Category: Business Process Management

How Legal AI and Automation Work for Law Department Operations

Posted on February 19, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Implementing legal AI and automation is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. With numerous forms of both technologies, it helps to examine specific use cases and the corresponding benefits that come to the table.

In the first part of this blog and podcast series, we outlined what AI is at its foundation. In part two, we tackled how artificial intelligence and law departments are already working together.

Now, we’re back for the third and final segment of his AI series, which covers the combination of legal AI and automation. With the many different types of legal automation and AI assistance available today, we have some crucial points to consider for automation and AI’s role in it.

Starting the Journey of Combining Artificial Intelligence and Law Departments

Start by asking yourself some basic questions about the drivers you’re trying to achieve through automation. Is your goal to increase productivity, efficiency and quality? Are you most concerned about risk mitigation and compliance? Or are you trying to be efficient about identifying trends and actionable insights with the data you currently have?

For example, if your goal is to enhance efficiency, contract AI software and automation can speed up contract approval by up to 70% and increase user productivity by 51.5%.

Your reason for automating your law department will have an impact on how you go about implementing it. Regardless of your goals, you always need to be considering how automation can help your legal department become more valuable to the rest of the organization.

The Different Types of Legal AI and Automation

Automation isn’t one-size-fits-all and there many varieties of it available now. Before you start implementing automation and legal AI, it’s helpful to understand the different automation types that exist today. The goals you have might impact the kind of automation you choose.

There are three significant types of automation, plus a fourth that ties them all together:

  1. Intelligent process automation (IPA) focuses on optimizing tasks that traditionally require some form of human interaction. It assumes that companies have already digitized business processes and created workflows. IPA uses software to perform processes and automate tasks while completing workflows and automating and integrating digital processes. It extends the scope of process automation that has capabilities for reading documents. Think OCR, machine learning and natural language processing. It also manages processes through event triggers and intelligent workflow and helps collate and process data across multiple systems. For example, in the legal domain, an IPA-based platform can read and analyze contracts to automate the identification, extraction and evaluation of contract terms, identify business-critical information such as contract entities and assess them against standard clause statements.
  2. Business process automation (BPA) is the technology-enabled automation of tasks that accomplishes a specific workflow or function. BPA has somewhat similar goals as IPA, but its primary goal is to automate a business process while improving and simplifying business flows. A critical difference between BPA and IPA is that IPA is more about optimizing existing digital workflows, while BPA is about digitization. An example of this in the legal world would be digitizing all incoming matter-related documents and forms, with BPA capturing and validating information in any format as soon as such information is available.
  3. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses intelligent automation technology to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks, enabling business users to devote more time to other, higher-value work. The distinguishing characteristic of RPA is its capacity for awareness and ability to adapt to changes in circumstances.
  4. Hyperautomation brings together several components of legal automation and AI and machine learning to amplify work automation. The goal of hyperautomation is to optimize and deliver work more effectively, more efficiently and at a lower risk to drive innovation. A crucial component of hyperautomation is the ability to include humans in the digitization process. Hyperautomation can provide insights into ROI and leverage AI to enable end-to-end intelligent automation. For example, consider a law firm utilizing two technologies – one that intelligently reads data and documents and the other being an RPA tool (robot). An incoming email from a client triggers the RPA robot to read the email and its attachment. It logs in to the client’s system as an accredited user and downloads the data to be processed by the reading tool. The tool reads all the document’s data (which a human usually had to do) and extracts the relevant information utilizing machine learning to pass back to the RPA robot to populate the case management system and the finance system. It then notifies the supervising partner of the critical case information. With hyperautomation, the time to open a file decreases from 90 minutes to 10 minutes. It meets the service-legal agreement for the first response and the file opening administration team – through AI-assisted automation – focuses on higher-value work for the more complex cases.

Once you understand the different types of legal AI and automation and what you’re trying to achieve through automation, you can start to develop and implement your ideal technology plan for your law department.

To hear more about legal AI and automation, the benefits of combining artificial intelligence and law departments and the essential elements to consider before deciding on technologies, you can listen to our entire podcast (see below.)

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.

Looking to Control Legal Spend? Don’t Forget These Enterprise Legal Management Features

Posted on January 27, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

When it comes to legal spend, corporate legal departments share a unanimous thought: It’s time to control costs. A recent survey from Gartner showed that the proportion for legal spend for outside counsel has decreased from 50% to 44% since 2018 – a trend predicted to evolve further as the effects of the pandemic influence companies’ priorities.

Before you can right-size legal spend, you have to understand how you’re spending. That’s where an enterprise legal management solution (ELM) comes in. Comprised of legal spend management and matter management, modern ELM solutions no longer land in the “nice to have” category. GCs and legal operations professionals are quickly outgrowing (and getting more and more frustrated with) dated ELM systems with non-intuitive interfaces and limited functionality that cannot meet their business needs.

Six Must-Have Enterprise Legal Management Features You Need Now

ELM solutions give users the tools to analyze legal spend, manage matters, minimize company risk and drive process efficiency, giving legal operations managers the ability to reduce legal spend with surgical precision.

The leading ELM solutions offer several crucial features (outlined here) that can help control costs and increase efficiency – an overall win on multiple fronts. However, here are six additional legal spend management and matter management features to consider when evaluating ELM options.

  1. Flexible Workflow

Corporate legal departments need flexible enough workflows to match business requirements. The workflows also need to be simple enough to manage or change without IT personnel reliance. Different work types, such as matters related to employment, litigation, or mergers, can have their unique workflows. Likewise, workflows change based on participants or collaboration with other departments such as sales, procurement and marketing.

  1. Timekeeper Management

Corporate legal departments need the ability to keep track of authorized timekeepers and rates and do it in one solution. This informs not only legal spend but other essential initiatives such as diversity. (For an example of using technology to drive diversity and inclusion, visit Hack the House and select “Team Diversity” for a demo. They created and deployed an app in less than three weeks.)

  1. Billing Guidelines

When a corporate legal department’s outside counsel spend reaches beyond $100 million, the number, size and amounts of legal bills go beyond manual processing capabilities. Submitted invoices may contain charges that do not comply with billing guidelines. ELM will enforce billing guidelines, automatically flagging or denying payment for suspect charges and supporting legal spend managment.

  1. Reporting and Analytics

When it comes to having insight into reporting, a leading ELM solution will provide you with a dashboard view that makes it easy to analyze invoices, evaluate performance and see trends in matter portfolios, which are vital for understanding and controlling legal spend.

  1. Advanced Security

Each day, news breaks of security breaches. Corporate legal and the law firms they work with are now prime candidates for hacking attempts. Industry-standard security and bank-level encryption ensure billing and matter data remains confidential. A three-pronged approach is optimal: custom-hardened Unix kernels, managed virtual private cloud and continuous firewall monitoring.

  1. Outlook Integration

For years, there has been one cry that continually arises when it comes to technology and communications: Email is dead! However, it remains a highly used tool for knowledge workers such as lawyers and operations professionals. Synchronizing matter information between Outlook and associated matters is a quick way to ensure your ELM information remains up-to-date and eliminates duplicative, manual work.

For more ELM and legal spend inspiration, take a look at the following resources:

 

Empower Legal Operations Automation with the Best CLM Tools

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

The right legal contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution is a crucial component of your legal ops toolbox.

When you work in legal operations, you’re required to wear a lot of hats. On any given day, you’ll work closely with general counsel as well as business stakeholders at all levels of your company. Legal operations is key in creating processes and practices that improve the day-to-day efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s legal team and, in turn, the company as a whole. Contracts are the lifeblood of corporate legal departments, and having tools to manage them is critical to the efficiency legal ops is trying to achieve.

Contract Lifecycle Management in Day-to-Day Legal Operations

It’s nearly impossible to think about legal operations without thinking about contracts. On a daily basis, you’re requesting and drafting contracts, monitoring their progress and obtaining signatures. On top of that, you’re responsible for implementing tools to streamline your organization’s legal practices, developing and enforcing processes and policies to manage outside counsel usage and spend, assisting with budget matters and optimizing workflows within the legal department, and managing the design, rollout and training for new systems – just to name a few things.

With that many important roles on your plate, monitoring contracts doesn’t need to be taking up any more of your time than it has to. With the right tool for managing your contracts from start to finish, you’ll be freed up to focus on tasks that are more critical to boosting efficiency and creating value for the organization.

Finding the Right CLM Solution

As is the case with most legal technology these days, there’s no shortage of options when it comes to choosing a contract lifecycle management solution. In making your choice, it’s important to keep in mind the pain points you’re trying to address in legal operations and the functionalities you want to achieve from your new tool.

Among the biggest challenges that legal ops professionals tend to face when it comes to CLM are:

  • Having a lack of visibility into where your deals stand, who’s responsible for them and what the next steps are at any given time
  • Having no easy way to keep contract drafting and negotiation moving forward
  • Needing an effective way to reduce risk and improve governance
  • Needing to accelerate contract turnaround time while also reducing costs
  • Having no means of self-service, and instead having to rely on others to handle contracts

The ideal CLM tool will serve as a single point of truth for all your contract data, allowing you to standardize your processes and increase efficiency through automation. You’ll have real-time insight into where each contract stands and who might be holding it up, so you can nudge them along and keep everything moving smoothly. CLM solutions also allow you to easily find contracts and have visibility into your renewal and amendments cycles without overwhelming you with information – the best tools allow you to see only the information you need to see, when you need and want to see it.

Implementing CLM in Legal Ops

Legal operations professionals are no strangers to developing, implementing, and using today’s most cutting-edge legal tech solutions. Using technology to manage contracts should be no exception. CLM tools help bolster the practice of corporate law, streamlining the contractual processes that are so integral to the operation of every legal department, and, indeed, every organization operating today.

Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you with end-to-end automation of your entire contract management process.

January Digest: Current Legal Operations Trends and Industry News

Posted on January 19, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

From COVID to cost-cutting, here are some of the leading industry articles on legal operations trends. This blog post represents a new monthly feature that shares the latest industry news for corporate legal and legal operations professionals.

#1

Legal Ops May Still Struggle for a Seat at the Table in 2021

(source: Legaltech News)

COVID has forced many professions to pivot in how they approach their jobs. Legal operations is no exception. In this article, experts share how 2020 will shape legal operations trends in 2021. Nick Whitehouse, GM of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, discusses the importance of building smart processes and workflows to remove low-value work from in-house and the growing adoption of AI-enable contract lifecycle management, automated third-party contract reviews and document automation. Roycee Hasuko, director of product engagement for SimpleLegal, advocates for the importance of clean data and systems to convey business priorities and how remote working will require legal ops to continue investments in communications strategies and cross-functional collaboration. You can read the full article here.

#2

Legal departments cut outside spending, focus on managers and specialists, study shows

(source: ABA Journal)

Legal departments have always been under pressure to cut costs, but last year has taken this to unprecedented new levels. The current pandemic has been responsible for the largest part of this pressure. This article examines legal operations trends uncovered by a Gartner survey, highlighting the fact that more legal spending (57%) is staying in-house compared to previous years, participants are expecting reductions in their budgets and 94% say their headcount will remain the same or be reduced. Find the full article here.

#3

Forging Into The Unknown: How COVID-19 Has Already Changed Legal Department Budget Planning

(source: Corporate Counsel)

We always like to maintain a sense of optimism about getting back to normal after the pandemic, and rightfully so. But some believe that things in legal departments will get much more complicated before there’s a return to normalcy. Budgets are the topic of discussion in this article, from opinions on tweaking budgets from previous years,  the role of analytics and “giving smarter haircuts.” The full text of the article is published here.

#4

COVID-19 Proved the Value of Legal Operations In-House

(source: Corporate Counsel)

Despite COVID challenges, many forward-thinking legal ops professionals have made significant strides in finding ways to save money. This article looks at how these individuals have discovered new ways to use their existing technology instead of acquiring additional technology, as well as how they were able to smoothly transition from the office to home. You can read the article here.

#5

Artificial Intelligence Trends Impacting Corporate Legal Departments

(source: Reinventing Professionals)

After ringing in the New Year, it’s that time again to examine current trends in our industry. Ari Kaplan of Reinventing Professionals recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, general manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. In this thought-provoking interview, they cover several aspects of AI and legal operations trends and how they translate to efficiency and savings for corporate legal. You can listen to the podcast here.

Additional Resources for Legal Trends

If you’re interested in more resources related to legal operations trends, here are some recommendations:

  • To support our customers and colleagues in the legal operations field, Onit offers free Business Continuity Apps to support remote workers and their families that are sheltering at home.
  • Interested in hearing more about how to trim spend? In our Virtual Legal Resourcing Debate with Buying Legal Council, three teams of legal professionals debate different approaches and their pros and cons.
  • In this on-demand webinar, the legal operations team at Pearson shares how they radically transformed how they manage contracts, cutting costs annually by roughly 30%.

We hope you find these articles helpful. We’ll return in February with another industry update on legal operations trends.

How Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management Software is Changing the Game for General Counsel

Posted on January 14, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Managing risk at an organization is a full-time job, especially for a general counsel (GC) or chief legal officer (CLO). As a company’s chief internal lawyer, they are expected to provide legal advice on a vast range of subjects – legal rights, risk mitigation, compliance with new and existing laws and so much more.

If that weren’t enough, GCs and CLOs are also expected to manage the organization’s legal matters, oversee outside counsel spend, conduct legal research, review internal litigation strategy, and be the ultimate approver and keeper of the organization’s contracts. Despite handling all these critical, sensitive matters, legal departments are often seen as “cost centers” and therefore are forced to do their challenging jobs without all the resources they need to succeed.

Technology, automation and artificial intelligence are key to doing more with less and streamlining processes, particularly when it comes to contracts. Enterprise contract lifecycle management software allows busy lawyers end-to-end control over contracts, freeing up time to focus on other tasks in the process. They can also play pivotal roles in helping corporate legal departments reduce contract management costs. For example, Pearson’s commercial transactions shared service center for more than 10,000 users worldwide achieved a 35% cost reduction and 30% improved contract turnaround time.

Contractual Pain Points

Even the simplest contracts can expose an organization to risk and liability if it’s not handled correctly. GCs and CLOs are tasked with overseeing the crucial job of examining and creating draft agreements, maintaining knowledge of the organization’s operations and legal documents, approving non-standard contract language and more.

Without a centralized solution for managing contracts on an organization-wide basis, legal departments run into countless hurdles, including:

  • Inconsistent language between contracts, often caused by employees using out-of-date contract templates
  • Competing objectives of moving contracts through quickly yet still having enough oversight to effectively manage risk obligations
  • A lack of insight into all the organization’s current contracts
  • An inability to track changes in contracts and ensure that contracts are in compliance with new and existing laws and regulations
  • The risk that contracts might expire or renew without notice because no one’s tracking them
  • Complicated review and approval processes for even standard contracts
  • Manual review and approval processes that create longer contract cycle times
  • Human error and inconsistencies inherent in manual processes, increasing the organization’s risk exposure
  • Lost revenue when add-ons, upgrades and renewals are missed
  • Being seen by other aspects of the business as a barrier to closing deals

The above list is by no means exhaustive. Given the large volume of contracts at today’s modern businesses, the challenges presented by trying to manage those contracts can become overwhelming when you rely on manual processes or basic contract tools that lack automation and AI for general counsel, as well as a means of creating a single source of truth for the organization’s contracts.

The Benefits of Contract Lifecycle Management Tools

While the challenges outlined above may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. CLM tools use automation and AI to remove the tedious, manual aspects of traditional contract management, increasing accuracy and efficiency, eliminating errors, and freeing up precious time that GCs and CLOs can use to focus on the many other critical tasks they’re responsible for handling.

Leverage the benefits of contract lifecycle management software to take control of your corporate legal budget and take the headaches out of risk management.

Among other things, the right enterprise contract lifecycle management software will allow you to:

  • Find every contract you need, when you need it
  • Store all your contracts in one cloud location, creating a single source of truth for your organization’s contract data
  • Have full visibility at all times into the status of contract drafting, negotiations, amendments, and renewals, ensuring that nothing’s missed or overlooked
  • Implement uniform templates and playbooks to speed up contract cycle times, reduce manual errors and ensure you’re always using preferred terms
  • Automate approval processes to eliminate bottlenecks
  • Be notified of contract renewals to get a jumpstart on the process
  • Allow for self-service, so that other departments can create standard contracts with the correct language without legal review
  • Improve legal risk management across the organization
  • Improve efficiencies and free up the corporate legal budget for strategic use by automating contract lifecycle management
  • Demonstrate that the legal department is a strategic partner of the business, not a cost center

The ideal CLM tool will give you real-time insights into all phases of the contract lifecycle and provide you with actionable intelligence to make informed decisions for the business. More information means a better ability to identify and control risks across the contract process.

It’s time to take control of your contracts and let contract lifecycle management for general counsel and automation do the heavy lifting for you. Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you implement end-to-end CLM for your organization.

Legal Ops in 2020: A Look at How Law Departments Have Weathered the Storm

Posted on January 12, 2021 by - Business Process Management

There’s no question that 2020 was an unusual year for organizations across all industries – and their law departments. From being forced into working from home overnight to embracing new technologies at an accelerated pace, law departments have adapted in ways they never imagined.

The Blickstein Group recently released its 13th Annual Law Department Operations Survey, titled “Weathering the Storms of 2020.” The findings show that, despite the pandemic’s unprecedented challenges and novel demands, corporate law departments have weathered those storms well.

As the survey points out, the world changed dramatically in the year since the 2019 Law Department Operations Survey. The impacts of those changes, however, were less dramatic. Here are just some of the critical insights about legal ops in 2020.

The Biggest Challenges

Survey respondents were asked to identify their most significant challenges in 2020 relating to law department functions, and notably, COVID-19 was nowhere near the top of the list. Instead, the top-three challenges identified were:

  • Cost containment and savings/managing the budget – 60.3%
  • Business process improvements – 56.2%
  • Departmental resources (e.g. funding for personnel/technology, personnel retention) – 38.4%

Concerns about cost containment are nothing new, as managing costs and budgeting have long been a focus for legal ops professionals. The same is likely to remain true throughout 2021 and into the future, making Enterprise Legal Management solutions – which simplify legal operations by analyzing legal spend, minimizing company risk and driving process efficiency – valuable investments.

Delivery of Work Product

Disruption to everyday business practices and routines seemed to come from all sides in 2020, but law departments didn’t let that stand in their way. When asked if they noticed a diminished ability of their internal legal teams to deliver work product due to the pandemic and working from home, a staggering 94% of respondents said no.

Much of this ability to avoid disruption can be attributed to advanced technologies that support remote legal operations management work, allowing legal departments to deliver the high-quality work product from anywhere. Automation and AI also played a major role in seeing legal ops through the pandemic. For example, a tool like Review AI automates contract review, cuts contract review time by up to 70% and increases accuracy in reviewing, redlining and editing all types of contracts. These tools are critical to improving efficiency and eliminating manual tasks that would otherwise present barriers to remote work

Focus on Diversity

The pandemic wasn’t the only thing grabbing headlines in 2020. Diversity and inclusion were perhaps more in the spotlight than ever before. While companies across the country struggled to figure out how to best address diversity and inclusion within their ranks, what was clear was that more and more law departments were turning the focus to these issues. When asked what employee-related metrics they track, 72.7% reported tracking diversity, up significantly from prior years’ surveys.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for improving diversity and inclusion, technology can play a significant role in achieving progress. At Onit’s recent Hack the House competition, one team – Team Diversity – built a solution to expand opportunities for diversity and an equal opportunity workspace using Onit Apptitude in just three weeks. (You can see a demo here.) This is only one example of how legal ops professionals can use institutional data to address workplace challenges and track progress on important issues.

Law Firm Rates

Law firm rates have increased in 2020, according to law departments. When asked how overall law firm rates changed in the past year, only 3.6% of law department respondents reported any decrease. In fact, 69.7% reported an increase, while 26.8% said that rates remained flat. Participants indicated they expect this increase to continue in the next 12 months, with 46.4% expecting an increase.

There’s no reason to think these trends won’t continue for the foreseeable future. That means it’s more important than ever to be able to track invoices and ensure that your law firm’s charges are accurate and in-line with your billing guidelines. With Onit Enterprise Legal Management, you’ll have the data you need to show the value your law firms are providing to the organization in exchange for the rates they’re charging.

For more insights on the state of legal ops in 2020 and how the pandemic has impacted law department operations, you can download the entire survey here.

What is Artificial Intelligence? The ABCs of What Is It and What it Does

Posted on January 5, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest buzzwords in legal technology today, but many people still don’t fully understand what it is and how it can impact their day-to-day legal work.

According to  Brookings Institution, AI generally refers to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention.” In other words, artificial intelligence is technology capable of making decisions that generally require a human level of expertise. It helps people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. (For example, here’s how AI greatly improves contract review.)

In this blog post and podcast (see below), we cover the ins and outs of AI in more detail. In this first installment of our new blog series, we’ll discuss what it is and its three main hallmarks.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

At the core of AI and machine learning are algorithms, or sequences of instructions that solve specific problems. In machine learning, the learning algorithms create the rules for the software, instead of computer programmers inputting them, as is the case with more traditional forms of technology. Artificial intelligence can learn from new data without additional step-by-step instructions.

This independence is crucial to our ability to use computers for new, more complex tasks that exceed the manual programming limitations – things like photo recognition apps for the visually impaired or translating pictures into speech. Even things we now take for granted, like Alexa and Siri, are prime examples of artificial intelligence technology that once seemed impossible. We already encounter in our day-to-day lives in numerous ways and that influence will continue to grow.

The excitement about this quickly evolving technology is understandable, mainly due to its impacts on data availability, computing power and innovation. The billions of devices connected to the internet generate large amounts of data and lower the cost of mass data storage. Machine learning can use all this data to train learning algorithms and accelerate the development of new rules for performing increasingly complex tasks. Furthermore, we can now process enormous amounts of data around machine learning. All of this is driving innovation, which has recently become a rallying cry among savvy legal departments worldwide. 

Once you understand the basics of AI, it’s also helpful to be familiar with the different types of learning that make it up.

The first is supervised learning, where a learning algorithm is given labeled data in order to generate a desired output. For example, if the software is given a picture of dogs labeled “dogs,” the algorithm will identify rules to classify pictures of dogs in the future.

The second is unsupervised learning, where the data input is unlabeled and the algorithm is asked to identify patterns on its own. A typical instance of unsupervised learning is when the algorithm behind an eCommerce site identifies similar items often bought by a consumer.

Finally, there’s the scenario where the algorithm interacts with a dynamic environment that provides both positive feedback (rewards) and negative feedback. An example of this would be a self-driving car where, if the driver stays within the lane, the software will receive points in order to reinforce that learning and reminders to stay in that lane.

The Hallmarks of AI

Even after understanding the basic elements and learning models of AI, the question often arises as to what the real essence of AI is. The Brookings Institution boils the answer down to three main qualities:

  1. Intentionality – AI algorithms are designed to make decisions. They’re not passive machines capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Rather, they’re designed by humans with intentionality to reach conclusions based on instant analysis.
  2. Intelligence – AI often is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics, and the resulting combination enables intelligent decision-making. Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and employ data analytics to understand specific issues.
  3. Adaptability – AI has the ability to learn and adapt as it compiles information and makes decisions. Effective AI must adjust as circumstances or conditions shift. This could involve changes in financial situations, road conditions, environmental considerations, military circumstances, and more. Artificial intelligence needs to integrate these changes into its algorithms and decide on how to adapt to the new circumstances.

For a more in-depth discussion of artificial intelligence, you can listen to the entire podcast below.

In the next installment of our blog series, we’ll discuss the benefits AI is already bringing to legal departments. We hope you’ll join us.