Category: Business Process Management

Legal Operations Experts Have Hacked the House; Now, We Have a Hackathon Winner

Posted on December 18, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

They came. They saw. They hacked. And now, Onit has a Hack the House winner!

In October, Onit launched its first hackathon – Hack the House. The friendly competition consisted of Onit customers, partners and staff seeing who can build the most useful and compelling workflow and collaboration solution using the Onit Apptitude platform.

Five teams accepted the Hack the House challenge. They include legal and business experts, certified App Builders and project managers. Within three weeks, each group identified a corporate legal department challenge, defined the requirements and built the solution from scratch using Apptitude.

Team Europe created the Data Breach Incident Reporting App to report a data breach in compliance with GDPR and other data privacy regulations. Many organizations currently use spreadsheets, phone calls, and emails – a highly manual process that is the perfect candidate for Apptitude automation. Their Hack the House App simplifies the process and helps meet expectations by regulators in Europe that reporting must happen within 72 hours from the point of breaches.

Team HR wanted to veer away from the traditional goal-setting and reviewing goals with a supervisor with their mentorship and career development App. Their Hack the House solution is a combination of several Apps for mentors, mentees and project opportunities. Users select areas of interest and then anyone across the company can find them and invite them to participate in special projects in their area of interest. Employees then gain more exposure throughout an organization to progress their careers.

Team IP focused on the trademark renewal decision process for Hack the House, one they identified as a challenge for any company that owns a significant number of trademarks worldwide. They combined Apps into a solution that streamlines the communication out to global teams, alerting them that it is time to make decisions about whether to renew trademarks or not. It gathers feedback on why decisions were made and automates the process for trademarks that will unquestionably be renewed. The team also built an additional App that tracks who in an organization has access to which trade secrets.

Team Diversity created an App to help law departments establish a baseline for diversity statistics and tracking. Using the App, a legal operations professional can gather a high-level view of a law firm’s diversity efforts, track historical progress and report on efforts. The App sends law firms a survey where they can upload their diversity stats and initiatives. They based the App on the ABA Model Diversity Survey to align with existing industry standards.

Team Pro Bono Program Management wanted to help pro bono leadership track, manage, recognize and report on time spent by attorneys and be able to thank each one for their volunteer efforts. Their Hack the House App centralizes requests and gives lawyers a space to collaborate with internal resources and third parties such as outside counsel on pro bono initiatives. Users can easily report out the work to different bar associations or internally. Best of all, it helps show appreciation for pro bono work in the form of automated document generation for thank you letters.

Judging Hack the House

The five judges found an impressive array of solutions to evaluate. The panel included:

  • Maria Anassutzi, Lead IP Counsel EMEA, Canon Europe
  • William Hayes, Senior Lawyer, BBC
  • Mary Shirley, Head Of Culture Of Integrity And Compliance Education, FMCNA
  • Jonathan Powers, Director Of Learning & Development, Onit
  • Kristi Gedid, Senior Director, Global Legal Operations, Mylan

They judged based on a variety of criteria, including the ambition of the idea, how closely it fit with the original idea, the ease of use and the constructed App’s completeness. They also had a helping hand from hundreds of voters in the legal space.

“It was awesome to see the level of work and the thought that everybody put into their respective projects,” commented Mary Shirley, a judge and Head Of Culture Of Integrity And Compliance Education, FMCNA. “There is going to be a lot of real-world use for the Apps that have been produced. I had a fantastic time being a judge.”

“This hackathon made me feel empowered – not only as a judge but also as someone who works in and heads up legal teams,” said William Hayes, judge and Senior Lawyer at BBC. “I say empowered because I work with data scientists and technologists and developers, and often we are relying on them to try to get a solution developed. Seeing what the hackathon teams did with Apptitude, I feel like I can take my legal team now and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do it ourselves.’ We can use these tools. We can use these ideas and create something ourselves. So it was empowering. I think that was something that I didn’t expect.”

After much deliberation and admiration for all the teams and their Apps, the judges selected the winner.

And the Winner Is …

TEAM IP!

Congratulations to Team IP and all the teams!

Thank you to everyone who participated in Hack the House.

Team EU

  • Ed Rastelli, Standard Chartered Bank
  • Lee Harrison, BT Group
  • Robert Johnson, Onit
  • Claire Banham, Onit
  • Alyssa Kokilah, Cognia Law
  • Tyler Reno, Onit

Team HR

  • Curtis Batterton, McDonald’s
  • Chris Hultgren, Deere and Company
  • Weston Wicks, Morae Global
  • Brett Baccus, Morae Global
  • Dipish Parmar, Morae Global
  • David Duffey, Onit

Team IP

  • Matt Burdman, Colgate Palmolive
  • Ken Capece, Colgate Palmolive
  • Ed Kelly, Colgate Palmolive
  • Nadine Stuttle, Duff and Phelps
  • Rebecca Cotton, Duff and Phelps
  • Atlantis Langowski, Onit
  • Larry Gianneschi, Colgate Palmolive
  • Josie Johnson, Onit

Team Diversity

  • Eric Kabot, Royal Caribbean Cruises LTD.
  • Michele Compasso, Corteva Agriscience
  • Gregg McConnell, Corteva Agriscience
  • Jesse Viani, Onit
  • Sam Lu, Consilio
  • Lisa Morris,  Consilio
  • Debby Young, Consilio
  • Rhonda Oliver, Onit

Team Pro Bono

  • Nick Panagoplos, Chubb
  • Kim Takacs, Chubb
  • Paige Edwards, Onit
  • Massimo Penzo, Morae Global

Thank you also to Cosmonauts, who collaborated with Onit on Hack the House.

The Latest Onit Acquisition: Your Contracts Drafted 10 Times Faster with Document Automation from AXDRAFT

Posted on December 17, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Hear Onit’s CEO and the General Manager of AXDRAFT discuss Onit’s latest acquisition and what it means for contract lifecycle management, document automation and contract drafting in our latest podcast below.

AxDraft - An Onit Company

Drafting contracts just got easier with document automation from AXDRAFT – now an independent Onit subsidiary.

Onit announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator-backed company today. AXDRAFT – now AXDRAFT, an Onit Company – enables in-house counsel to draft legal documents 10 times faster and complete contracts like nondisclosure agreements and service agreements in less than five minutes.

This is Onit’s second acquisition announcement in 30 days. In November, Onit acquired legal AI company McCarthyFinch and immediately launched Precedent, its intelligence platform, and ReviewAI, software that accelerates contract review by up to 70% and improves user productivity by more than 50%.

Continued Contract Lifecycle Management Innovation

The AXDRAFT acquisition addresses Onit’s commitment to innovating its offerings, especially contract lifecycle management (CLM).

“Disruption is in Onit’s DNA, from launching the industry’s first no-code business process and automation platform, Apptitude, to bringing machine learning and natural language processing to the practice of contracting with Precedent and ReviewAI. We’re also the first in our space to offer two platforms, one for workflow automation and one for artificial intelligence. AXDRAFT is a disruptor to old-line businesses in the document automation space. Our guidance and resources will help the company scale significantly, secure new customers worldwide and contribute to Onit’s aggressive growth strategy,” said Onit’s CEO and co-founder Eric M. Elfman.

Addressing the Challenges of Contract Drafting with AXDRAFT

The contract drafting process comes with multiple challenges – especially when a corporate legal department has a high volume of them to complete. It’s highly manual, repetitive and time-consuming. Plus, as a manual process, there are numerous ways to make mistakes.

AXDRAFT breaks that cycle with its document automation by providing lightning-speed, error-free and multilingual contract drafting.

Yuriy Zaremba, co-founder of AXDRAFT and now its General Manager, understands these challenges firsthand.

“When I was a lawyer, I experienced how routine legal work can be when you draft the same types of documents over and over again. It’s a process that invites mistakes and keeps attorneys from focusing on higher-value contributions,” he explained. “AXDRAFT drafts the contracts and other legal documents in less than five minutes, making it significantly easier for legal professionals to maintain accuracy and collaborate with the businesses they support. We’re excited to join Onit and begin the next phase of our company’s evolution.”

Fueling AXDRAFT is a proprietary algorithm created by its co-founder and now CTO, Oleg Zaremba. The algorithm enables streamlined and extensible document drafting in any language, including Chinese and Japanese. It supports live document preview and data integrations to transform complex documents into simple Q&A processes. Another important distinction: AXDRAFT onboards customers’ documents at no cost, making it a truly turnkey solution.

AXDRAFT is available immediately as a stand-alone, out-of-the-box document automation tool.

Listen to the Latest Episode of Onit’s Podcast 

You can hear more about the acquisition in this podcast interview featuring Eric M. Elfman and Yuriy Zaremba.

To find out more about the AXDRAFT acquisition:

  • Read the press release.
  • If you are an Onit customer, speak with your account manager.
  • Visit the AXDRAFT website at AXDRAFT.com.

 

 

Three Surveys of Interest for Legal Operations Management Professionals

Posted on December 10, 2020 by - Business Process Management

Data is the cornerstone of operations, which is why this blog post focuses on three surveys of particular interest for legal operations management professionals.

Data, Business Strategy and Higher Profitability 

In the 20th Global C-Suite Study, IBM surveyed more than 13,000 C-suite executives around the world to learn more about their organizations’ use of data and how they drive value from it. The study identified four stages of the data journey, including highly sophisticated Torchbearers who have aligned their data strategy with their business strategy, and Aspirationals, those who are just beginning to capture and explore the value of their data.

Unsurprisingly, the Torchbearers lead all other levels in revenue growth, profitability, innovation and managing change.

How do they manage this? The study provides numerous details, but one area in particular is especially helpful. To gather, share and eventually drive better business performance with data, Torchbearers adopt and extend their business platforms to external parties like partners and customers. It provides this example: “A platform that links real estate agents, home inspectors, insurers, and mortgage lenders, for example, puts the customer at the center of a more seamless experience.”

This approach can be replicated with similar success within the microcosm of corporate legal. With a unified, intuitive platform, corporate legal can collaborate across the enterprise (marketing, sales, R&D, HR and more) and outside of it with law firms, legal service providers and other stakeholders. Not only is the level of support and responsiveness enhanced, but legal operations are collecting valuable data to analyze for performance, spend and more.

Modernizing Legal Service Delivery

The 2020 Legal Operations Survey from Deloitte found that 86% of in-house counsel see “an opportunity to modernize legal services provided to their stakeholders.” However, they still have obstacles to overcome, such as a high-volume of time spent handling manual tasks (71%) and a lack of metrics to provide insight into completed work for in-house lawyers and external parties.

Legal operations professionals might find this data point especially interesting:

“77% of respondents felt their legal systems were not integrated with a consistent data taxonomy to allow for visibility into workflows and real-time data.”

The Pandemic Proves Just How Valuable Legal Operations Management Professionals Are to Their Employers

A new survey covered by Law.com shows the pandemic’s effect on corporate legal.  Altman Weil’s survey gathered responses from more than 100 CLOs, finding that 66% of them say the pandemic has decreased their companies’ revenues. Unsurprisingly, 44% say they will reduce 2021 budgets. A decrease in money correlates with these data points:

  • One-third said they have requested additional discounts from law firms
  • 11% said their law departments had to lay off employees
  • 77% said their workloads have increased

One bright spot: Legal operations professionals are invaluable during times like these and law departments recognize this. The survey found that:

“None of the CLO participants reported that their companies had laid off a legal operations manager during the past year. Meanwhile, 75% of legal departments with 50 or more lawyers had at least one legal operations manager in the house and half of all CLOs said they had someone in that role in their department … ”

Investing in legal operations has been an ongoing trend. For example, the CLOC 2020 State of the Industry Report found that:

The size of Legal Operations functions has continued to increase through a combination of full-time employees (FTEs) and contractors as teams demonstrate more impact.

Conclusion

Legal operations management professionals continue to approach their data-driven discipline with innovation. Here are three examples.

  • The Onit Hack the House hackathon, where they had three weeks to create Apps that address critical business challenges across IP, HR, compliance and more. (Voting on the winning App is open to everyone, by the way. Your vote enters you for a chance to win an electric scooter. The link also includes demos.)
  • Three teams of legal operations experts debated the best way to control costs for a fictional corporate legal department. You can see who won here.
  • The Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference featured a presentation with a head of legal operations, a partner for an AmLaw 200 law firm and a Legal Lean Sigma expert to explain how they worked together to create stronger relationships and results. You can read more about that here.

The Great Debate: Three Teams of Legal Operations Management Experts Explore How to Reduce Outside Counsel Expenses

Posted on December 2, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The general counsel of your $30 billion conglomerate approaches you with a request. As the new GC, she’s looking to make her mark while addressing the unique challenges brought on by COVID. She’s tasked you with a critical mission: Discover how the corporate legal department can reduce outside counsel expenses.

This was the hypothetical scenario presented in a recent debate hosted by Buying Legal Council and Onit. Three teams of legal operations professionals examined how to accomplish this for this fictional company, which has $200 million in legal spend, a panel of 100-200 law firms and 75 internal staff in multiple countries. Here’s an overview of what each team proposed.

Team One: Bring More Work In-House

Members:

  • William Bremner, Sr. Director, Law Department Management, Consilio (captain)
  • Vianka Wong, Sr. Corporate Paralegal, Tronox
  • Roycee Hasuko, Director of Product Engagement, SimpleLegal

The first team proposed in-house staffing optimization, including work analysis and skills assessment, to preserve in-house positions while maximizing existing resources. This included a value review of all outside counsel work based on a level of complexity, quality and cost. Based on this research and resulting analytics, the team proposed a Legal Entity Management beta program that brought more work in-house and resulted in 60% program savings. When extrapolated to an entire year, the team found a potential for outside counsel savings of $34 million.

Team Two: Leverage Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) More

Members:

  • Robin Snasdell, Managing Director, Consilio (captain)
  • Jo Ellen Hatfield, Sr. Manager, Procurement Professional Services, Bunge Ltd.
  • Brad Rogers, COO and Chief of Staff, TIAA

Team Two determined that the best way to achieve savings with the lowest risk and better results is to leverage ALSPs. This “replacement cost revolution” relies on new firms offering alternative ways to get work done at a lower cost.  Lawyers spend 25% of their time below their license and permanent staff can eventually end up overqualified. The ALSPs offer numerous opportunities, including costing three to seven times less than in-house or law firms, instant access to talent and expertise and the ability to “plug and play” repetitive tasks with established and consistent performance metrics.

Team Three: Renegotiate Terms With Existing Outside Counsel

Members:

  • Silvia Hodges-Silverstein, Buying Legal Council (captain)
  • Greg Kaple, Sr. Director Legal Department, Kaiser Foundation
  • Richard Brzakala, Director Global Legal Services, CIBC

Team Three advocated for renegotiation to focus on transparency, partnership and innovation. In this scenario, the company’s relationship with firms goes beyond transactional work. However, there is still the need to balance the value of those relationships with the company’s fiscal responsibility to shareholders ahead of a potential economic downturn. The team recommends cost management actions such as a temporary moratorium on market-rate increases, budgeting, leveraging technology to reduce costs and an emphasis on working effectively and efficiently. As a result, cost savings could measure up to $1.75 million with information security mitigating against higher costs on items such as class action litigation and increased insurance premiums.

After a round of questions from GC judges Stasha Jain of Onit and Michael Flanagan of Consilio, debate attendees selected the winning team.

We won’t spoil the results here, but we do invite you to watch the recorded debate to learn about the strategy and tactics recommended by each team. Congratulations to all the teams on their insightful work.

This debate is part of  Lean Into LegalOps, a virtual learning and networking program for legal operations professionals worldwide. For notices of future educational events, sign up here.

Four Compelling Ways Corporate Legal Departments Use Matter Management and E-Billing Solutions

Posted on November 10, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Roughly 30 years ago, the idea of computers managing in-house matters and outside counsel billing was an appealing concept. Paper ruled those processes, with lawyers slogging through reams of bills and digging through filing cabinets for documents.

Thanks to advances in software, hardware, the cloud, mobile computing and more, matter management and legal e-billing solutions are now fundamental parts of corporate legal departments’ toolkits. The technologies help legal professionals understand data, create efficiencies and increase business contributions. With this in mind, here are four exciting ways in-house professionals are leveraging eBilling and matter management.

Workload Management

Internal time tracking for in-house legal professionals can shed light on the type of work lawyers and staff members are assigned and performing and enable immediate changes based on this data. With reporting, you can identify surface administrative versus substantive assignments, as well as unique, high-risk matters versus repetitive work. G.C.s can review data to ensure equitable matter staffing and projects. Such data may also be used to guide recruiting efforts, justify budgets and navigate future hiring.

Diversity and Inclusion  

In March 2019, more than 60 U.K. and European general counsel – including G.C.s from the GC 100 and the European G.C. association – signed a letter demanding more diversity from their law firms. The U.S. has also prioritized diversity, with G.C.s signing pledges and joining forces with law firms to jump-start new diversity-related innovations. Now, matter management and eBilling support the cause. Using these systems, in-house counsel can review demographic information on timekeepers from law firms. The data reveals how work was assigned, guides changes, allows monitoring of those changed practices and leads to a continual cycle of improvement.

The same tactic can be used in-house, with G.C.s reviewing internal staff to ensure they reflect the company’s efforts to move the needle on diversity and inclusion programs within the law department and across the overall company.

Proven Value

The pandemic has forced many companies to rethink and reset. As a result, initiatives arise to increase efficiency and control costs. Automation with matter management and eBilling supports both of those priorities, streamlining administrative work and decreasing the time it takes to complete work. By capturing the new efficiencies, time saved, advances in work made possible by time savings and increased output, corporate legal departments can align with corporate initiatives.

More importantly, matter management and legal eBilling solutions enable a legal team to justify why funds are being spent and effectively communicate and quantify how much risk was mitigated through legal spend. For example, consider a high-stake matter that may significantly impact a company and its abilities. In a situation like that, any amount of spend less than that value may be seen as a win.

Enterprise-Wide Operations

Corporate legal work stretches beyond the corporate legal department’s boundaries and across the entire enterprise, touching H.R., compliance, marketing, sales and more. Having a single platform for technology, including matter management and eBilling, allows corporate legal to use Apps to increase cross-departmental efficiencies and responsiveness. The Apps also encourage adoption since most of the users are already familiar with the platform and its solutions’ general look and feel.

This approach also enables a legal team to work cross-functionally and eliminate the “black box” perspective. Other groups can send information to legal for review and work with legal to appropriately engage outside counsel. Legal still has oversight but is also able to see broad risk management wins.

Here are a few examples of how Apps amplify the power of matter management and spend management:

  • An international automotive manufacturer uses an App to automate reporting for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act, reducing manual work and ensuring the company complies with the act.
  • A Fortune 500 global consumer products company relies on an App to centralize marketing challenge requests, increasing knowledge management and enabling analytics to understand the consistency and success rates of challenges.
  • One company uses an App to help manage all of the necessary business processes, reviews and approvals for the transfer of assets between portfolio companies and generates the legal documents needed to memorialize the transactions. As a result, the company can handle even more complex financial transactions with the same size staff.

Doubtless, use cases for matter management, legal e-Billing solutions and other vital legal operations systems will evolve as technology does. Automation, AI and more will continue to help legal operations further the efficiencies, insight and savings for their corporate legal departments. 

Many thanks go to Rodolfo Christophersen, Regional Legal Operations Manager of Mercado Libre, who joined Onit experts for this piece. It was originally posted on the International Legal Technology Association’s blog here.

Legal Tech Trends & Examples in Europe (and Beyond)

Posted on November 6, 2020 by - Business Process Management

In this Q&A, we’re speaking with U.K.-based Derek Southall, founder and CEO of Hyperscale Group Limited and an expert on legal tech trends. He talks with us about how technology is reshaping the delivery of corporate legal services in Europe and around the globe and the shifting relationship between law firms and corporate legal departments.

Q: Tell us a bit about your legal technology experience.

Southall: I started as a corporate finance lawyer and, in the late 1990s, moved into a role as partner and head of strategic development, looking at efficiency and how to use technology for the firm and its clients. After taking a break from corporate law, I started looking into technology developments at the time like case management, intranets, portals, and document assembly. They were crazy times. It was the dotcom boom with firms making huge claims. Law firms were starting to embrace technology and were getting themselves ready to make significant changes – some were saying they’d be supported by huge percentages of digital income within three years. A few wanted to “own the dealroom” while others claimed they would make all their know-how available to clients.

I was effectively appointed as one of the first innovation leaders at partner level in a law firm and commend my former firm for their vision and foresight. It was both a scary and hugely exciting time. You could not even hire people due to the demand from dotcoms.

However, 20 years down the road, sadly, we’re still dealing with a lot of the same issues. Many of the fears did not materialize and the momentum was slower than many expected once the dotcom bubble burst. I’ve realized that very few technologies have made a material difference in speeding up the delivery of law. Most tech is not legal tech but instead is tech – infrastructure tech and focused on storing information.

Q: Has legal technology changed drastically in the last decade?

Southall: It has, in other ways. Today you can break tech into three areas: digital basics, enabling tech and disruptive tech like AI and blockchain. Imagine it as an onion. It’s harder the closer you get to the outside. You have to get under the skin of legal and work cross-functionally with lawyers, which not all lawyers understand. These projects can’t be done for people. They need to be done with them and lawyer time is precious. Also, ROI is lower as you typically have a higher number of projects, each benefiting smaller numbers of people.

Law is a $900 billion global business, and most of the work is still delivered with manual processes. There is technology, but most of it stores information. Still, not much technology actually tackles the delivery of law. But we see a greater appetite for technology, even from lawyers who haven’t grown up with it. It is a huge opportunity.

Q: What are the top legal tech trends in the European legal community right now?

Southall: According to the latest figures, the legal tech market is worth about $15.6 billion, and $9.6 billion of that is corporate. Many new technologies, such as AI, are more beneficial to in-house teams than law firms as they have a greater corpus of similar documentation. The biggest priorities are around financial management, document and matter management and metrics. It’s about knowing who’s doing what work where. Also, there is a huge trend in terms of uptake in contract management as it goes straight to the top and bottom line.

More widely, I also see an increase in analytical tools as many countries are providing data under open licenses which can be exploited. Predictive analysis is becoming very real.

Law firms are in a difficult space. Many are full-service because they’re trying to support their clients as much as possible, but this means it is hard to really improve efficiency in every area. You might have 63 teams in 19 sectors and 18 jurisdictions. How do you prioritize that and help everyone in every market? Some firms have resorted to partnering and others are leveraging no and low code systems. Others are buying productized AI. It is a hard area though.

Q: What do you see happening in other markets?

Southall: Beyond the U.K. and U.S., you can find some great examples of innovation. Impressive things are coming out of Asia and Australia. Singapore has invested massively in driving its startup market. Legal tech is genuinely a global market. The U.S. and U.K. are only one piece of the equation.

Q: How do you see the law firm/corporate legal relationship changing in the next decade?

Southall: Law firms started putting in place best-in-breed technology before corporate did. Now corporate seems to be embracing technology at a faster rate, and that technology lends itself better to their needs. Law firms are ahead, but corporate seems to be accelerating much more quickly and will overtake law firms. The scope and ROI is often larger too.

Work given to firms by in-house legal may well diminish or at least change as their expectations for more efficient work and knowledge of technology increase. Corporations are heavily marketed to by software providers, raising the level of understanding the average in-house lawyer perhaps more so than in many private practice firms.  Virtually every major corporation will have an Alternative Legal Services Providor now , which will also perhaps take more of the routine work away from firms and firms are fighting back by launching their own.

Law firms will have to increasingly leverage tech to be more efficient and to interface with their clients’ systems and the increasing number of platforms emerging in the market. COVID has also accelerated everything and technology adoption at law firms is no exception. Firms wishing to attract the best talent in a post COVID world will also need to ensure they provide their people with the very best systems.

Legal work and how it’s delivered will look very different in the future. Those firms who get this right will reap the rewards in years to come, but sadly the reverse is always true. Someone said to me a year ago, “Why would a technologist want to work in law?” Given it is a $900 billion undigitized market, I would suggest it is a huge opportunity. What is there not to like for great technologists?

Many thanks to Derek for sharing his insight. If you’d like to contact him, you can reach him at [email protected] and www.hyperscalegroup.com.

One more note: If you’re interested in connecting with the greater in-house legal community to share experiences, lessons and successes, sign up to join Onit’s Lean into LegalOps program for Europe or the U.S.

 

How to Reduce Legal Hold Complexities During A Time of Zettabyte-Level Data

Posted on October 29, 2020 by - Business Process Management

As the amount of global data increases exponentially, so do the challenges related to the process of legal holds.

IDC predicts that worldwide electronic data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, with an average person creating and participating in up to 5,000 digital interactions a day.1 What does that amount of data look like? One publication explains it like this: “A single zettabyte will fill 1,000 datacenters or about 20% of Manhattan.”2

That’s a lot of data – especially for corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees and locations worldwide.

Now consider this amount of data in the context of a legal hold. When you combine the sheer amount of data with the fact that it exists on multiple systems, mobile devices, cloud-based solutions and in shared and private drives, it vastly complicates the process.

Yet, many companies still rely on email to manage legal holds.

Preserving Data

It’s now more important than ever to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) correctly  – especially when undergoing litigation.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e)3 states that:

If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court:

(1) upon finding prejudice to another party from loss of the information, may order measures no greater than necessary to cure the prejudice; or

(2) only upon finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation may:

(A) presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party;

(B) instruct the jury that it may or must presume the information was unfavorable to the party; or

(C) dismiss the action or enter a default judgment.

If ESI isn’t preserved in accordance to discovery, judges can impose monetary penalties or even rule against the party that lost the information.

The Importance of a Legal Holds Solution

Ideal legal holds solutions work on multiple levels. They enable corporate legal departments to notify custodians of their duty to preserve information in a timely manner while collecting and storing custodian acknowledgements, questions, preserve notices and data in a secure location. It also offers real-time tracking so team members know the status of collection requests, when actions were issued, which tasks are in progress and which legal actions require immediate attention. The tool should also create comprehensive dashboard views, allowing those involved to see when a custodian leaves an organization. From there, they can enable email archiving or suspend the destruction of data.

Automation plays a vital role in a legal holds solution. It relieves the burden of manual work with automated workflows that can be configured to match a company’s legal hold process. It also provides automatic notifications and reminders to support compliance.

Legal Holds Solution Benefits

Aside from these features, how does a legal hold solution benefit a corporate legal department?

First, they ensure compliance. Real-time dashboards, reports and audit trails ensure relevant data is collected and preserved – demonstrating that the proper care has happened to preserve and collect digital evidence. Processes supported by legal holds technology also demonstrate an appropriate level of diligence as automation reduces the chances for human error.

Next, when based on a low- or no-code platform, a legal hold solution enables a quick setup and deployment with little to no IT involvement, increasing time to value.

They also enhance overall visibility into the legal hold process, which is imperative for companies undergoing numerous cases. By being available on multiple browsers or devices, it allows easy access to information.

Finally, a legal holds solution can also reduce costs by tracking budgets and spend by matter, matter type or law firm.

Conclusion

Whether it is for one case or many, technology can reduce the complications of legal holds in today’s data-heavy business environment while minimizing risk. If you’d like to learn more about a legal holds solution, visit here.

 

1 IDC: Expect 175 zettabytes of data worldwide by 2025
2 Infographic: How Big Is a Yottabyte?
3 Discovery Sanctions under Amended Rule 37(e): A Safe(r) Harbor

 

Legal Department Operations: The Key to Better Partnerships Between In-House Legal Departments and Outside Counsel

Posted on October 27, 2020 by - Business Process Management

The prevalence and role of legal department operations have both expanded exponentially in recent years. While in-house legal departments once operated almost exclusively as silos within corporations, today these departments are undergoing a significant transformation in the face of expectations that they help drive their organizations’ value.

Legal operations is at the center of this transition, helping in-house departments implement the right processes, activities and staffing expansion to help grow their companies through effectively providing legal services.

“Organizations like the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium or the Association of Corporate Counsel had only had a few hundred legal operations members five years ago. Today, they count thousands of members among their ranks,” said Christine Juhasz (C.J.), head of legal operations for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. “There’s no question that legal operations professionals are connecting more as a community and, as a result, growing their skills and driving the legal operations conversation in new directions.”

That sophistication is paying off. More and more these days, law firms are actively aligning with law department legal operations to become better partners with the companies they serve. This offers many opportunities to deepen relationships between legal and business professionals, including law firm marketing and business development professionals.

In an effort to explore and foster deeper relationships with corporate legal clients, the Legal Marketing Association invited a panel of legal operations leaders to speak at its annual conference on October 22 which included C.J., Catherine Alman MacDonagh, J.D., CEO and founder of Legal Lean Sigma Institute LLC; Kate Villanueva, partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP; and Rhonda Oliver, account manager for Onit. The session, titled “How to Think Like a Legal Ops Professional,” shed light on how legal operations leaders think about engaging outside counsel.

“Legal marketers are challenged,” commented MacDonagh. “They’re the first to go through an RFP or tender papers carefully. They’re painfully aware that clients want factual information and data.”

An Innovative Approach for Stronger Legal Department Operations Partnerships

Legal department operations plays a large role in helping corporate legal departments understand processes, metrics and more. Though the struggle for law firms has historically been that they serve many clients at once, each has its own processes and ways of looking at things. By collaborating with legal operations, these firms can now map out processes for a given client much more quickly and efficiently than they could in the past, making it easier to manage several clients at the same time.

C.J. collaborated with the Legal Lean Sigma Institute to introduce Lean and Six Sigma process efficiencies into outside counsel relationships. The learning and practice of Lean principles evolved into a pilot project and then a mutually successful long-term relationship with Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. Part of the approach included a hybrid alternative fee arrangement that combined fixed fees and hourly components.

“Most law firms don’t even know that Lean Sigma is so valuable,” explained C.J. “We got in a room and memorialized processes. It was a long-term bet on Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath’s part, and it paid dividends for them. When the firm wants to discuss rates, there’s no debate. MassMutual saves more than 12% per matter each year under the arrangement, and the firm is locking in the business.”

As MacDonagh pointed out, “There’s increased pressure on corporate legal departments. They’re being measured and looking at net promoter scores internally. They need to be ever more efficient, and that trend will only continue. A collaborative approach to improving processes like this gives a law firm competitive advantages. If you’re a legal marketer or in business development, you’re uniquely positioned to help your firm emerge from this pandemic in an even better position. You should be approaching your clients with ideas like these and not waiting to be asked.”

The result of the Legal Lean Sigma approach was a powerful partnership between MassMutual and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath that never would even have been attempted five years ago. It also earned MassMutual a 2019 ACC Value Champion award and serves as a model for firms looking to better partner with the in-house departments they serve.

Technology and Transformation

Technology has also been at the forefront of transformations like these. Systems such as platforms and enterprise legal management enable legal department operations to capture, manage and report on valuable data.

“In the overall scheme of legal operations in achieving its objectives with less, technology has increasingly played a prominent role. Driving efficiencies and controlling costs in the legal department are being borne, to a significant degree, by well-chosen technology,” said Oliver.

Legal Department Operations Resources

Legal operations is critical to building solid partnerships with law firms in today’s legal market. Here are additional resources from the presenters for those who wish to learn more about legal operations management:

 

4 Core Benefits of the Leading Enterprise Legal Management Solutions

Posted on October 20, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In today’s fast-paced and quickly evolving business environment, corporate counsel and legal department professionals want to work faster, smarter and more efficiently. One of the best ways to do this is by automating manual processes with enterprise legal management solutions.

Manual processes are sneaky. They manage to irritate most knowledge workers but don’t always provoke a full-fledged resistance. The work has to get done, so the processes – which often include manual components – have to be completed as well.

However, the time spent on manual process accumulates drastically during a week. According to this survey, over 40% of workers spend at least 25% of their week on repetitive tasks and nearly 60% say they could save six or more hours a week with automation.

A Modern Approach to Enterprise Legal Management

Modern enterprise legal management solutions are systems of engagement, built on a platform that can easily accommodate new Apps and solutions to handle evolving business process needs. They employ automation, such as the review of documents and assigning tasks, to help law departments better serve their businesses while improving operational efficiency. While they provide valuable matter management and legal spend management, they aren’t limited to those solutions. The one-two punch of a platform combined with automation offers a  foundation for current and future needs, accommodating solutions such as contract lifecycle management, legal holds, Apps and more.

With this in mind, here are four simple, core benefits that an enterprise legal management solution can provide.

  1. Maximize Savings

Process automation with an enterprise legal management solution can cut operating costs by up to 90%, while at least 45% of current paid activities can be automated. It allows you to easily manage, track and analyze legal spend to minimize company risk and exposure. With these tools, legal departments can create visibility into spend and a strategy to manage it going forward.

  1. Increase Efficiency

An enterprise legal management solution drives process improvements in all areas of legal operations. It helps corporate legal realize more efficiency with reduced billing error fees, increases productivity and reduces time spent on matter management. Optimal enterprise legal management solutions are simple to configure, easy to deploy and address complex everyday problems.

  1. Enhance Collaboration

Collaborative tools are proven to have a high impact on businesses, regardless of department size or geographic location – especially now with a rise in remote working. A solution that supports and tracks the multiple contributions often associated with each piece of legal work improves collaboration between internal and external stakeholders. It also encourages greater collaboration across the enterprise, as corporate legal departments automate intake and speed response times with HR, procurement, compliance, marketing and more. Two items offered by modern enterprise legal management solutions enable all of this. First, they provide a consistent and familiar App-based interface, thanks to the platform. Second, a platform that allows unlimited users encourages higher usage and adoption in-house, across departments and with outside counsel.

  1. Simplify Work

With automation, enterprise legal management software streamlines the way lawyers and their legal staff work and get work into the department. It integrates data-driven decision making into standard work processes. It also offers an App-based approach to legal operations that breaks complex tasks into individual, task-based solutions and processes. Both elements simplify work drastically.

If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of enterprise legal management solutions, here are some helpful resources:

How DaVita’s Corporate Legal Department Stays Synced with Evolving Business Needs

Posted on October 15, 2020 by - Business Process Management

In its 23rd annual CEO survey, PwC found 83% of U.S. CEOs prioritize operational efficiencies to drive growth over the next 12 months. The pandemic has forced many businesses to reassess and pivot quickly – meaning that corporate legal departments have had to do the same to stay aligned with strategic initiatives. At the same time, they want to enact change and accommodate new workflows efficiently.

How can a corporate legal department enhance efficiency while quickly adapting to changing business needs? According to Daniel Lee, Director of Legal Operations – Technology & Analytics at DaVita, you need Apps. In this on-demand webinar, he shares how DaVita has invested in building apps to support what he calls “the other lanes” in the corporate legal department. As a result, they’ve streamlined workflows and accelerated change management for areas such as marketing intake and conflict waiver tracking.

Before and After Apps

For example, he describes the “before and after” of their process for reviewing marketing materials. Before, the legal team created and worked from color-coded spreadsheets and email tags – a process that demanded a lot of valuable time to maintain. The company’s legal operations team saw an opportunity to increase efficiency. Working with Onit’s workflow and business process automation platform as the foundation, they built a marketing intake process App. Marketers can request legal review online, uploading information needed for review. Then, the App automated the process, capturing work product, redlines and more. It also gave them weekly reports that help them calculate the type of work associated with these projects.

As a result, Daniel reported that they expect enhanced task management and collaboration, knowledge is stored in a system instead of shared mailboxes, metric generation is simplified and distribution automated.

A Platform Advantage

This is one example of how DaVita has increased efficiency. With Onit Apptitude as its technology platform, the corporate legal department has combined the power of an enterprise legal management solution with the ability to launch Apps to solve critical business challenges quickly. As a result, they can configure their workflows to their specific needs and data and reports are consolidated in one place to make reporting easier and more meaningful.

Apptitude minimizes the need for technical resources. It bridges the gap between technical and business users, providing a no-code platform and a visual drag-and-drop workflow builder with an intuitive visual interface for building and managing workflows. Plus, it allows an unlimited number of users, meaning other departments and contacts can use any Apptitude-powered app without having to incur costs.

In this recorded webinar, you can hear Daniel share the corporate legal department’s vision for enterprise legal management and how they use a platform and apps to supercharge efficiency.

Lean Into LegalOps

The DaVita webinar is one in a series of virtual learning and networking titled Lean Into LegalOps. The program, available in both the U.S. and Europe, brings Onit customers and the greater in-house legal community together to share experiences, lessons and successes through formal webinars, virtual discussions, customer demonstrations and more informal check-in calls. Join Lean Into LegalOps today to get periodic updates on upcoming events and new content, as well as invitations to the virtual events and bi-monthly check-in calls.