Category: Business Process Management

The Legal Operations “Crystal Ball:” Eight Things to Expect

Posted on July 10, 2018 by - Business Process Management

In our new white paper, Legal Operations: Transforming the Legal Ecosystem, we explore the world of legal operations and how technology is clearly a driving force in the landscape today.

“Running corporate in-house legal departments like a business is quickly gaining traction.” Those words spoken by Connie Brenton, co-founder of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), are not to be taken lightly. What it means to run a legal department like a business and how it’s accomplished were the questions that drove the creation of CLOC to begin with, and now the original “book club,” as the founders called it, has morphed into an international organization of legal professionals. Legal operations managers are now found in more and more legal departments of all sizes – not only in the Fortune 500s; another sign that legal operations is here to stay.

In the overall scheme of legal operations in achieving its objectives, 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 solutions, and legal operations managers who understand this are taking action.

Our white paper also investigates current trends in legal operations. Looking at current trends is always a good thing and a component of due diligence. But if we had the proverbial crystal ball, wouldn’t it be even better to see the future? Though we know that’s not possible, we can make educated assumptions and predictions based on current trends. We believe the future of legal operations will reveal eight things that should be on our radars now: 1

  1. An even greater reliance on legal operations
  2. More legal operations professionals hired than ever before
  3. A growing focus on the legal sector as it relates to legal operations
  4. Legal operations professionals will evolve to become the link between legal and the business
  5. Legal operations will likely segment and specialize to meet business demands
  6. Legal operations pros will be better positioned to help legal understand business and vice-versa
  7. Legal will then become a welcome corporate citizen, collaborating with the business
  8. As legal operations grows, the legal department won’t rely solely on its internal operational practices. It will be sharing best practices with peers across the industry.

 

1 Deloitte: The Legal Department of the Future: How disruptive trends are creating a new business model for in-house legal, 2017

How Technology is Transforming the Legal Ecosystem

Posted on June 27, 2018 by - Business Process Management

In our new white paper, Legal Operations: Transforming the Legal Ecosystem, we explore the world of legal operations and how technology is changing the landscape.

There is increasing pressure to run the legal department like a business. General counsel generally do not have the time to make this happen. This is where legal operations professionals come in — to handle the management of vendors, systems, strategic planning, technology, knowledge, financial issues and the myriad other tasks that plague the department. Legal operations is all about optimizing the legal department’s ability to grow the company. Legal operations is a multi-disciplinary function that optimizes legal services delivery to a business or government entity by focusing on twelve core competencies, as seen in the graphic below. The competencies are divided among three levels: foundational, advanced and mature. Almost every legal department function is covered, including vendor management, technology and process support, service delivery and litigation support.

CLOC's 12 Core Competencies

Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons that legal operations is important and is growing so quickly. Its impact now and in the future is almost like a tidal wave that’s hitting legal departments across the industry; but in the best of ways. Legal operations professionals are now managing outside vendors, implementing technology, overall legal spend and many other aspects of the legal department. And it’s not only in the Fortune 500 companies (as it was a few years ago); smaller companies are saddling up for the ride of their lives as well. Many believe, and rightfully so, that legal operations will be responsible for some of the biggest changes in the legal ecosystem in years to come.

Download this white paper to learn more about:

  • Market trends and the future of the industry
  • How technology is driving change
  • Onit’s strategic alignment with CLOC
  • How Onit’s platform can help legal departments gain a lasting digital transformation

 

7 Best Practices of Business Process Automation and Digital Transformation

Posted on June 19, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

As corporate legal departments search for better ways to work, the topic of business process automation (BPA) and digital transformation is becoming hotter than ever. Improving efficiency, exceptional user experience and reducing costs are top priorities for savvy companies and should be strategic priorities.

There are numerous best practices out there in the world of BPA and digital transformation. Here are some of our top ones to consider: 1

  1. Start with what you have. Already have a few processes outlined? Great! Start building from there. Are all your processes just “in your head”? That’s okay, too. Over the course of a typical business day, start writing down everything you do. Soon, you’ll start to notice process patterns emerging, as well as common bottlenecks.
  2. Don’t assume automation will fix all your problems. Yes, automating common processes can save you time and money, but only if the processes you have in place are effective. A bad process will not improve with automation.
  3. Root out waste. Look for the root cause of the business problem to discover and nullify inefficiencies.
  4. Assess what you have. Log your current BPA capabilities and note what is missing regarding requirements, 
so you only invest in missing technologies and avoid unnecessary duplication.
  5. Start with business needs and build out. Track the business requirements and use them to build your functional requirements accordingly. Use functional needs to develop technical requirements and assign these to your existing technology sets.
  6. Go mobile. Investigate mobile and cloud technologies, including mobile apps, that may provide solutions for your present needs and help stakeholders and remote staff in your processes. Take the time before implementing these technologies to understand how they will align with your current enterprise applications. Remember, BPA can also play the role of the integrating mechanism.
  7. Build in real-time optimization. Adopt an ongoing improvement program that will continuously monitor and optimize changes in real time. BPA is not a “one and done” project. Successful BPA requires an ongoing, cross-functional effort from all stakeholders.

To learn more about business process automation, download our white paper.

1 Brian Hughes: “How Business Process Management Will Change Your Small Business,” Huffington Post, July 2016

Learn Why Clients Love Onit!

Posted on June 6, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

Onit’s new company video encapsulates what Onit is all about: we love our product and empowering customers with a better way to work. It also offers a snapshot of how Onit is positioned to help businesses and legal departments create better processes with smarter operations and technology. Of course, we wanted our new video to “look” and “sound” great, but we can back up every claim. The words in the video are based on solid facts and resounding customer success.

Lucky for us, Onit’s clients are not shy about telling the world about our products. Have a look at some of the things they say about us:

 

Anna-Lisa Corrales, General Counsel, North America Jaguar Land Rover

“What’s unique about the way Onit solutions work in the background with different data sets is that as you decide different categories of data, you can add these tabs along a horizontal line. It was just differently organized than other systems we had seen, and we really liked it, because all of the information was at our fingertips. And in today’s highly connected world, where information is spread across devices and in the cloud, that is more important than ever.” Read more in this case study.

 

Gary Tully, Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

“One of the cool technologies that I think doesn’t get a lot of press is workflow technology. We see this in titles like Thinksmart and Onit. When I think about the purpose of legal operations, it’s to deliver legal services efficiently and effectively… And legal operations professionals are aligned with identifying redundant processes and recommending improvements. Workflow technology is a way to automate those processes, reduce redundancy and execute quickly.”  Read more in this Corporate Counsel article.

 

Lauren Giammona, Director of Operations, Business Affairs & Legal, PayPal

“PayPal is a technology company with many legal department employees familiar with technology. It needed a tool that was powerful rather than just easy to adopt – a tool that augments the people and processes in place rather than displaces them. We really focused on a system that provided more of the back-end and the analytics that we needed. … We sacrificed some of the UI, the ease-of-use, and some of our law firms liking the old system better to get to the data that we needed. The team enhanced spend management capabilities to enable the ops team to work smarter, depreciating matter management systems like spreadsheets and SharePoint lists in favor of one ELM system of record that actually allowed for creating common processes and automation.” Read more in this case study.

 

David Cambria, Global Director of Operations – Law, Compliance and Government Relations ADM

“The creation of the ADM Law Firm Alliance was complex, and it was achieved in no small part through the power of technology – including a major upgrade to the company’s matter-management system (by Onit), with provided sorely-needed data to help make better spend decisions.” Read more in this case study.

 

Dana McDonald, Senior Counsel, Under Armour

“Onit has proven a great partner both in terms of its product features and the customer service support the Onit team provides. Onit provides a very nimble product that can be quickly modified and adapted for various business needs. This is not the case with the other products we considered in this space. My experience of Onit is that they are motivated not only to sell their product at the outset but to continue to improve the product and ensure customer success in the adoption and use of the product. It’s been a great experience so far.”

 

Those are just a few of our client testimonials, and the theme is almost always the same. Onit provides a nimble, powerful, cutting-edge product that empowers the customer with a better way to work – because it’s designed for the way people work. Our products have reached this rare level of excellence not only because of hard work and adhering to best practice, but because over the years customers have told us exactly what they want.

Onit Debuts New Company Video

Posted on April 17, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re delighted to announce that we now have a new company video. We’re especially excited because we feel this video captures what Onit is all about: we love our product and empowering customers with a better way to work. It also offers a snapshot of how Onit is positioned to help businesses create better processes, make smarter operations, make informed decisions, and build better business.

Watch the video to learn more about Onit’s innovative technology.

5 Problems the Best Contract Management Solutions Can Solve for You

Posted on April 5, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

In previous posts last year, we spoke about features you should be looking for in a premier contract management solution. We’d like to keep the momentum going on this topic by discussing some very common, and major problems that the best contract management solutions can solve for you.

Before we get to the problems, we’d like to make something clear: contracting is more complex than ever before, and this unfortunate trend is expected to continue. One reason is that standard, “universal” contracts are a thing of the past now as clients are demanding more personalized contracts. What’s needed is a simple and reliable process for getting new contracts into the system, approving those contracts and then managing and storing them. Business, legal, and even financial contract approvers should have access to one central location to collaborate and approve contracts as they move through the contract lifecycle process. Now, let’s have a look at the problems.

Problem #1: The contract management process is unnecessarily complex.

This is the 21st century and we need to press “delete” on this problem. The top contract management solutions allow you to easily collaborate with reviewers and departments directly. Email updates may be sent to contracts through an assigned unique email address, and email notifications will be configured for multiple events, including new contract requests, comments, tasks, updates and documents. The best solutions simplify the submission, review, approval and management of contracts in one easy-to-use tool. Team members should never have to search their inbox or hard drive for the latest version or keep an Excel spreadsheet to manage their contracts. And if your CM solution is part of a broader, more comprehensive enterprise legal management system, so much the better.

Problem #2: A decentralized and confusing repository.

A complete, centralized contract repository allows users to organize lifecycle information such as participants, documents, milestones, negotiations, status reports, key dates and provisions. Systematic categorization, clarity, versioning and easy storage of documents are some key benefits of such a repository. A single source for all sales collateral and other customer-facing content is a key element of the best CM solutions, as well as contract lifecycle management solutions.

Problem #3: The lack of visibility.

Centralizing your contracts allows visibility throughout their lifecycle. You can see a document’s history, including all previous versions and can create reports based on any data field in a personalized dashboard. Part of what exacerbates the speed vs. control dilemma for legal is a general lack of visibility into contract terms, obligations and value. If you can’t see it, you can’t control it. This becomes a major pain point because agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged. If you can’t ensure you are getting the right value for your deals, money is slipping through your company’s fingers.

Problem #4: Inflexible workflow.

The best solutions allow workflow to be configured relative to a contract type or matched to your unique business needs. It’s important to have a mechanism for managing changes over time. You need to be up-to-speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that will require you to speak to your customer/vendor specifically about your contractual relationship. Your ability to manage the contract, particularly changes over time and the renewal process, will have a direct impact on your customer retention rate.

Problem #5: Weak reporting and analytics.

Why would this even still be a problem today? A powerful, straightforward dashboard allows stakeholders to quickly view and analyze the department’s progress on contracts and certain bottlenecks that may appear. Powerful business analytics and reporting engines are additional hallmarks of the best solutions and are crucial in helping team members with their reporting, configuring notifications and other tasks.

These are the main problems we’ve noted over the years, but the list could go on and on. Choosing a provider that is always on top of their game is a sure-fire way to rest assured your money is well spent. By the way, it’s quite possible to purchase a contract administration solution, and also a separate contract review and approval solution. Better still, if you choose to use a contract lifecycle management solution, you’ll have the best of both worlds: a convenient combination of contract administration and contract review and approval all in one package.

New Podcast: A Simple Way to Automate Business Processes

Posted on March 22, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Onit is excited to introduce our latest podcast! In this episode, Jonathan Powers discusses Onit’s Apptitude solution (a business process automation platform), and how he loves empowering people who will be building solutions on the platform. Jonathan begins by succinctly illustrating how Apptitude is sort of a “blank canvas” on which clients can “paint” to solve specific problems. Expanding on this theme, he describes how clients can configure Apptitude to solve business process management problems. There are no vertical specific objects built into Apptitude; in other words, it doesn’t know what a contract is, or a legal matter, etc., but rather the client (or Onit) teaches it what those things are, and then productizes their configuration. This then becomes the starting point for future projects, such as e-billing, matter management, legal holds and contract management solutions.

Jonathan goes on to provide some good examples of solutions developed on Apptitude such as legal service requests, phased-based budgeting and matter management reports. He wraps things up by reinforcing that Apptitude is a tool for solving your problems, and why automating solutions shouldn’t be a frightening or intimidating proposition.

Onit’s Apptitude provides the foundation for solutions across your business. Apptitude has transformed some of largest global companies to become more agile, efficient and effective. In fact, Apptitude has more than 100 pre-built business process management actions available to build workflows.

Solutions are easy to create with Apptitude, and some workflows can be implemented in less than 30 minutes. Apptitude is an innovative tool that makes it easy to create, modify and deploy new processes with robust workflow, transaction management and reporting capabilities. Using Apptitude, Onit helps customers solve real business problems without the need for costly support, training or IT infrastructure.

We have more podcasts coming your way soon, and we look forward to your joining us! Here is a link to this podcast.

Five Must-Have Features in a Workflow, Process & Collaboration Platform

Posted on March 19, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Business process automation (BPA) platforms have been around for years. It can be an overwhelming task trying to decide which one is just right for your business. When it comes to state-of-the-art enterprise solution (or “app”) development, you must have the workflow, process and collaboration platform that is the best fit. In other words, software also needs to fit the collaborative way that business is now done. These are the reasons that a cutting-edge, collaborative platform is critical.

We now almost take for granted certain features we need in such a platform: no-code configuration, rapid value delivery, responsive user interface, and adaptive end user experience. But it should also be highly human-centric with certain simple capabilities — a simple intake form, a shared workspace, configured and ad hoc workflow, and a dashboard to view all of your transactions.

The platform should centralize all data, notes, documents, conversations and email threads in one location. Business teams should have real-time visibility into the process—whether it is a contract negotiation, NDA request or sales quote approval. It should easy to configure custom forms, fields, checklists, workflows and process tracking capabilities with the flexibility to make changes and improvements in-stream as often as required.

So, knowing the basic things needed, what are five features that you need to be looking for in the best BPA platforms?

  1. Short Development Time – A simple process pilot can be ready for implementation in hours and in production within days.
  2. Flexible – Technology that provides business users with the flexibility to route, comment, revise and track progress of the project to accommodate the variability and unpredictability inherent in knowledge work.
  3. Standard Intuitive Interface – A simple intuitive interface allows the user to focus on the “process” instead of the application.
  4. A Hands-On Approach – Business users can optimize their processes quickly using an agile approach, unlike traditional software customization that requires the development of process maps and workflow design.
  5. Cost Savings – Solutions developed with the platform should be a fraction of the cost of standard business process automation software and traditional enterprise systems.

We fully agree that the task of finding just the right BPA platform can be daunting, to say the least. But if you proceed in your quest armed with the knowledge of what you need to be looking for, you’re already a giant step ahead.

To learn more about Onit’s Apptitude platform, listen to our most recent podcast.

Onit and Client Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) Featured in Legal Evolution

Posted on February 28, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

After Onit’s and Archer Daniels Midland’s (ADM) joint ACC Value Challenge 2017 win, you’d think the smoke would’ve started clearing by now. Imagine our surprise when we saw the fantastic write-up by Bill Henderson in Legal Evolution, titled, “Successful technology adoption: David Cambria (ADM) and Eric Elfman (Onit) Discuss their Collaboration.“

The article encapsulates how Onit collaborated with ADM on a high-profile global legal technology project. ADM’s legal department needed workflow automation that didn’t require their lawyers to change, and also substantial productivity gains. By partnering with Onit, ADM was able to leverage technology and their new platform solution to reach all corners of the law department beyond legal and spend management.

Henderson also offers an enticing look into how Onit came into being and touches on how the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, had significant influence on Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit. The thesis of the book is the “big fish, small pond” strategy, which suggests that companies should focus the efforts of key personnel on a niche market. Having done this and then developing a “whole product” solution, the company can then cross the chasm into mainstream.

The article also plays fair and mentions the high risks involved when small companies try to cross the chasm by attempting to focus on niches like legal technology. This in mind, Henderson ended his write-up by noting an observation that Elfman made, “…technology startups are essentially a series of experiments until something works or you run out of money.” Good for Onit that things worked well.

Click here to read the entire article. To read more about our joint ACC Value Challenge win, click here.

Gogo Goes Live with Onit’s Enterprise Legal Management and Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions

Posted on January 23, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re excited to announce that Gogo, the leader in commercial and business aviation broadband connectivity, is now using Onit’s Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions.

“It’s an honor to add Gogo to our rapidly growing list of satisfied clients. It’s also worth pointing out that the Gogo implementation was not only highly successful for everyone involved, but it was also a rather unique one,” says Eric M. Elfman, founder and CEO of Onit. “After going live with the ELM solution, they then quickly went live with the full CLM package. Users can quickly switch back and forth between ELM and CLM at any time. The implementation team went their usual extra mile on this project, and I am extremely pleased with their accomplishment at Gogo.”

Gogo, a company providing superior connectivity and entertainment in the aircraft industry, first went live with Onit’s ELM solution. Their ELM solution is not only a system of engagement, but also comprehensive and highly flexible in the sense that additions can be made quickly. And this was the case with Gogo – shortly after they went live with ELM, they added CLM and went live with that as well.

To see the full press release, click here.