should have immediate access to critical matter metrics, including performance data, through simple information collection, management and workflow.

Here are six features you should look for in a matter management solution:

  1. Custom Intake and Matter Forms

Most businesses require some custom forms for matter management, including custom intake and data forms for multiple matter types such as litigation, employment, intellectual property and claims.

  1. Flexible Workflow

Organization is mandatory, especially when dealing with matters that can substantially impact a business. Corporate legal professionals need configurable workflows relative to the matter type, dollar amount or specific business rules. No-code workflow and business process automation platforms powering ELM, matter management and legal spend management tools enable legal professionals of all technical proficiencies to create, automate and edit necessary workflows easily. To learn more about a platform approach, view this CLOC presentation by Colgate-Palmolive and Baker & McKenzie.

  1. Data Management and Robust Search

One of the necessary conveniences of matter management is that you can easily find the data you need at all times. A solution with full-text search capabilities for all information—including documents, transaction details, emails and notes – makes that happen. This benefit is further enhanced by searching capabilities that put critical matter information, including tasks, documents and notes, in front of you in a click.

  1. Outlook Integration

Those who proclaimed the death of email need to retract their statements. In 2020, more than 306 billion emails were sent and received. Email remains a critical component of communications and information exchange for businesses and many companies use Microsoft Outlook. If Outlook isn’t syncing with a matter management solution, a corporate legal team will ultimately face more manual processes and the potential for inaccurate or missing data.

  1. Email Notifications

To easily share information with corporate legal team members involved with matters, matter management technology should provide automated notifications that replace manual processes. This includes matter-unique emails within the system that keep team members up-to-date on matters.

  1. Reporting and Analytics

As mentioned above, metrics and analytics help legal professionals better understand their matters’ statuses, finances and performance. A matter management solution should have the ability to create dashboards to manage matters by type, location or geography as an essential part of reporting and analytics.

For more enterprise legal management and matter management inspiration, we invite you to check out the following resources:

  • Learn more about InvoiceAI, an AI-enabled legal invoice review offering for enterprise legal management.
  • Access this webinar replay for “Legal Operations Reporting Done Right,” where the global healthcare company Viatris (formerly Mylan) discusses its approach to identifying and collecting the right data and creating reports that are meaningful to different audiences across the organization.
  • Hear how McDonald’s formulated a cohesive, long-term strategy to achieve the right balance of people, process and technology here.

Contract Management in Procurement is Fueling Transformation and Streamlining Processes

Posted on February 23, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

At its core, contract management for procurement enables a team to manage spend against budget and automate the contracting process. We’ve previously explored how technologies like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and contract AI increase efficiency and reduce risk for general counsel, legal operations and sales operations. Now, we’ll examine the power of contract management for procurement and how it increases visibility and cuts time through automation.

Procurement is a critical role in any organization. As Chief Procurement Officer at a global enterprise, you’re ultimately responsible for all procurement transformation efforts around the world, and you’re expected to lead those efforts efficiently and effectively. In doing so, you enable spend owners, such as business units and functional partners, to maximize the value they receive from suppliers to meet their objectives.

Technology is integral to effective and efficient procurement in the modern era. Because contracts are such a key part of procurement activities, having the right contract management (CLM) tool for procurement can make all the difference.

CLM and Contract AI in Procurement

A Chief Procurement Officer is responsible for accomplishing some of the organization’s most critical business goals, including ensuring that the company has ongoing value creation via a world-class supply base, developing the company’s overall procurement strategy and identifying and realizing cost-saving and cost reduction opportunities for the enterprise. There’s also the need to manage budgets and an overall expectation for procurement transformation to create a center of excellence resulting in lasting value for the organization.

In addition to these crucial overarching functions, Chief Procurement Officers must also control and manage the inner workings of the procurement department, including its employees and the systems they use. They must manage procurement staff in and across sourcing, contracting, transactional purchasing, supplier management, and miscellaneous internal procurement support activities, while also managing the skills and competency development of that staff, including training development and knowledge management capabilities.

As a foundation for all of these important roles and expectations, the Chief Procurement Officer is responsible for the selection and management of procurement systems. This can, and indeed should, include incorporating the technologies necessary to build the procurement center of excellence the organization expects and needs. Because contract management for procurement, along with contract AI, is imperative, having the right CLM tool for procurement will boost effectiveness and efficiency across all those activities, increasing excellence and bringing value to the enterprise as a whole.

Benefits for Procurement

In selecting a CLM tool to transform your procurement operations, keep in mind the importance of understanding the needs of different stakeholders who will be impacted by any new system. Consider the benefits of contract management for various different roles within your procurement staff, and balance their needs to get the most out of your system. At its core, your CLM solution for procurement must be flexible enough to meet a variety of needs and be easily applied across all the different tasks that make up the procurement function.

Because contract management for procurement is so foundational, your CLM solution needs to serve as a centralized tool for managing procurement contracts across the organization, regardless of where around the globe they originate – think of your CLM solution as a single point of truth for your procurement activities across the enterprise.

Being able to centrally manage contracts will help you handle some of your most critical Chief Procurement Officer tasks, including improving business outcomes, decreasing risk and managing spend against budget. With a CLM solution, you’ll always be able to know exactly where every procurement contract is and see the status of current contract negotiations. If someone is causing delays, you’ll know who it is and how you can help move them forward. CLM tools can also automate routine contracts like NDAs, bringing even more efficiency to the procurement function and shifting your focus to tasks that create more value for your organization.

When you’re the head of procurement at an organization responsible for high levels of spend, you understand the importance of contract management in procurement to deliver savings and value. You need the right CLM tool for procurement to make the most of those contracts and support the critical activities of your enterprise.

Onit’s CLMs solution provides the flexibility and efficiency your procurement function needs to become a center of excellence for your enterprise. Contact us today to learn more.

February Digest: The Latest in Legal Operations Trends and News

Posted on February 17, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to our February run-down of the latest in legal operations trends and news. In this digest, we dig into the results from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2021 Chief Legal Officers survey and how ADM controls legal spend. Experts will share real-life numbers that illustrate contract AI benefits and a new approach to legal operations maturity models. Finally, we’ll talk about CLOC and its strategy for expanding membership.

#1

Contract Management Tops General Counsel Wish Lists, According to Survey

 According to the 2021 Chief Legal Officers survey conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel, corporate legal departments are pursuing more hiring as privacy and compliance challenges increase. More than 30% plan to add in-house lawyers and nearly half said they will send more work to outside counsel this year and increase headcount for corporate legal.

Artificial Lawyer analyzed the results as well, focusing on the types of legal technology GCs and CLOs want in the next two years. Taking first place: Contract management, with 67%. With contract AI accelerating contract approvals by up to 70%, it isn’t hard to understand why this is a priority corporate legal top brass.

The ACC survey includes feedback from 947 participants in 44 countries.

(sources: Corporate Counsel and Artificial Lawyer)

#2

ADM Legal Chief Redesigned Law Firm Relationships and Cut Spend. Here’s How.

In legal operations news regarding outside counsel spend, Cam Findlay, Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary at Archer Daniels Midland, shares how his team significantly reduced legal spend. The company dropped its legal spend from 85% to 50% of its budget. How? The department relied on technology, best practices and a law firm panel.

As he explains to Bloomberg Law:

“One of the first things we did was get better technology. We put in place a matter management system that allows us to track every penny—well, we think we track every penny—of spending by an outside law firm. We can even track the diversity of the lawyers who are working for us, how many hours were done by women or people of color.

“We use Onit, and we were one of the first major companies to use it, I believe. It’s a very good system because it’s beyond just matter management and e-billing, and we use it for all sorts of purposes throughout the company. It’s a good platform that you can plug and play other aspects onto.”

He also discusses how the law firm panel – called the ADM Law Firm Alliance – helped drive them to their global spending goals:

“We sit down with our top firms early in the year, every year, and through our Onit system, we’re able to prepare a firm report card for them that shows how their rates compare to other law firms, how their staffing compares, in terms of whether they are partner heavy or associate heavy. It also shows how they’re doing in terms of the diversity of the team that they’re putting on our matters. That’s been a really effective tool. We can sit down with a firm and say, ‘Your team was 100% white male. Your competitors here have been able to put much more diverse teams on our matters. That’s something we want you to work on for next year.’”

(source: Bloomberg Law)

#3

How Effective is Contract AI for Legal? Here Are the Numbers.

A panel of experts from Adobe and Onit gathered at Legalweek(year) tackled the latest legal operations trends by discussing contract AI and its impact on corporate legal. Instead of general benefits, though, these presenters provided quantitative numbers showing how effective this technology is.

A recent study of contract AI found that:

  • New AI users become 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive
  • Contracts are reviewed and redlined in less than two minutes
  • The technology helps corporate legal reduce contract processing costs by 33%
  • Users can shift work to higher-value activities, with one senior lawyer reallocating 15% of his time from contract work and team management to more strategic endeavors.

To hear the panel discussion, visit here.

(source: Legalweek[year])

#4

A New Approach to Legal Operations Maturity Models

According to the 2020 State of the Industry survey by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), there has been a steady growth trajectory in legal operations across organizations of all sizes. The outcome has been an increase in new hires and technology to deliver legal services efficiently, cost-effectively and across departments.

Nathan Wenzel, the co-founder of SimpleLegal, proposes an alternative to existing legal operations maturity models – one honed from working with more than 200 corporate legal departments.  While he outlines five distinct levels of legal operations maturity, he also emphasizes that the goal is to find the place in the spectrum that works best for your organization.

(source: Law Technology Today)

#5

CLOC Welcomes New Legal Technology Members

In 2016, CLOC allowed only in-house counsel as members. In 2019, they welcomed legal operations professionals. In the latest legal operations news, they’re opening the doors wider by inviting more members, including technology companies, service providers and law schools.

What should all CLOC members expect? According to Betsi Roach, CLOC’s executive director, there will be an expanded array of topics and perspectives. As she explains in the CLOC press release on the matter:

“Our members and the greater legal community are hungry for more resources to answer questions and advance their careers. Creating a place that champions diversity of ideas and thoughts will not only disrupt the business of law but will define professional growth paths and pave the way for future generations. This is an exciting advancement on our continued journey to make a real impact on both the legal industry and for those in our community to grow their networks.” 

To learn more about CLOC memberships, visit here.

(sources: Corporate Counsel and CLOC)

Discover More Legal Operations Trends with Lean Into Legal Ops

Speaking of legal operations, Onit is expanding our Lean Into Legal Ops virtual learning program to include even more members of the legal community and provide even more diverse content. Past webinars have included:

Get the inside track on legal operations trends, the very best events and helpful content from the legal community by joining Legal Into Legal Ops today. Visit this page to join.

How Sales CLM with Contract AI Helps Business Development Automation

Posted on February 9, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

It’s impossible to imagine any organization’s sales function without considering contracts. Sales operations professionals handle some of a company’s most value-generating activities: overseeing daily sales activity, meeting with major clients, drawing up sales reports, designing new and more effective sales strategies, and working to market and promote company products and services. 

None of those activities are possible if you can’t effectively manage your sales contracts and glean insights from them. Tools to manage contracts, including contract AI, are designed to ensure that sales operations and the VP of sales have a single point of truth for contracts. In addition, business development automation makes the sales Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) process more efficient, and the entire sales function more effective. 

Contract AI Software in Sales

The sales function at any enterprise encompasses various duties, ranging from discrete contractual tasks to overarching strategy. On the contractual front, sales operations are responsible for many phases of contract lifecycle management, including: 

  • Creating requests for contracts 
  • Drafting contracts 
  • Monitoring the progress of those contracts 
  • Keeping contracts moving forward when things stall 
  • Approving contract terms 
  • Delivering contracts to customers for signature 

The sales function doesn’t end there. In addition to handling contracts daily, sales operations professionals find new opportunities to expand the organization’s client base and devise new and innovative ways to market products and services. It’s also responsible for setting specific critical enterprise goals and ensuring they’re met, including quarterly or annual sales and ongoing productivity goals. 

Underlying all sales functions, whether drafting a contract or setting the right sales goals for the entire company, is the expectation that the VP of sales and the sales operations team will continuously improve the sales team’s effectiveness and productivity. 

Technology is the key to ensuring continuous improvement. Sales CLM tools and contract AI empower sales operations professionals to better tackle both aspects of the job by making the contract process more efficient and effective from start to finish. In addition, AI–enabled sales management software helps create a central repository for the organization’s contract data. The central repository is a critical source of information for making informed decisions about sales goals and marketing strategies.

Finding the Right Sales CLM Solution and Contract AI Software

While every company and sales department is different, some common barriers prevent sales operations from performing effectively and efficiently. These include: 

  • Having little to no insight into where deals are, who’s responsible for them, and what the next steps are
  • Missing an easy way to keep deals moving forward
  • Not having mobile technology options to effectively handle work tasks in today’s on-the-go and remote working scenarios
  • Lacking self-service options that allow the various interested parties to create and manage that contract or request information directly.

A valuable sales CLM tool and contract AI software will remove barriers and help sales by: 

  • Closing deals faster with features such as self-service and contract AI that reviews, redlines and edits first-pass review within two minutes
  • Automating the contract request process to improve sales representative productivity 
  • Giving sales a real-time view of bottlenecks, where every contract is, and if the process is stalled 
  • Only showing the information you need when you need it, rather than burying you in a mountain of data irrelevant to what you’re doing at any given moment. Having immediate access to the correct data is critical to setting the right sales and productivity goals for your team and the entire organization. 

Speeding Up CLM for Sales – and Welcoming Revenue More Quickly

Sales operations professionals understand the role of contracts in doing their job right. However, they need the right CLM tools for sales to manage those contracts end-to-end. Onit’s CLM solution helps with business development automation for the entire contract management process, allowing for a more efficient sales function and better insight into sales data. Contact us today to learn more.

The Future of the Legal Profession, AI and Legal Work

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

The legal profession faced down seemingly endless changes this past year, and many people are understandably wondering what’s in store for the future. In a recent webinar sponsored by Onit and titled The Future of the Legal Profession, leading economist Daniel Susskind tackled exactly that question, offering insights on what changes the industry should expect in the future, what role technology and AI will play and much more.

A Tale of Two Futures

Susskind envisions two possible futures for the legal profession, both rooted in technology: one that’s simply a more efficient version of the current profession, and another in which technology actively displaces professionals.

In the first, today’s professionals continue to incorporate more technology to streamline and optimize the traditional ways they’ve worked, changing practices that may have been in place for several decades. In the second, technology isn’t just streamlining and optimizing traditional work practices, but fully replacing professionals with increasingly capable systems and machines. In the short term, these two divergent futures will develop in parallel. However, in the long term, Susskind expects the second future to dominate due to its greater efficiency and more effective problem-solving abilities.

How Technology Affects Professions

Professions evolved in modern society because no one was capable of doing everything, and therefore specialists – lawyers, doctors, educators, etc. – were needed to solve common challenges that people couldn’t solve on their own. Each profession became a gatekeeper for a unique body of knowledge.

Technology has been changing all that in recent years. Today, institutions are using technology to solve problems that were traditionally only solved by specific professionals. For example, in the case of law, three times as many disputes are resolved each year on remediation platforms without traditional lawyers than are filed in the legal system. Other technologies are similarly replacing hundreds of thousands of hours of traditionally billable time by addressing discrete legal tasks.

How Technology and AI Are Changing

There’s no finish line when it comes to technology. Today, technology is seeing exponential growth in prevalence, power, and capability, performing tasks that were once the sole province of humans. More and more people own devices, and both those devices and their owners are becoming increasingly connected. Over time, technology will only continue to improve.

Artificial intelligence has seen some of the most significant evolution. While AI once focused on copying human thinking and reasoning, today’s AI tools perform judgments that humans once exclusively performed and do so based on much larger volumes of data than humans could ever tackle.  (To see an example of how AI can quickly review, redline and edit all types of contracts including NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, purchase agreements, lease agreements, employment agreements, construction and sub-contracting agreements, visit here. You can also schedule a demo of Onit’s Review AI by filling out this quick form.)

The Future of Legal Work

We won’t be seeing robot lawyers any time soon, but we will see changes. Rather than eliminating entire jobs, technology will likely displace humans from particular tasks and activities, while making others more valuable and more important for humans to perform. Technology is a story not of mass unemployment, but of mass redeployment, changing the tasks and activities lawyers will be expected to perform in carrying out their work.

The Pandemic Effect

While the pandemic may have spurred recessions in some areas, recessions often lead to an increase in automation. Automation, in turn, tends to replace the tasks of middling-skilled workers, rather than lower-skilled or higher-skilled workers.

The pandemic has also created a unique incentive to automate work, since machines don’t have to worry about challenges like contagion or isolation. Some automation experiments necessitated by the pandemic are likely to become permanent fixtures of the profession, as there’s been a significant shift in the belief that most work needs to be performed face-to-face.

How This All Impacts You

Susskind closed with three pieces of advice for lawyers going forward:

  1. Explore new roles, skills and capabilities that might not be traditional in the profession.
  2. Learn from the pandemic. Understand what’s worked well and what hasn’t and apply that going forward.
  3. Imagine the future of the profession like a clean slate, figuring out how to solve problems in new and fundamentally different ways.

To learn more about Daniel Susskind, visit here.

To see how Onit’s AI solutions – including Precedent, ReviewAI and ExtractAI – schedule a demonstration here.