Category: Business Process Management

Much of the software labeled as enterprise legal management (ELM) are simply souped-up matter and spend management systems that only effectively tackle one side of the problem: the database. What’s important to note is that these systems don’t address the other side of the problem, what Gartner defines as “the automation of manual processes through methods such as workflow and collaboration functionality.”¹ Moreover, how the software addresses workflow and collaboration determines the software’s long-term benefits to your team, department, and larger business.

The database-centric philosophy of enterprise legal management will inevitably be supplanted by intuitive, process-centric Apps that have already become the norm in many other markets. Enterprise Apps address both sides of the enterprise legal management need (matter management and spend management), are simple to deploy, intuitive to use, and evolve with your changing business needs at a fraction of the cost of the “old” ELM systems.

How can you determine if your software is a truly holistic enterprise legal management solution versus a repackaged matter and spend management system?

Here are four key phrases that should make you wary:

1. “Senior management has to champion the idea.”

Translation: People won’t use this software unless they are forced to.

2. “Change management is essential for success.”

Translation: The benefit to your business and legal users is illusory.

3. “Strong training program is critical to adoption.”

Translation: This software is exceptionally hard to use.

4. “We release new versions once or twice a year.”

Translation: Plan to spend a lot of time and money staying current.

More is not always better when it comes to feature-rich ELM systems. Adding new tools and functionalities onto existing database architectures achieves little more than to complicate the implementation and does not support the reality of the way lawyers and law departments work and support their business. This architecture also comes up short in supporting the transactional kinds of legal services requests and processes that are the primary focus of corporate legal departments.

Traditional matter management and spend management solutions, repackaged by marketing departments as “ELM solutions,” simply can’t support the integrated, collaborative workstreams that law departments increasingly are required to achieve their goals and support the overall enterprise’s business goals.

To learn more about the future of spend and matter management, download our new whitepaper: A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management.

More about enterprise legal management on our blog:

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Ten Things You Need to Know about Enterprise Apps and How They Relate to Enterprise Legal Management 

¹ Gartner: “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Legal Management,” 23 Oct 2013

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you will no doubt have heard the term, ‘collaborative economy.’ Our day-to-day lives have slowly evolved into this shared existence, sometimes without realizing it. So, what exactly is the collaborative, or sharing, economy? Jacob Morgan summarizes Wikipedia’s definition in a Forbes article, 

“The sharing economy (sometimes also referred to as the peer-to-peer economy, mesh, collaborative economy, collaborative consumption) is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human and physical resources.” 

This idea, while mainly applied to consumer applications such as AirBnB, Uber, or Netflix, has wide-ranging ramifications for every facet of our personal and professional lives. 

It’s about access, without the burden of ownership 

Take the legal industry for example; the days of legal departments investing in large, cumbersome, database-centric enterprise systems is over. No longer do companies want to own a product outright, as the cloud has made it easy to gain the benefits of much more nimble and cutting-edge products without the price of ownership. Our businesses change at break-neck speed. Therefore, the tools and technology we depend on to run those companies cannot be slow to change. Just like the Zip Car driver isn’t responsible for fixing that flat tire or maintaining the oil, Onit’s Enterprise App customers don’t have the burden of making sure that the technology they use to run their legal department is fully up-to-date. 

It’s about collaboration, transparency

However, the benefits of access with ownership extend way beyond your legal operations team directly purchasing a cloud-based App over a traditional enterprise software solution. The sharing, or collaborative, economy reaches far into our peer-to-peer tasks and inter-department dealings. No longer do you have to depend on someone “owning” and maintaining the database or centralized repository. The newer cloud-based Apps depend on a democratic and collaborative way of working. Everyone has visibility, everyone has ownership, everyone contributes, everyone benefits.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Tina Rosenberg, author of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, had a great quote about the sharing economy as it relates to business innovation. Rosenberg said, “Innovation happens best when people from different disciplines collaborate.” We think that is true in cross-disciplinary environments, but also in cross-departmental applications. Onit’s Enterprise Apps help legal departments manage and streamline their operations, but also provide easy access to information to help drive strategic initiatives for the larger business. Because of their inherent transparency, Enterprise Apps allow a great opportunity for ideas from all levels of the organization to get visibility and traction. This is in direct contrast to the walled-in, ownership approach of old, making it much harder to nurture ideas between those rigid structures.

It’s about the user, and ultimately, the consumer 

This type of service model places the customer at the forefront of this economy. When transparency and collaboration collide for users on the business-side, customers stand to benefit from faster response times, greater accountability, and a much better end product. Companies such as Salesforce, Dropbox, and Amazon’s content distribution service have made it easier for users on the business side to access information quickly and collaborate effectively to meet customer demand. A common thread among these companies, and of those at the center of the sharing economy is their commitment to success by devising solutions that are accessible, perform well, and are designed with the needs of the user at the forefront.

Mark Gilbreath, CEO of LiquidSpace, talked about this new customer-centricity in a blog for the Wall Street Journal, saying, “Sharing at work is not a new disruption — rather, it’s just the next chapter in a continuing consumerization trend that last brought us the consumerization of IT.” Here at Onit, we believe nimble, cloud-based business applications are firmly rooted in this collaborative economy, and have upended what Gilbreath aptly called the “command and control business culture that has defined the Industrial Age.”

To learn more about how our enterprise Apps can improve the collaboration economy in your business, download our new whitepaper: A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management (ELM).

Want to move your law department beyond just cost cutting and operational efficiency into a role of strategic leadership in your business? Join us as we present a panel discussion at Legaltech West Coast about how new enterprise legal management technology can help your in-house team drive firm-wide innovation. Our panel is part of the emerging technology series at Legaltech West Coast in San Francisco on July 13 – 14^th. For the fifth year, Legaltech West Coast will bring together law firms, in-house counsel, and technology providers to discuss the pressing issues and challenges of the practice and business of law today. Over the two-day conference, attendees can learn trends and discuss strategies across five tracks: Corporate Legal Operations, Information Governance, Advanced IT, Cloud and Mobile Technology, and Disruptive Trends in eDiscovery.

Stasha Jain, In-house Counsel and Account Manager, Onit, Inc., and Kirsten Taitelbaum, Director, Finance and Operations at DaVita will discuss best practices for using technology to drive stronger collaboration between law departments and the business they support to produce better outcomes. Entitled, “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” the discussion is designed to give you a roadmap on how to use data to develop metrics in order to understand how work gets done and how to streamline that work from end-to-end in order to improve service overall. Learn tactics and best practices from leaders at the forefront of this important shift in thinking, from a focus on cost cutting and improving efficiency, towards using predictive and actionable analytics to drive future strategic initiatives.

Join us for “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” on Monday, July 13th at 10:15 am. Connect and continue the discussion with us in the conference exhibition hall at booth #409 to learn about our customizable enterprise legal management solutions.

To learn more about, and register for, Legaltech West Coast 2015 and view the full agenda, click here.

Find out how Onit can help your law department operations team innovate to meet today’s and tomorrow’s strategic challenges. Schedule a demo or contact us today!

Read more about Enterprise Legal Management on our blog:

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Put people at the center… not databases.

The relationship between technology and the workplace is a very dynamic thing, and technology is more important than ever to corporate legal department operations. As computer processing capabilities grow and programming languages evolve to allow for ever-increasing levels of complexity, businesses must be vigilant to read the trends and ensure that they are responsive to technological advancement and the market demands that those advancements birth. With the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud services, people in all kinds of businesses and industries must choose to pursue new ways of doing things or else find themselves in an unsustainable position as their current standard of practice becomes obsolete. This is especially true for legal departments facing the daunting challenge of managing the enterprise’s legal affairs.

Software as a Service:

Traditionally, software has been offered as a “product:” an instance of intellectual property licensed to an organization and deployed and supported internally. This model is based on the idea that software is a tool similar to hardware: a virtual property that a business can employ to achieve its ends.

This is, at first glance, a logically sound position—after all, it is the same structure we use when acquiring computer hardware. Why should software be any different? The short answer is that it doesn’t have to stop there. Operations can be much more efficient.

When the Internet appeared in the 1990s, some software vendors envisioned a different approach. Inspired in part by the mainframe computing of the 1950’s, they saw the potential for a system that not only provided a software product, but also treated the maintenance, hosting, and support of that product as a service.

By combining the idea of a software product that achieves a function with a support system that makes the use of that product inherently simple and trustworthy, they changed the nature of the industry, and slowly but surely turned “the cloud” into a buzzword. So… what have business gained from cloud services?

Industry Response

Some industries were more ready for to the change than others. Consumer offerings, such as YouTube and eBay, provided centralized access to video entertainment and a global marketplace respectively, and served as positive use cases for the applicability of this concept.

Other industries, especially those in the notoriously rigid B2B sector, were less prepared to adapt, instead continuing to offer independent instances and letting the purchaser handle the rest (support, service, troubleshooting, and all of the headaches that come along with it.) This structure forces organizations to foot the bill and even hire their own support staffs for the most complex and unwieldy software. Many of these offerings require organizations to license the product on a per-employee basis, rendering employee adoption and use an increasingly cost-prohibitive option. As efficiency needs grow and margins shrink, one-size-fits-all tools begin to appear to be very wasteful.

Lag Behind or Race Ahead: It’s Your Choice.

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for Enterprise Legal Management aim to directly address these issues for legal departments that desire more than the “old way” can offer. Whether they desire to fill the gaps between the tools they already use or to design a new workflow from the ground up, Onit’s App design philosophy makes it all possible.

Instead of cobbling together features into existing (and many times outdated) ebilling, matter management or enterprise legal management packages and interfaces, Onit seeks to answer the question: how does this legal department’s business work, and how can we help it work better?

Onit and other SaaS providers strive to facilitate success by being responsive to how app users actually use apps instead of treating the database as the center of all things and building out, as traditional all-things-to-all-people Enterprise Legal Management systems do. By approaching the problem of success in business and legal departments holistically, solutions can be designed as opposed to just applied.

The Way of the Future

Though it sounds trite, it’s unassailably true. Subscription-based models are becoming the norm. Netflix killed Blockbuster, just as SharePoint obsoletes FTP and email attachments. By moving Creative Suite to the cloud, Adobe both took steps to combat its long-term piracy problem and made its product exponentially more affordable. Nowadays, video rental shops are few and far between, business information can be easily accessed without having to navigate confusing file structures, and virtually anyone can have access the world’s most advanced design and digital arts suite.

So the question is: will your legal department adopt a smarter business process now, or will you wait until you have no other choice?

Enterprise Legal Management (ELM), or the integrated administration of legal matter and spend management systems, is quickly becoming the standard in the way that legal departments are managed. By unifying these historically independent areas, management strives to delegate more effectively and develop a holistic view of how resources are put to use to maximize departmental efficiency and make educated, informed business decisions.

As these silos combine, certain truths about how ELM works are becoming self-evident. These axioms can be used to guide your legal department’s transition to a more intelligent set of best practices for legal operations management.

1: Change is good for growth

The history of legal department management software stretches back four decades, and one thing has remained consistent: as software solutions mature and grow along with the legal departments they help manage, those departments must be able to change to keep up with evolving standards. Matter management solutions, which began to gain popularity in the early 1980s, grew in scope and functionality over the subsequent two decades, enabling legal departments to make better decisions about resource deployment. Likewise, the spend management systems of the 1990s introduced new features to enhance the efficiency of financial dispositions.

When these new features entered the market, legal departments were forced to acknowledge that, especially in light of the exponential rate of technological advancement, adaptability is an essential quality for a legal department that values efficiency. Legal should be set up in such a manner that is responsive to change, and to some degree anticipates the technological curve of the near future.

2: Communicate your successes to develop better best practices

Experimentation has always been key to innovation, and this logic holds true in ELM as well. But when success is met, much is also lost if the insight gained is not applied broadly. A policy change that shows success in IP should be considered for other areas if it is applicable. Inversely, if a policy change has unforeseen negative consequences after being applied to an area, there is no reason to sustain that effort simply because it works elsewhere.

The common key to this point is communication. Good ELM requires a constant dialogue so that management has a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. Without healthy, honest communication between sections of your legal department (and those outside it who interact with its policies,) any Enterprise Legal Management best practice guidelines that your business develops will be threatened.

3: Invest in technology to automate the minutiae and facilitate “smarter” work

In spite of these theoretical considerations, the amount of actionable changes that can be achieved are limited without a software solution that strives to take some of the drudgery and frivolous costs out of ELM. Paper invoices, human error in data entry, and misplaced information are constant hazards for legal, and by adopting a Enterprise Legal Management software solution, a business can drastically improve its overhead and efficiency. 

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for ELM, in contrast with typical, often bloated offerings, are uniquely designed to serve specialized business needs and promote adoption rates, sidestepping the pitfalls of steep learning curves and esoteric user interfaces that plague many other “comprehensive” solutions and limit actual ROIs.

4: Standardize pricing to develop a coherent billing framework

Deciding how best to bill clients can be a challenging question for legal. When precedents conflict and the facts of a business relationship are not stored centrally, ambiguities can present that can lead to lost profits. This will also take some pressure off where it comes to maintaining customer relationships by mitigating the risk of billing errors or inconsistencies.

In tandem with a software solution as discussed above, a clear, consistent guide that drives commodity pricing will go a long way towards increasing efficiency and predictability within legal.

Results

By accepting and internalizing these four truths, legal will provide itself with opportunities to increase value and efficiency while promoting collaboration and minimizing error. By choosing Onit Apps for Enterprise Legal Management, legal departments can achieve those ends to a greater degree while also saving money versus the established “all-in-one” solutions. With Onit Apps, a business can design a solution that perfectly fits with how its legal department is managed and how it interfaces with the rest of the business. 

To schedule a demonstration of Onit’s ELM Apps, email [email protected].

The End of the Silo: How to Organize your Enterprise to Be “Customer-Centric”

Did you know that acquiring a new customer is seven times more expensive than the cost of properly maintaining an existing relationship? (Kissmetrics) So why are sales organizations hyper-focused on new customer acquisition versus nurturing the customers they already have? Many businesses operate as loosely connected groups of silos; each focused on its own responsibilities. The silo-ed sales approach leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term ROI rather than long-term customer success. 

In order to change the focus from short-term ROI to long-term, you must build your organizational structure around the client, making sure that each step in the sales process serves the ultimate goal of customer success. This change in focus is what makes an organization “customer-centric.” Instead of forcing customers to interact with a process that does not serve their interests, you should organize your processes to be adaptable and responsive to your customers’ needs. One way to facilitate this is through automating the sales process.

Here are seven customer-centric benefits of sales automation:

1. It democratizes account management. Rather than reserving the highest standards of service for key accounts, automating parts of the process enables your sales organization to apply those same standards to every single account. 

2. It stops reps from gaming the system. How? With clear visibility into progress toward leading performance indicators, sales reps can compete amongst themselves to “win” the game instead of trying to beat the system. 

3. It limits variance within large sales organizations. A good control system with a high level of visibility for management will limit variation and help sculpt positive customer experiences by holding sales representatives directly responsible for how they carry out their duties.

4. It creates more time for human-intensive work. When you automate the low-skill, low-reward tasks you cut down on errors and unnecessary labor hours spent. Sales automation is estimated to save companies five hours of labor per employee per week. By eliminating the human element where it isn’t efficient, you free up time for reps to focus on responsibilities such as sales and support calls which require the human touch. 

5. It puts metrics at your fingertips. An automated system can be used to analyze account and representative success and intelligently determine the best KPIs. 

6. It turns account management into a product. Automated capabilities will allow your company to differentiate itself within your industry, offering a customer experience other organizations would be hard pressed to match. Account management can be your flagship product.

7. It gives you visibility into the entire customer relationship. With a clear image of the customer supplier-relationship, you can trust that your clients will notice the effort your organization puts into account management.

For more information, download our Whitepaper: Achieving Measurable Success in Account Management.

Clean up your CRM process with an Onit Account Management App. Contact us today!

The landscape of legal technology is all about Enterprise Legal Management (ELM). As a category of technology, ELM solutions are loosely identified as integrated matter and spend management systems, but their overall goal is to help an enterprise manage legal issues and risk consistently throughout the organization.

Legal departments are adopting integrated solutions in droves because they help in-house counsel streamline matter, contract, and e-billing processes. The result of this streamlining effect is that departments are better able to handle the increased risk and compliance burdens and reduce their overall legal spend. With more work moving in-house and departments tasked with doing more with tighter budgets, advanced legal operations management is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. Many legal departments have adopted enterprise systems to handle either matter or spend management or both.

Unfortunately, many enterprise management systems are not helping legal departments address the most critical issues facing their organization – mainly project visibility and risk-management.

The Limitations of Traditional Enterprise Legal Management Software

Enterprise legal management software does not effectively address process or collaboration.

Traditional enterprise legal management systems are mostly data and task-oriented systems that focus on maintaining large databases of information related to matters and spend. A traditional enterprise legal management solution is a system of record, so it will be less likely to track day-to-day activities within the legal department. Although some claim to address process and collaboration, the very nature of these large data-driven solutions prohibit them from doing so effectively. What results from a traditional enterprise system is a recording of the final data, such as a contract or document relating to a matter, without the context of the activities that surround it.

What these systems claim to do is enterprise legal “management,” when, what they actually do is provide a “database.” Traditional matter and spend management solutions do not address process or collaboration in a way that facilitates the implementation of consistent, repeatable processes for the variety of legal issues managed across a large enterprise. This lack of visibility into the context around these legal issues exposes companies to undue amounts of risk. And, the lack of process-driven workflow engines that work the way you work keeps adoption rates low and return on investment difficult to achieve.

One example of this is the process of reviewing and approving NDAs. For many organizations, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) lifecycle is an often-overlooked Achilles heel. Traditional enterprise legal management solutions may store the final document, but there are no productivity tools around its request, creation and execution. These critical documents protect intellectual property, but too often they are pulled together haphazardly, not countersigned, and left to languish in an email inbox. Work commences, and both parties forget about the NDA until a problem arises. While your existing enterprise legal management software may provide a database for the final NDA, how does it handle the process of actually requesting and managing the various approval stages? Moreover, once signed, do you know where to find the executed NDA if a problem arises? Read more: How Ad Hoc Turns NDAs into Nightmares.

Enterprise Legal Software is Not Designed to Evolve with Your Business.

The simple fact is that enterprise legal management software does not work for legal departments and the business users they support in the way IT and management wants to believe it will. For one, enterprise legal management systems take an incredible amount of resources – both time and money. The time it takes to develop and deploy one of these cumbersome systems can take months, even years. Moreover, once implemented, it can take a very long time for the business to see value from the software.

Secondly, changing the software to support new business initiatives is difficult. For as long as it took to create the original enterprise system, it can be just as expensive and time-consuming to bring in new functionality that meets changing business needs.

Facilitate True Enterprise Legal Management with Enterprise Apps

Enterprise Apps are about people and process first.

Innovative legal departments are changing and adapting to help the business they support grow and thrive. In order to do so, they recognize that matter management is not about the database, but rather, successfully managing a legal matter is about process. Implementing and enforcing consistent processes is critical to gaining visibility into how all the various business units may be exposing the company to risk.  That visibility leads to better business risk mitigation and more efficient handling of litigation when it does arise.

While a database to store final information is certainly needed, Enterprise Apps like those developed by Onit can fill the “process and collaboration gaps” left by these database-driven systems. For example, when turning out NDAs become a simple, repeatable process, leveraging the NDA App to add consistency and visibility, organizations can stay on top of their legal obligations and reduce their exposure to risk. An App will help you manage the NDA lifecycle from creation to execution, jump-starting what will be a productive working relationship in a fraction of the time and effort than an ad hoc “process.” Read more: Closing the Loop in the NDA Lifecycle.

Enterprise Apps are Designed to Evolve with Your Business.

Enterprise Apps are easy to deploy, support, learn and use. App building platforms like Onit enable non-developers to write SaaS web applications to solve human process problems for enterprise users. Enterprise Apps are hyper-focused on solving problems for your team, and have remarkably high success and adoption rates. Because they are designed to fill the process and collaboration gaps, Enterprise Apps can evolve quickly to meet your changing business needs at a fraction of the customization and administration costs associated with enterprise systems.

While your enterprise legal management software may have a long list of features, our Enterprise App clients measure success by user adoption, rather than feature checklists. Why spend big money on a complex legal management tool that does not address the visibility and the productivity of the human processes at the core of the task?

Ready to consider a new way to manage legal operations? Onit Apps for matter, contract, and spend management will help your legal department provide better service to your businesses and improve your operational efficiency. Contact us or schedule a demo today!