Category: Business Process Management

Are Legal Operations Professionals Ready to Hack the House? Hack, Yeah!

Posted on October 13, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The next time you’re tapping your iPhone or reviewing a contract on your MacBook Pro, you might want to thank hackathons.

In 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club met for the first time in Menlo Park, California. The group of technology enthusiasts – a group credited as the originator of hackathons – united to talk shop and Altair 8800, swap parts and share information on how to DIY computers. Members influenced by the club included … wait for it … Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who credited the organization with inspiring Apple’s founding.

Hackathons organized more concretely in 1999, with groups collaborating on cryptographic software and a program for Palm Vs. Throughout the years, hackathons have grown in size and frequency, creating companies including GroupMe and Zapier and finding new ways to solve problems. For example, one hackathon focused on discovering how digital technologies can support the epilepsy community. There’s even a company that operates a league for student hackathons.

What’s a Hackathon?

We hear the word a lot. While some may be quite familiar with it, others may not. So let’s define it. Hackathon is a meshing of “hack” and “marathon.” In a general sense, it’s a collaborative group that works together to solve problems using technology.  For example, Onit united with Consilio and Adobe earlier this year to create the Evergreen Donation Emergency Network (EDEN) for a hackathon to solve complex COVID-19 problems. The app, built on Onit Apptitude (a workflow and business process automation platform), connects donors with excess supplies to organizations in need. You can view the EDEN demo here.

Who can Participate?

Hackathons aren’t just for coders. The best results come when people with different strengths and backgrounds are involved. They bring their perspective to the project, which creates stronger results. For example, coders can build a workflow to solve a problem. Still, you need people with intimate knowledge of (for example) the corporate legal operations or process experts to ensure you get the best outcome.

Hack the House

Now, Onit continues to foster innovation with the launch of a new hackathon: Hack the House.

Sign up for Hack the House updatesHack the House, a collaboration with Cosmonauts, is a friendly competition between Onit customers, partners and staff to see who can build the most useful and compelling workflow and collaboration solution using Onit Apptitude.

Each team consists of legal and business experts, certified App Builders and project managers. The teams will have three weeks of virtual hackathon time to identify a challenge to solve, define requirements and build the solution.

Hack the House has of five teams, with each one focused on a particular challenge theme: Team IP, Team HR, Team Europe, Team Diversity and Team Pro Bono.

Once each team builds its solution, the Onit sales engineering team will help them put together a demo story and short video to highlight the solution’s strengths. A judging panel of in-house legal leaders and a public vote open to everyone will determine the winner.

That’s right – you can vote on which team should win. To keep tabs on the hackathon’s project, sign up for updates here. You’ll want to sign up soon because the team members will be released next week.

We’ll announce the winner in early December. Good luck to all the teams!

Workflow and Business Process Automation for Corporate Legal Operations

Corporate legal departments have used Onit Apptitude for years to build innovative solutions to solve enterprise challenges. More than 5,500 apps and 130 solutions have been built on Apptitude, with varying uses such as enterprise legal management, automating the TREAD reporting process and managing the necessary business processes, reviews and approvals for the transfer of assets between portfolio companies. You can read about all the different ways corporate legal has leaned on Apptitude here.

Remember, sign up for Hack the House updates. You’ll be hearing more soon!

Three Challenges to Anticipate – and Avoid – During Your Contract Lifecycle Management Technology Implementation

Posted on September 29, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Today, Onit welcomes Michael Stevens, managing director of Duff & Phelps, as a guest contributor and an expert in contract lifecycle management technology implementations. We announced last week that Duff & Phelps reached the Premier status of the Onit Strategic Alliances program. Duff & Phelps has been a trusted Onit partner since 2017, having worked on more than 20 projects in the U.S. and Europe across various industries such as pharmaceuticals, insurance, high-tech, oil and gas, manufacturing and more.

Managing contracts is a complicated business. The process for even just one contract may often spread across multiple companies, departments, stakeholders, versions and systems. Tracking progress and capturing feedback in spreadsheets and emails rely on manual updates.

And that’s just to get a contract signed.

The management must continue beyond execution to maintenance and renewal. If businesses are not diligent about receiving or delivering everything agreed upon, the advantages gained through negotiations will be forfeited.

More corporate legal departments are adopting contract lifecycle management technology, as evidenced by data and – in my case – experience in the industry. First, workloads are increasing. I’ve heard and seen this during my corporate legal work, but numerous surveys have verified this trend. Second, COVID-19 has impacted general counsel, with this report showing that 67% of general counsel participants consider contracts as a top legal risk in the wake of the pandemic. Finally, let’s look at the numbers. Analysts anticipate that the global software market for contract lifecycle management software will reach $2.4 billion by 2024, growing at a rough rate of 14%.

Altogether, these statistics and trends set the stage for large-scale adoption of contract lifecycle management solutions.

I’ve worked with corporate legal departments on technology implementations for more than 30 years and on over 50 contract lifecycle management technology implementations. My colleagues at Duff & Phelps and I have compiled some of the top challenges to implementation and how to address them.

  1. Legacy Data Migration

There are significant benefits in migrating at least the current active contracts into a contract lifecycle management software and removing them from existing repositories. First, it creates a one-stop shop for users to find existing contracts and request new ones. Second, when doing a new amendment, it is essential to have the original contract and all existing amendments readily available to be able to file the new amendment appropriately. Identifying all existing repositories of contracts is a critical step.

  1. Integrations with Other Business Systems

Every contract documents a business transaction that is being executed by one or more business groups. Those business transactions are often managed in one or more business systems. For example, a sales opportunity may start in the customer relationship management (CRM) system, which leads to the need for a contract. Once the sales contract is signed, order processing and fulfillment may be managed in different systems. For a sales contract, you may wish to integrate with both the upstream CRM system and the downstream order management and/or ERP systems. It is crucial to define all the contract types you wish to automate in the contract lifecycle management software and the corresponding business systems that govern those transactions.

  1. Counterparty Source of Truth (Master Data)

To integrate with other business applications or share useful data with the rest of the company, it is beneficial to integrate with a company-designated source of truth for counterparties. This is a directory of customers, vendors, suppliers and other companies that the target company does business with. Here are the key questions when exploring whether your company has a single source of truth for counterparty and whether it will be useful for contract management.

  • Is there a single source of truth for ALL counterparties or separate sources for customers vs. vendors/suppliers vs. partners/other types of counterparties? Some companies maintain different directories for customers and venders/suppliers. The challenge with separate sources of truth by counterparty type is that sometimes the same company is both a vendor and a customer, thus creating duplication.
  • Do all geographies/business units share the same source(s) of truth? If not, this creates the same duplication problem as above.
  • Does the source of truth contain prospective counterparties and not just approved/active customers and vendors? If it does not contain prospective counterparties, this is problematic for contract lifecycle management software because you need to be able to enter into NDAs and start contract negotiations for other types of contracts with prospective counterparties.
  • Does the source of truth use counterparty legal entity as the foundational data element, and does it capture the relationship between parent and subsidiary legal entities of the counterparty? This is important because contracts are with legal entities of counterparties, not bill-to or ship-to addresses, which are secondary attributes of legal entities. Also, knowledge of the counterparty’s legal entity structure is useful because contracts are often written to allow subsidiaries to operate under the contract with the parent company.
  • How good is the data in the source of truth, and is there a data governance protocol?

Visit here to learn how Duff & Phelps can analyze and enhance how your company manages contracts throughout a lifecycle.

To learn more about reducing costs and increasing profits by automation the contract lifecycle, visit Onit Contract Lifecycle Management. 

About our Guest Author 

Michael Stevens is a managing director of Duff & Phelps and has been helping global companies improve contracting processes and systems for the majority of his career. Stevens is a part of the Duff & Phelps practice group that helps clients with a range of operational improvement and compliance initiatives including contract management, information/document management and governance, legal department operations, intellectual property and merger and acquisition integration.

The Global Spread of Data Privacy Regulations and Their Potential Effect on Legal e-Billing

Posted on September 24, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Gartner estimates that 50% of the world’s population will have personal information covered under local privacy regulations similar to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) within two years. Indeed, governments worldwide, including Australia, Canada and Brazil, are creating new privacy laws or updating existing ones. States in the U.S. are actively legislating in favor of this, with California, Maine and Nevada enacting comprehensive privacy laws.

While this represents a positive to individuals’ data protection, it adds a layer of complexity for companies working across states and countries. Jane A. Bennitt, founder of Global Legal Ebilling and president of the LEDES Oversight Committee for 14 years, talks with us about a development in European Data Privacy that directly impacts legal e-billing.

Q: Tell us about your e-billing and technology experience.

Bennitt: I have nearly a quarter-century of hands-on experience in implementing legal technology, and my specialty is global e-billing. Regularly I work with law departments, insurance claims organizations, law firms and vendors needing assistance with workflows, compliance, automation and metrics. With the nature of my job, I research rules and regulations which apply to electronic invoicing for my clients.

Q: What did you discover recently when looking into EU data privacy laws?

Bennitt: The U.S. government routinely requests information on users from large corporations like Google, Facebook and others. Based on a case out of Ireland, the European court has invalidated the data privacy shield that allows the transfer of personal information on EU citizens to U.S.-based servers. Contractual-based data transfer from the EU to U.S.-based servers is still allowed, which is fortunate because that is the basis for data transfer in legal e-billing. But that also may be challenged in courts.

Q:  What are the implications for corporate legal departments?

Bennitt: Data privacy litigation is hot across the globe. More countries are considering and enacting stricter data privacy regulations, and it is not limited to the EU. I predict there will be a time when there are similar requirements all over the world. The California Consumer Protection Act, which went into effect on 1 Jan 2020, offers protections modeled on GDPR, for example. These regulations provide more comprehensive protections than seen previously,  especially with GDPR. We’ve seen companies hit with massive fines for non-compliance with GDPR and we will see more in the near future.

If your corporate legal department is involved in e-billing and cross-border operations, find out where your e-billing data is hosted. You may need to consider storing e-billing data on multiple global servers in jurisdictions with stringent data privacy regulations. If you’re based in Europe, have a server in Europe. If you’re in Brazil, have your data stored in Brazil or South America.

Q: What advice do you have for corporate legal departments?

Bennitt: I’m not a lawyer, but here are common-sense steps to take to protect your e-billing and its data:

  • Talk with your e-billing vendor and find out the steps they have taken or are considering regarding compliance to regulations such as the GDPR.
  • Reach out to corporate counsel and look at your contracts. Make sure you have covered all the bases for contractual-based data exchange with your e-billing vendor. Also, consider your employee contracts to ensure they allow for the collection of this type of information that may survive their employment tenure.
  • Contracts between legal e-billing vendors and their clients should identify the type of personal data collected and include a clause allowing data transfer.
  • Outside Counsel Guidelines should similarly identify the personal data collected and grant permission for this collection.
  • Companies should proactively explore options if contractual-based data transfers are invalidated. Better yet, work with your e-billing vendors. It’s better to work proactively.

Thanks so much to Jane for sharing her insights into e-billing and regulation trends. If you’d like to contact her, you can reach out via LinkedIn or email.

To learn more about legal e-billing and legal spend management from Onit, visit here. 

A Legal Industry Expert Shares Secrets for a Successful Corporate Legal Department Metrics Program

Posted on September 22, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

How can corporate legal departments assess performance in an objective, tangible and quantified manner? According to Mary Jummati, managing director of Morae, the answer lies with setting up a metrics program. She dropped by our virtual podcast studio to discuss corporate legal department metrics, technology’s role and the best-kept secrets for a successful metrics program.

Mary helps improve organizational performance of legal operations through technology and has more than 25 years of experience in strategic planning, leadership, project and program management, software selection, enterprise software implementation and change management. She believes in serving the legal community in the most foundational way possible—by helping clients solve complex problems.

In short, she knows what she’s talking about.

In the podcast, Mary discusses how a formal corporate legal department metrics program:

  • Articulates business impact
  • Promotes understanding of the work performed within the corporate legal department
  • Helps inform data-driven decisions

Morae and Onit – A Winning Partnership

Morae is a valued Onit partner that brings a deep understanding of how attorneys work to Onit implementations – especially with a platform approach.  As Mary explains in the podcast, “The biggest thing our clients see when implementing Onit is the visibility into the reporting and metrics using the dashboard. It makes it easy to analyze and evaluate performance against budget and to see trends across your matter portfolios. The platform allows you to tell that story in a very meaningful way like never before.”

Take, for example, Pearson. The company partnered with Onit and Morae to create a transformational shared service center to support commercial transactions worldwide for more than 10,000 users. Powered by contract lifecycle management technology and Apptitude platform from Onit and Morae’s expertise, Pearson achieved a 30 percent improved contract turnaround time. As a result, the company earned the prestigious ACC Value Champion Award from the Association of Corporate Counsel. You can hear about their journey here.

Many thanks to Mary for joining our podcast.

To hear her podcast, visit here.

To hear more episodes of the Onit podcast, visit here.

More Data and New Legal Technology Will Force Lawyers to Expand their Digital Skillsets

Posted on September 22, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Data proficiency has become a “must-have” for law firms, as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) continue to change the legal profession forever. Categorizing the sheer amount of data housed in legal databases, automating standard tasks such as due diligence and contract reviews are all much easier and more accurate with legal AI solutions.

It’s also important to understand how these advances in legal technology and increasing adoption will impact junior legal workers, whether it be the latest class of incoming lawyers fresh off the bar exam, or graduates outside of law school being recruited to man the new legal data infrastructure.

As Alex Smith of Reed Smith points out, not being equipped with skillsets in data analysis will soon be a barrier to getting legal jobs at all, as will the lack of core technical knowledge. This alone should be enough to convince today’s law students to seek technical training as part of their curriculum, but there’s more to it.

As Smith notes, the demand for graduates in STEM fields, as opposed to traditional law school graduates, will only increase as firms and legal divisions look to stay ahead of the curve and meet market demand. It won’t be unheard of for math, science and engineering graduates to be brought in to help develop and maintain legal databases and technology tools.

That being said, the junior legal class of today still has time to build up their digital proficiencies and better understand where the market is going. Part of this is understanding what legal advising means in this digital day and age. At the very least, anyone in a legal role will need to know the legal and privacy implications of technology.

You might look at this picture and assume it means far less junior-level positions will be in the mix due to automation, but that’s not the case at all. A recent report by consultancy firm AlphaBeta says only 15% of work conducted by legal professionals will be automated by 2030, much less than fields like mining or construction. The Law Society of England and Wales even points to an increase in hiring of junior legal staff members, largely as a means to parse through all the data being generated by digital tools.

Jean Yang, our VP of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, had a proof point earlier in her career that demonstrated the importance of automating tasks through technology. One of her assignments in her first year as a junior lawyer was repetitive, manual and time consuming, so as an experiment she asked a developer she knew to write some code to automatically complete parts of the tasks, which she then went back and manually reviewed.

This test turned a five-day task into a two-day task and left her ample time to consider the substantive issues in the case, and tackle things from a more strategic level. Having this time to work on client needs was beneficial for her growth, which is something junior legal team members are always hungry for.

It’s only a matter of time before law firms start to search for graduates who can help them merge technology and the law, both putting the pressure on law schools to train their students in a broader range of skills and opening opportunities for grads who are tech-savvy and adaptive. Keep in mind, this marriage of worlds goes the other way too, with STEM jobs increasingly needing soft skills like good judgment, decision making, deductive reasoning, critical thinking and problem solving that legal graduates have in spades. In short, it’s time to bridge law and STEM and take advantage of them, before the field gets too crowded.

Interested in learning more about legal automation? Hear how Pearson used automation to transform legal service delivery.

The New Landscape of Process Automation

Posted on September 15, 2020 by - Business Process Management

Disruptive forces have a way of making companies reevaluate their business models.

At the beginning of 2020, many businesses were already dabbling in reevaluating their operations. Once the COVID pandemic hit, that reevaluation took on a new focus and priority. One question quickly dominated companies across all industries: How can I optimize my deliverables from both a process and a tool perspective to make them more efficient and better deliver them to my customers?

If the pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that they need a more fluid business operating model. Companies that adapted quickly survived, while those who didn’t – or couldn’t – suffered. This has been true across industries, whether we’re talking about automotive, banking, hospitality or anything else. Every industry has operating process models connected to traditional business systems that make up their value chain.

Today, rather than creating specific new workflows to address current realities, operating processes and workflows need to be put into an intelligent process automation platform that can adapt to whatever disruptions arise. An intelligent process automation platform offers the agility to solve even the most novel business problems that arise. For example, corporate legal can be empowered to collaborate within departments and across an entire enterprise to implement the business model you need to meet today’s challenges.

When implementing changes to your current business model, it’s essential to keep a customer-centric focus. Despite disruptions, you want to continue to deliver the maximum quality services and products to your customers. One critical way to make that happen is through business process automation. When the pandemic hit, many companies were able to optimize and automate processes on the IT side of things, but they struggled to do the same for the business side. AI-driven process management allows you to introduce efficiency and predictability that complement your existing business operations and adapt to whatever disruptions arise.

One of my colleagues at Forrester coined a term that is reshaping knowledge work: Enterprise Service Management (ESM). ESM brings efficiency, predictability, and automated workflows to everyday business operations across all departments of an organization, not just IT.

Take, for example, how our corporate legal customers use our workflow and intelligent process automation platform, Onit Apptitude. Apptitude enables the ability to track work to approve, facilitate, automate and drive operations. It supports collaborative services across departments, automates departmental handoffs, and provides businesses with more predictability to know when efficiency needs to be increased as demand surges, observe trends and improve processing efficiency in the future.

We recently published our Onit Apptitude Solutions Catalog, which gives real-world examples of how corporate legal customers embrace intelligent process automation and  ESM. One large company created an App to manage all of the necessary business processes, reviews and approvals to transfer assets between portfolio companies. It also generates the legal documents needed to memorialize the transactions. As a result, the efficiency the App generates makes it easier for the staff to handle higher volumes of these complex financial transactions in less time. Another global corporate legal department uses an Onit-based App as a policy endorsement drafting portal. Insurance underwriters can submit policy endorsement drafts for review and approval, saving time and improving response rates with self-service and automation.

To date, we have 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions built on Onit Apptitude and users on multiple continents using this technology.

Legal operations (also referred to as legal ops) is an important emerging domain and a critical piece in your digital value chain. To function in today’s demanding environment and navigate the uncertainties that continue to rise, organizations need to capitalize on a scalable workflow and intelligent process automation platform that supports not only legal but all of their digital enterprise functions. Your platform now becomes the link between digital and operations to deliver your brand promise. Organizations with any vertical can benefit from formalizing work, increasing access to systems, validating and tracking information, and coordinating knowledge workers across departments. This means automating business functions like legal operations now becomes a critical and connected component in your value chain that adapts to challenges and thrives in disruptive times.

Here are three ways to learn more about business process automation:

  • Sign up for this upcoming webinar, featuring Daniel Lee, Director Of Legal Operations – Technology & Analytics for DaVita. In it, he will discuss the power of a business process automation platform for enterprise legal management. (Thursday, September 17, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. CDT)
  • Check out this blog post, which shares how legal operations professionals have solved business process challenges with Onit Apptitude.
  • Listen to this on-demand webinar, Transforming Legal Service Delivery And Enabling Self-Service At Pearson. Robert Mignanelli, SVP, Associate General Counsel, Global Product/Technology, Pearson plc, shares the company’s transformative journey to move from a highly bespoke legal services model into a more standardized and streamlined way of delivering support to the business.

Top 5 Contract Negotiation Strategies

Posted on September 10, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Negotiation and compromise are a part of our everyday lives; whether it’s at home or a business situation. Contract negotiation is a discussion between parties with the desire to reconcile or resolve conflicting priorities in a written legal document. This can be a challenging task, especially when considering the risk or benefit of being too passive or aggressive in your discussions and how that might impact the bottom line.

Whether you’re an amateur or veteran, here are some strategies to keep in mind when negotiating your next contract:

  1. Set the Scope of Your Negotiation

It is important to be involved in setting the agenda of the negotiation. This could involve the method, forum, location, time, topics and the overall terms. By taking an active role, you can set topics of discussion that can protect and advance your interests.

  1. Understand the Counterparty

It is important to research your negotiating counterpart and consider what issues are important to them before you enter the conversation. Having more information and background allows you to predict what factors will be important and what they’ll likely ask for, so you can be prepared to respond accordingly.

  1. Identify Your Best and Worst Case Scenario

Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want from the agreement. Consider which parts of your contract are the most important to you or your company and identify what is your best or worst-case scenario. For example, ask yourself: which contract terms are non-negotiable for me? Which contract terms would be acceptable to compromise on? Highlight these legal issues in the agreement and work your way through the discussion one issue at a time. This exercise will help you prioritize your interests by keeping your eyes on the prize and avoid getting distracted by issues less important to you.

  1. Find Your Middle Ground

Prior to entering contract negotiations, you should set ambitious goals that you believe the other side will not agree to. This creates opportunities for concessions, showing the other side that you can compromise. For example, typically any first offer will be high and not realistic, so the party will expect that you will provide a counteroffer; this process may happen a few times before you find the acceptable middle ground. This exercise will allow you to make concessions that will not ultimately jeopardize your position and give you space to barter on issues of greater importance to you.

  1. Use Collaborative Language

In order to have productive contract negotiation discussions, you should see the counterparty as a collaborator rather than a villain. It’s a good idea to strike a collaborative tone and always attempt to end discussions on a positive note to maintain a professional relationship. For example, ask questions when reviewing the contract like “What’s the purpose behind this?”, “Could you explain what your intention was here?”, and “What about this alternative?” Showing your proactive efforts to work toward a constructive solution will help close the deal sooner.

Reviewing and drafting contracts take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. With ever-increasing pressure to do more with less, improving contract efficiency through automation represents a significant opportunity to improve business performance. Learn how artificial intelligence can help you automate and manage a contract’s lifecycle.

Checklist: Importance of Contract Lifecycle Management

Posted on September 8, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that people don’t realize how manual it actually is.

This is especially the case for contract management.

Many corporations rely on manual processes to handle contracts, leaning on paper, spreadsheets and email. While it lets you work in programs you use every day, it also means you’re cutting and pasting information into templates, entering data, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and saving items to multiple drives.

The process is a nuisance, yes. But it also invites risks, such inconsistent legal language, a lack of insight into content and status and an inability to anticipate and accommodate renewal data, pricing changes and emerging legal requirements. (We break down more challenges regarding manual contract management in this blog post if you’d like to read more about them.)

What’s the new evolution of contract management?

A contract lifecycle management solution.

It allows companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. It eliminates data silos, automates workflows and reduces the overall time spent. Studies have shown that businesses with a streamlined contract lifecycle management process can compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks and increase customer satisfaction. In short, a contract lifecycle management solution contributes value.

Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions Checklist: How to Vet a CLM Solution

How can you pick the best solution? Start with this checklist to ensure that the solutions you’re vetting offer you the features that work best with your corporate legal department.

  • Collaboration – A secure collaborative capability facilitates editing and communication among team members.
  • Client and partner self-service – Highly intuitive, streamlined portals give authorized individuals access to commonly used contract templates and verbiage.
  • Easy-to-access requests – These allow anyone within the corporation to initiate the contract process. They don’t have to set up an account.
  • A central repository – A single source for all contracts and associated documentation means no more searching for information.
  • E-sign capabilities – Timely signatures are vital to the contract process. Users should be able to sign contracts electronically and manage them within the contract lifecycle management software. It should integrate with tier-one e-signature solutions. Upon completion, the solution should automatically store the contract in the central repository with all of the expected notifications without any additional intervention.
  • Routing and approval – The technology should enable the easy building of configurable workflows to route contracts for review and/or approval.
  • Human-centric user interfaces – The system should be intuitive and lightweight, requiring little to no training.
  • Microsoft Word integration – Word is used extensively in creating contracts. An integration with Word captures changes and notes as they occur to contracts, speeding up the entire process.
  • Notifications – Proactive alerts such as notifications or reminders should be sent by the technology as the contract progresses through its lifecycle.
  • Enterprise contract management – The software should manage sell-side, buy-side and corporate contracts.

Are you interested in learning more? Download this white paper: “What to Expect from a Contract Lifecycle Management Solution.” You can also read more about Onit Contract Lifecycle Management or request a demo.

Filling the App Gap: How Process Builder Makes it Easier for Corporate Legal to Automate Processes

Posted on September 3, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

According to a McKinsey survey, the use of automation has increased by roughly 10% compared to two years ago. Participants who reported high levels of success often attributed it to the fact that their companies made automation a strategic priority.

Earlier this week, Onit announced the availability of its Solutions Catalog (now available online here.) The catalog shares more than 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions, all built by Onit customers, partners and employees on the Apptitude platform. The Apps reach beyond the legal department to automate critical business processes, extending into HR, IT, accounting, sales, procurement and more. As a result, legal operations innovators have increased transparency, saved time and ensured compliance with governmental regulations and internal guidelines.

The progress made over a decade is astounding, as hundreds of thousands of users worldwide rely on Apps and solutions built on Onit Apptitude to streamline processes.

However, we wanted to make it easier to create Apps.

Introducing Onit Process Builder

The latest version of Onit Apptitude, released in August, bridges the gap between technical and business uses and simplifies the creation of new workflows. Process Builder, the new interface for Apptitude, provides a visually-oriented, drag-and-drop-friendly workflow-building interface. The new configuration tool empowers Onit Apptitude developers (our Onit Nation) to build workflows much faster. Process Builder was designed from the ground up with ease of use as its primary goal. As a result, it benefits both experienced Apptitude Developers and those who are brand new to building.

Join Us for Apptitude Training

Learn more about Process Builder by joining us for Apptitude certification classes.

Whether you’re simplifying a contract management process, building a full-featured e-billing or matter management system, or implementing a custom process, it is valuable to learn Apptitude’s many workflow tools and configuration options. The Apptitude certification track takes a vertical-agnostic approach, focusing on the key concepts required to work with Apptitude’s many automation and metadata management tools.

You can find classes and schedules here.

 

One Platform, Limitless Opportunities: How Legal Operations Pros Solve Business Process Challenges

Posted on September 1, 2020 by - Business Process Management

There are more than 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. And they’re interested in learning what other lawyers are doing – especially when it comes to technology and legal operations. Whether through networking, industry organizations like CLOC or ILTA or on-the-fly discussions in (virtual) hallways, they make connections to explore legal innovation and how it can work for them.

One of the latest areas of interest is automation. According to the CLOC 2020 State of the Industry report, a high priority for most corporate legal departments is automating legal processes. As automation continues within the department, innovators are quickly realizing that they can automate beyond legal. Each day, in-house counsel and legal operations professionals work with departments across their enterprises like sales, HR, accounting, procurement and more. The automation potential is limitless and promises substantial results in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.

With this in mind, we are thrilled to announce the release of our Onit Solutions Catalog.

The catalog represents more than 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions built on our workflow and business process automation platform Apptitude. Developed by Onit customers, partners and employees (aka the Onit Nation), the catalog reveals innovative approaches corporate legal departments have taken to automate business processes in legal operations and across departments.

As our CEO and co-founder, Eric M. Elfman, explains it: “If there’s a use case, Apptitude can automate it.”

Apps that Reach Beyond Legal

Examples of innovative Apps built on Apptitude include:

  • TREAD Report – One of the largest automotive manufacturers uses Onit 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.
  • Trade Association Approval and Management – This App, created by a Fortune 500 company, manages memberships, renewals and spend for trade associations worldwide. By adding transparency and reporting to the process, the company drives more value from association participation and greater accountability that lowers costs.
  • Fund Management – This App helps 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. Now, a company can facilitate higher volumes of these complex financial transactions with the same size staff.
  • Policy Endorsement Drafting Portal – With this App, insurance underwriters can submit policy endorsement drafts for review and approval, saving time and improving response rates with self-service and automation.
  • Marketing Challenges – A leading global consumer products company uses Onit to centralize challenge requests from emails to a single location, increasing knowledge management and enabling analytics to understand the consistency and success rates of challenges.

A Worldwide Platform

More than 400 customers, including 57 Fortune 500 corporations, use Onit’s Apptitude platform. It is highly configurable and scalable and supports hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. The recent launch of its new visually oriented, drag-and-drop-friendly, workflow-building interface Process Builder dramatically simplifies the creation of workflows and business logic for all users – regardless of technical proficiency.

This latest version of Apptitude offers features such as 200+ out-of-the-box workflow actions, unlimited end-user licensing, and an intuitive interface that creates a workflow visualization before it is even finished.

Next steps

If you’re an Onit customer interested in learning more about the Onit Solution Catalog, contact your account manager or email [email protected]. For anyone else, please request access via [email protected].

To see how one corporate legal department used Apptitude, view this webinar: TIAA: Transforming Operations and Driving Innovation with a Platform Technology Strategy.

To see Apptitude in action, you can request a demo here.