Category: Business Process Management

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

Posted on November 11, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The legal industry has been undergoing a technological revolution in the past decade, and few technologies have been having a more significant impact than artificial intelligence. Lawyers everywhere are curious to know how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law.

Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of ExcellenceNick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, recently sat down with Jared Correia, host of Above the Law’s Non-Eventcast podcast (available on Apple and Spotify), to discuss how AI impacts the legal world. Spoiler alert: it’s not Terminator time just yet.

The conversation started with an icebreaker about the latest Pixar movie, Lightyear, which proved to be an ideal segue into the topic of AI. Pixar is a prime example of how you can find success by using computers to do things differently.

Nick and Jared then discussed lawyers’ current attitudes toward AI and the lack of understanding about what AI truly is. To many, AI is an amorphous concept, made up of technical terms like “algorithms” and “machine learning” that aren’t always easily understood. Nick provides some handy definitions to clarify the terms.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

AI can have a tremendous amount of value for corporate legal departments and law firms. Consider areas of routine work that involve a lot of data. AI brings efficiency to many traditionally time-consuming tasks, like due diligence, document preparation, eDiscovery, transcription, contract lifecycle management, and billing. With the time saved, lawyers can focus on more complex and meaningful tasks than administrative or manual work.

According to Nick, the reality is that most lawyers are likely already using AI even if they don’t realize it. The emerging technologies will continue to reshape the legal landscape. Technologies like chatbots and robotic process automation are rapidly changing the way lawyers practice law. AI is helping lawyers understand what clients want and assisting with the work that meets those needs. Whether it’s drafting contracts, answering billing queries, automating administrative work or something else, AI is making it an exciting time to be a lawyer. The time to start experimenting and capitalizing on AI is now, so lawyers can gain a competitive advantage going forward.

When you discuss how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, it’s helpful to understand what will happen in the near future. What can we expect from AI in the future? As Nick explains, we’ll see AI increasingly used for contract management, matter management and billing. For in-house teams, AI will be applied more often to managing assets. At law firms, it will be harnessed more and more for determining proper fees, billing, data management and back-office productivity.

You can find the entire Non-Eventcast podcast on Apple and Spotify to hear Nick and Jared’s entire discussion of all things legal AI.

To learn more about how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, we recommend the following resources.

Contact Onit today for more information about how AI powers contract lifecycle management, enterprise legal management and more offerings for corporate legal.

 

What Are CLM Tools and How Do They Help Sales, Procurement, and Legal?

Posted on November 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Sales, procurement, and legal departments are increasingly turning to AI, automation, and other technologies to ease the burden of routine tasks, increase efficiencies, and better collaborate with other departments. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools can be a cornerstone of this technological revolution. 

Why Companies Need Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Tools

Contract management challenges vary by department and role. However, many contract stakeholders desire a quick review process and visibility into contract activity.  

Sales departments know that contract delays mean delays in revenue-generating opportunities. They want to avoid “black box syndrome” when sending contracts for legal review; this makes options such as self-service and AI-assisted first pass review especially attractive.  

Procurement must effectively enable spend owners to maximize suppliers’ value and meet their objectives. For example, with contracts, they want to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders, manage contracts centrally, decrease risk, and reconcile spending against the budget. 

Legal has several concerns, including lack of oversight on current contracts, balancing speed and review, and losing revenue when add-ons, upgrades, and renewals are missed. 

Contract attorneys need to be able to consistently and efficiently compare third-party contracts to company contract standards and extract key provisions from large amounts of contracts to manage their company’s risks. They also need to quickly track critical dates and locate contracts in a searchable repository. 

Legal operations professionals face similar but often more practical contract management challenges that speak to their specialization. These challenges include accelerating turnaround time, reducing costs, and providing attorneys with tools to help them manage contracts, internal legal requests, and overall risks. 

What Are CLM Tools?

CLM tools streamline the contracting process from start to finish, bringing benefits to both the pre-signature and post-signature phases of contracting and creating self-service opportunities for stakeholders. As a result, CLM tools can reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and lower the average hours spent on contracts by 20%. 

They use technologies such as AI and automation to accelerate the review process and manage contracts from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management. This end-to-end solution improves consistency, saves time, and surfaces critical insights allowing proactive, informed decision-making. For example, automation, AI, and CLM can reduce end-to-end NDA processing time by 70%.  

A typical contract lifecycle process. When handled manually, it can lead to delays, errors, high costs and increased risk.

A typical manual contract lifecycle can lead to delays, errors, high costs, and increased risk. 

How do CLM tools accomplish this? Here are some examples of how they work.

How do CLM tools accomplish this? An ideal CLM tool provides: 

  • A central repository serves as a single source for all contracts and associated documentation, eliminating the need to search for information. 
  • Partner and client self-service, providing an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts. You can see an example of one here for NDA automation. 
  • Microsoft Word integration meeting people “where they work” so they can draft, pre-screen, edit, and review in their preferred word processing tool while maintaining a seamless and secure link to CLM. 
  • Conditional contract generation that automatically generates a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata. 
  • The ability to securely manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in the cloud from a centralized location. 
  • Automatic version control and easy-to-use check-in, and check-out functionality. 
  • Obligation management allows for controlling and measuring tasks or milestones related to compliance. 
  • Automated risk mitigation identifies clauses and terms that add risk to your agreement to support negotiations and re-negotiations. 
  • Routing and approval automation that can be quickly built, deployed and updated as needed. 
  • Proactive alerts such as notifications or reminders sent by the technology as the contract progresses through its lifecycle. 

What Are CLM Tools Powered by AI?

In addition to the features mentioned above, the most effective CLM tools harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes a combination of AI techniques such as natural language processing, deep learning and proprietary algorithms that build and release fully-formed AI models. Here’s how AI supercharges contract management:

  • Pretrained AI – A CLM tool should come pre-trained on datasets that allow you to analyze NDAs, master service agreements, purchase agreements, third-party contract reviews, and more straight out of the box. The pre-trained AI will continue to learn to identify and enforce your organization’s unique contracting preferences over time. 
  • First-pass review and redlining – AI handles first-pass review quickly and accurately, analyzing the document, comparing it to the corporate playbook, and providing redlines for suggested changes. For example, if AI finds an indemnity clause or waiver that shouldn’t be in an NDA, it can redline that section. Or, if it doesn’t see a standard clause used in an NDA, the AI can automatically add it. So how do you start this process? It’s as easy as emailing the contract or submitting it through a user-friendly intake form. 
  • Smart checklists – AI goes beyond alerts with configurable checklists to create dynamic lists of concrete, task-based actions generated from your company playbook. 
  • Repapering – AI amends and redlines contract details and critical terms to comply with regulatory changes or M&A activities. 
  • Contract abstraction – AI identifies critical legal clauses, terms, and details in documents for easy analysis and syncing with your CLM. 
  • Audit compliance – CLM and AI automate large-scale legal contract reviews when regulatory changes occur and export relevant details in notes and reports. 
  • Due diligence – Automating batch review contracts for routine legal, due diligence frees up valuable resources. 
  • Legacy contract migration – AI analyzes and extracts legacy contract metadata, including critical dates, terms, and clauses, to assist in importing. 

How to Learn More about CLM Tools

Here are some more resources that answer the question, “What are CLM tools?”

Schedule a demonstration with us today to learn more about how CLM from Onit can benefit your legal department and other departments across your organization.

The Latest in Corporate Legal Department Trends and Resources (November 2021 Edition)

Posted on November 4, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Welcome to the November digest of the latest in corporate legal department trends and helpful resources. In this edition, you’ll find information on AI’s effect on practicing law, stringent steps to increase law firm diversity, the importance of a business perspective, how to benchmark legal technology investments and the latest in tech spending for UK law firms.

1.    AI vs. Lawyers: How Does AI Affect the Practice of Law?

There’s always the question: Will AI replace lawyers? The answer is no. But it will reduce congestion and manual work resulting from back-office administrative tasks that lawyers face every day.

In the latest episode of the Non-Eventcast podcast, host Jared Correia of Red Cave Consulting speaks with Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Together, they discuss fundamental components of AI, how it improves processes in the legal world, how it gives lawyers a valuable competitive edge and the future of AI in the next five years.

Source: Non-Eventcast podcast (Apple or Spotify)

2. Corporate Legal Departments Want Diversity, and They’re Using Money to Motivate Outside Counsel

One of the most prevalent legal department trends is diversity – and leaders are turning to the most significant penalty of all to push for compliance. They’re docking law firm fees. This can mean relocating work or reducing fees. It can also mean rewards for successful efforts.

This article from Bloomberg Businessweek discusses how Facebook, HP, Novartis and more have embraced fee-based strategies to motivate racial and gender diversity within outside counsel. Others, such as BT, reward successful diversity efforts with a chance to join their law office advisory panel.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek + Equality

3.    The Link Between In-House Tech Adoption and Legal Department Business Acumen

The concept of running the legal department like a business surfaced decades ago. It’s still one of the legal department trends zealously endorsed by many GCs, in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals. New opportunities made possible by legal technology mean there are even more opportunities to evolve this discipline.

In-house panelists gathered at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual meeting to discuss the skills sets that amplify legal technology ROI. Not surprisingly, they pinpoint the importance of a business perspective. You can read the article here.

Source: Legaltech News

4.    How to Benchmark Legal Technology Investments: One Company’s Journey

Speaking of legal technology ROI, let’s shift to benchmarking. Every legal department’s journey varies depending on priorities. In this on-demand webinar, legal ops executives from a global provider of multi-cloud services for apps discuss their mission to transform and scale legal services to accelerate its growth and simplify the customer experience. They’re joined by an expert from HBR Consulting, who breaks down legal department trends and how data plays a critical role in a successful legal tech transformation journey.

Source: Onit

5.    UK Legal Department Trends Alert: Increased Tech Spending, But Not for All of the UK 100

Here’s good news for corporate legal departments aiming to work more efficiently with their UK law firms. A recent survey, analyzed by Artificial Lawyer in this article, finds that 60% of UK 100 law firms bumped up their tech spending in 2021. Further, more law firms indicated that improving the use of technology is a top priority in the next year, with standardizing and centralizing processes not far behind. The one drawback: The publication notes that “… for a significant slice of the market that sits between 11th and 50th place by revenue, tech spending shrank a little relative to revenue.”

Source: Artificial Lawyer

Bonus Resource: How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

CLOC recently gathered a panel of experts to discuss one of the most interesting legal department trends happening now: digital transformation. Large and small companies alike have increasingly turned their attention to legal digital transformation to increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track. These CLOC experts offered valuable advice for implementing legal transformation projects, including the top-five considerations. You can read more about it and hear the recording of the presentation here.

What to Look for in a Legal Operations Management Platform

Posted on October 29, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Legal operations management platforms technologies have been revolutionizing the way corporate legal departments and legal operations have been doing business in recent years. More and more legal professionals are abandoning their stand-alone software and solutions in favor of a platform approach to technology that better allows legal to streamline business processes, implement tailored solutions and collaborate with other departments across the enterprise.

While stand-alone solutions exist to serve a single purpose or handle a discrete task, such as e-billing or document management, platforms are robust environments where you can host all the tools you need to address whatever scenarios arise. The right platform will even allow you to build additional solutions yourself as needed, tailored to the needs of your individual organization.

Not all platforms are created equal, however. If you’re looking to upgrade your technology, there are specific considerations to keep in mind when evaluating a legal operations management platform.

Top Considerations When Choosing a Legal Operations Management Platform

Making the switch to a platform approach is a major step toward a better-operating legal function. To make sure you choose the best possible legal operations management platform, however, you should look for the following features.

  • No-code configuration: Your platform shouldn’t require you to be a coding expert or even overly tech-savvy. No-code platforms bridge the gap between business and technical users, allowing even users with no technical background to simply create new workflows and build necessary solutions.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Not all platforms are powered by AI. Those that are can learn, anticipate, reason and improve – in other words, they can function like lawyers. An AI platform automates and improves processes, allowing users to get more work done faster. Allowing for unlimited users, these platforms are critical to scaling your resources and controlling your spend as your needs change.
  • Enterprise considerations: Your legal operations management platform should be useful beyond legal. You need to be able to create the solutions needed for day-to-day operations across all departments in your organization, and even allow business users to engage in new levels of self-service for routine tasks.
  • Agility and speed: You need a platform that’s capable of adjusting and evolving as your needs change, and can start creating value as soon as possible once you implement those changes. Look for a platform that allows you to quickly build solutions right on the platform and continually release updates when they’re available.
  • Integrations and partnerships: While building your own solutions is important, you also want your platform to be able to seamlessly integrate with the third-party tools you rely on every day for your organization to function. You also want your platform provider to have strategic partnerships with the best talent and resources in the industry to maximize your investment.
  • Business intelligence and analytics: Legal operations professionals today have access to more data than ever before. Your platform should integrate robust business intelligence tools and analytics capabilities that allow you to gain important insights from that data and make more informed business decisions.

Onit’s Platforms

Onit is the only two-platform company in the market, offering legal operations professionals and legal departments the most flexibility to build the workflows and solutions they need. Apptitude is Onit’s business process workflow platform, which empowers organizations to easily create, modify and deploy limitless workflow solutions in a no-code environment. Precedent is an artificial intelligence platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes across organizations, allowing users to get more work done faster with the power of AI.

Schedule a demo or contact us today to learn more about how Onit’s platforms can help transform your legal operations function

How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

Posted on October 19, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Companies both large and small have increasingly been turning their attention to legal digital transformation, with an eye toward implementing new initiatives and pursuing innovation that will help increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track.

Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy & Growth, headed up a CLOC Ask the Experts panel that offered some valuable advice for companies looking to implement legal transformation projects. Here are the top five considerations to keep in mind as you pursue legal transformation at your organization.

1.   Remember that legal digital transformation is a journey.

No matter how prepared or dedicated you are, the transformation won’t happen overnight. You need to think of it as a journey – and one that’s disruptive and often messy. You might not be able to plan precisely where you’re going, but you should know where you want to get goal-wise. Just be prepared for the path there to zig and zag along the way. Too many people think of legal digital transformation like building a skyscraper with square corners where you can count all the nuts and bolts you’ll need to get the job done. In reality, transformation is more like building a city, where many people are involved, and some neighborhoods will go faster or slower than others.

2.   Know the primary goals of your GC.

It’s essential to keep your GC’s primary goals in mind as you implement legal digital transformation and align your strategy with those goals. Most GCs have the same priorities, namely to protect the company, have a team of highly engaged, top talent, and boost efficiency to be a world-class legal department. Keeping these goals in mind at all times will keep your GC engaged in your transformation efforts and lead to a better outcome.

3.   Know the primary reasons why you’re transforming in the first place.

No transformation initiative will be successful without a concrete plan. It’s not only important to have a plan, though – you also need to be able to articulate it. Successful digital transformation requires buy-in from all the stakeholders in your organization. If you want to secure that buy-in, you need to be able to adequately explain the reasons behind your transformation in your company’s town hall, in team meetings or even in the elevator.

4.   Understand why data is important for legal digital transformation.

Data plays into legal transformation in a number of ways. First, a data-driven staffing model is the only way to fully understand how many and what type of resources you’ll need to make your transformation initiative succeed. Second, you need to present data on matters, risks, legal spend and more to help your GC and your company’s leadership team understand your organization’s legal exposure. Finally, you need to give your leadership and your lawyers data on the legal function to help them manage the business better.

5.   Foster a process-based mindset.

It’s not always easy to get your lawyers to think about processes. The way you think and speak about legal digital transformation may not line up with the way your lawyers think. To overcome the gap, you should start with a high-level process map that your lawyers can follow. It shouldn’t be overly detailed, but simply create clarity around roles and responsibilities. Another helpful tool is a dashboard that provides key operational metrics that break down the process in a way that’s easily understood.

You can listen to the entire panel here for more insight into best practices for pursuing legal digital transformation.

Onit is helping businesses of all sizes with their legal ops transformation journey. Contact us at [email protected] or schedule a demo to learn more.

Innovation in Action: ADM’s Self-Built Vendor Management App for Legal Operations

Posted on October 12, 2021 by - Business Process Management

In an earlier blog post, we looked at some of the latest Apps legal operations professionals build to solve some of their most complex business problems. Now, we’re excited to continue this exploration – this time by highlighting a genuinely innovative approach to vendor management developed by Fortune 100 company ADM.

Why an App?

As a massive company, ADM not surprisingly engages with numerous vendors to accomplish many crucial aspects of its business. What they didn’t have, though, was a standardized process around selecting the right vendor for a particular matter or project. They needed a complete process from start to finish for how teams would operate and how they would engage law firms on their various matters.

ADM has built a strong law firm network and has devoted significant time to negotiating rates and pricing systems, including alternative fee arrangements in some instances. The next step was creating a means to obtain competitive bids on projects to make sure that they had the right law firms handling the right matters. That meant instituting a matter-specific RFP process – but there were a lot of cumbersome communications and past practices to sort through in order to get there. In addition, they needed a consistent and reliable way to score RFP responses.

Simply put, ADM wanted an easy way to empower its attorneys to handle RFPs, law firm selection and executing engagement letters for themselves.

The Vendor Management Solution

ADM’s legal ops team is incredibly lean, so it was critical that any vendor management solution could be managed by their attorneys. Ultimately, the answer was to build it themselves.

A crucial factor for ADM was that the entire vendor management process happen in a single place, rather than relying on cobbling together disparate tools that don’t necessarily integrate to create a seamless workflow. ADM turned to Onit’s Apptitude workflow automation platform, which allows organizations to turn ad hoc, chaotic, inefficient, everyday manual intensive work into manageable defined processes, to build the vendor management App that would meet its needs.

The App they created addressed vendor selection at the matter level, was standard across how their teams operate and combined the processes they were already using rather than reinventing the wheel.

At the end of the day, ADM’s new App addressed three problems that had been hindering efficiency: standardizing vendor approval,  automating engagement letter creation and execution, and streamlining the RFP process. They were able to combine all three aspects of the vendor management process into a single App that also leveraged vendor data and metrics. A key component of the App is always showing the attorney where they are in the process, what steps are left to complete and showing help text to walk them through the process. ADM utilized visualization of both phases and a task grid within the Onit tool.

As Aaron Van Nice, Vice President of Legal Operations at ADM, explains:

“I wanted a tool that really helped us and empowered our attorneys to conduct matter-specific Competitive RFPs themselves. There were some steps that we wanted to help them with, but the idea was to make this easy enough for them to do it themselves. We needed something that was efficient that could be managed by our attorneys. And that’s what we built.”

Today, ADM can use Onit Apptitude with their vendor management App to draft RFPs, send communications to vendors, accept questions or proposal submissions, review submissions, score proposals for each vendor and pre-approve vendors for review by Van Nice and ADM’s GC, who can ultimately approve hiring within the App. In addition to the vendor management App, ADM also built an engagement letter App that allows them to automatically generate engagement letters and send them through e-signature for execution.

In a nutshell, ADM succeeded in connecting all the dots in the vendor management process via Onit Apps.

To hear more about Onit’s new App Catalog and see a demo of ADM’s new vendor management App, you can listen to the webinar, Drive Legal Innovation One App at a Time, here. The webinar offers valuable insights about driving legal ops innovation.

To learn more about getting started with Onit Apptitude and building your own Apps to solve critical business problems, contact Onit today.

Corporate Legal Operations Resources and News (October 2021 Edition)

Posted on October 5, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Welcome to Onit’s October compilation of some of the most pertinent and timely articles and legal operations resources. In this month’s digest, we explore a piece of concrete proof for diversity advancement, lagging adoption in automation, the Gartner Hype Cycle and how to reduce time spent on invoice review. We hope you find some valuable takeaways.

1. New Study Reveals Women Legal Execs’ Salaries Outpacing Their Male Counterparts

Women legal executives have some great news to celebrate. According to a recent survey, while salaries for male general counsel remained flat at $2.7 million, the median total compensation for women GCs topped more than $3 million last year – and pay has increased more than 17% since 2019. The number of women GCs surveyed also increased from 33% to 36% in the same amount of time. This offers some proof that companies are willing to pay upper-echelon salaries for diverse legal talent. (Source: Law.com)

2. Gartner Reveals that Trust, Growth and Change are Driving Emerging Technology

Quantum ML is on the rise, and NFTs and decentralized identity are on the cusp of disillusionment, according to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. This intriguing article illustrates three overarching trends that its analysts believe will drive organizations to investigate emerging technology, including engineering trust, accelerating growth and sculpting change. Gartner, who is always one of the most valuable legal operations resources for technologies, also explores how a key enabler of competitive differentiation and a catalyst for transformation are driving technology innovation. (Source: Gartner)

3. Are Law Firms Lagging on Automation?

Many law firms continue to demonstrate interest in technology that helps automate manual workflows and improve efficiency, but surprisingly, many others are still lagging behind. About 75% of law firms that responded to a recent survey report that they are not provided with the technology to do their jobs effectively. One reason for this is a crucial disconnect. Administrators mistakenly believe they have provided legal with all the technology they need. The result is that staff spend too much time on routine administrative tasks that automation could handle. (Source: ABA Journal)

4. Legal Trends Lawyers Should Know About

We’re going meta now by sharing legal trends from a compilation of legal trends. The National Law Review recaps a recent report by the ABA that discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the legal industry, how attorney wages are growing faster than inflation, an increase in bar passage rates, progress on the diversity front and some insights on the post-pandemic job market. (Source: The National Law Review)

5. How to Free Yourself from Legal Invoice Review

Legal invoice review often invokes frustration from in-house counsel. After all, which busy lawyer wants to set aside interesting work to review a 100-page law firm bill?  Advances like e-billing and billing guidelines have helped the process tremendously, but there’s still room for improvement. In this podcast, Onit’s Matt DenOuden and Mary Fuzat sit down to discuss the challenges of legal invoice review and how AI finds “between the rules” savings and gives attorneys back time for more strategic contributions. (Source: Onit podcast)

A Bonus Option for Legal Operations Resources

Ready for a break? Try out this video if you need a change from watching puppies or listening to guided meditations for a mid-day lift. You’ll never look at legal billing the same again.

How to Find the Latest Updates in the Legal Operations Software Market

Posted on September 30, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The legal operations software market is rapidly evolving, thanks to technologies such as AI and the ever-growing operational sophistication of corporate legal departments.

Fortunately, a slew of resources are available for those interested in legal operations and the technology that turbocharges it, including:

  • The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) – A community of legal operations experts focused on redefining the business of law. In addition to releasing its yearly State of the Industry Report, it offers programming worldwide, educational resources and online connections for its membership.
  • The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) – Founded in 1981, this legal organization represents, guides and supports the global in-house counsel community in over 85 countries. In addition to valuable programming and online resources, it hosts the annual ACC Value Champions awards program, which highlights leaders in improving costs, predictability and outcomes.
  • Corporate Counsel – This magazine explores corporate legal department trends and challenges and how innovative legal leaders respond to them.

These are only a few of the resources available. And now, there’s one more.

A Podcast for the Legal Operations Software Market

Over the past several years, we’ve been tackling some of the most significant issues in legal ops, automation and more through a series of podcasts. Now, we’ve collected them all in one place, so that anyone in corporate legal can hear candid discussions on some of the latest news and advances in the legal operations software market.

Podcast highlights include:

  • How BT Enacted its Award-Winning Digital Transformation – In less than a year, BT transformed its global legal department, creating award-winning operations that judges described as admirable “not only due to the speed of their roll-out of the platform, but by taking an existing process and migrating it into a streamlined, efficient platform.” In less than three months, the company has been awarded the Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and joined the shortlist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law awards. In this episode, David Griffin, Head of Legal Technology and Change at BT, shares how this happened.
  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Reviewing and managing NDAs is a pain in the neck for in-house counsel. They’re the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today. In fact, some corporate legal departments tell us they process between 500 and 100,000 a year. That’s a lot of time and cost that can be redirected to other contributions. Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how AI and automation are transforming the NDA process – in some cases shaving the time spent on NDA processing by 70%.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, former Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune 100 global financial services company with more than $1 trillion in assets under management and 14,000 employees globally (and now SVP of Strategy and Growth for Onit), shares his insights into what goes into creating world-class legal ops. While budget is an essential factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Everyone from tech companies to industry influencers tells lawyers what they need from AI. And, if there’s one thing about lawyers, they don’t generally like being told what they like. Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, a lawyer and technologist, talks about ways legal and contract AI technologies are actually giving lawyers what they need.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Surveys – both formal and informal – show a rising interest in contract lifecycle management (CLM). As interest grows in this technology, how can legal operations professionals cut through the hype to find ROI? Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses unique ways to find CLM ROI.
  • Ten Years of Onit: Stories from the Companies’ Co-Founders – How do four very different and strong-minded people come together to create one of the leading companies in the legal operations software market? Well, there’s success in dysfunction. In this podcast, Onit’s co-founders share their journey from startup to scaleup.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here. Be sure to like our podcast LinkedIn page to get the latest episodes. You can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal ops through AI and automation, schedule a demo or reach out to [email protected].

The Top Risk and Compliance Automation Tools Created by Legal Operations

Posted on September 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Managing risk and compliance are critical tasks for keeping companies safe, which is why corporate legal departments are turning to compliance automation tools.

Between an ever-changing regulatory landscape, an increased focus on data privacy, the need to monitor internal policies and guidelines and more, risk and compliance represent a challenging task. It spans multiple departments within an enterprise, requiring collaboration and management of often manual tasks. These elements increase the possibility of the proverbial dropped ball and, in turn, increase the likelihood of noncompliance with external or internal protocols or higher risks for companies.

Take, for example, data breach incident reporting for GDPR and other data privacy regulations. Organizations must take immediate action to report potential data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours. However, this can be a challenging timeline for large organizations relying on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails as tools for compliance.

What if legal operations could build their own compliance automation tools? It’s happening – and quite often. Here’s how.

The Power of Business Process Automation

As a general rule, the lower the number of tools needed to manage a process, the higher the overall efficiency. That’s where business process automation and compliance meet.

Corporate legal departments of all sizes across the globe are rethinking how they work. They are looking for ways to radically improve their process performance to optimize compliance activities. Technology is rapidly accommodating this need through the rise of no-code platforms and visual interfaces. These innovations have made it possible for almost anyone to build and deploy solutions and applications without writing a single line of code.

Let’s return to the example above of data breach incident reporting. Automation vastly streamlines this process. One team of legal operations experts, which included BT and Standard Chartered, built an App on a no-code business process automation platform to streamline the process. The resulting App reports, manages and tracks data breaches and notifies regulators. It collects data breach information, automatically sends a notice to the security and compliance team and offers a rules-based dashboard and a quick entry point to review records. It even generates ICO reports and submits them in addition to collecting feedback from the organization. (You can see the App in action in this video.)

Risk and Compliance Automation Tools and Apps

The Onit Nation – a group of Onit Fortune 500 corporate legal customers, partners and employees – has built an impressive range of Apps on our business process automation platform. These 5,500+ Apps cover a wide range of industries and practices, including accounting, finance and procurement, enterprise operations, general and administrative, human resources, IT, legal operations, marketing and IP and risk and compliance.

Here are some of the risk and compliance automation tools the Onit Nation has created:

  • Compliance Questionnaires: Creates, distributes and keeps track of responses to questionnaires for various compliance-tracking needs.
  • Directors’ Stock Election Unit Form: Assists with distributing, collecting and tracking annual Board of Director’s instructions for stock options.
  • Employee Incident: Provides a secure intake mechanism for employees to report incidents, both named and anonymous.
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations, collecting all ethics cases together for better oversight, collaboration and management.
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation for company-wide gift and business entertainment to improve compliance with relevant policies.
  • Internal Investigations: Traces internal allegations end to end and creates capture points for intake.
  • Power of Attorney Agreements: Handles the approval and management of power of attorney contracts used when a company needs to act on behalf of an employee.
  • Whistleblower: An anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought by employees that allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution.

These are just some of the tools that make risk and compliance tasks easier. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. You can also learn more about no-code platforms by reading this white paper – No-Code Platforms: How They Are Transforming Legal Operations and Their Enterprises.

To get started with building your own Apps, request a demonstration of Onit’s Apptitude platform or email [email protected].

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

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

Has your corporate legal department been struggling to figure out ways to cut down time spent on contracts, reduce the average sales cycle and find a better way to manage buy-side, sell-side and corporate contracts? Contract management platforms offer the ideal technology to help on all counts.

You may be at the stage where you’re considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to help you reach these goals, but are unsure about how to proceed. You’ve likely already heard and read about all the benefits of using a premier CLM solution. After all, it’s a technology many corporate legal departments have prioritized, and you’ve probably already reviewed resources or spoken with vendors. We’d like to take a different angle here and tell you about four common mistakes to avoid when evaluating a CLM solution.

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

  1. Believing That A Cutting-Edge CLM Solution Is Not Worth The Cost Of Investment.

For several years, the new paradigm has been to do more with less money and fewer resources. Technology has increasingly played a prominent role as legal operations focus on achieving objectives with “less.”

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. For example, Onit’s contract management platform streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk in the process and enables departments to save an average of 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce by 20% the average hours spent on contracts.

  1. Assuming That Staff Reduction Will Be Possible With Your CLM Implementation

It’s true that a good CLM offering streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk and enabling departments to save valuable time. The ideal contract management platform also makes quick work of many processes, relieving staff of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Having said that, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can save even more money with staff reductions. It’s a better strategy to remember that while you’re automating many processes and some staff functions may change or even be eliminated, staff reductions are usually not the best option in many cases.

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

Many legal departments already know how well CLM products empower legal and business teams with an enhanced contract management process. Some key benefits are conditional contract generation, MS Word integration, document management, secure collaboration and eSignature integrations.

With all that, what could be missing? Integrated artificial intelligence.

For example, in the pre-signature contract phase, the AI engine provides a first-pass review of the contract and annotates it based on your company’s checklist, playbook and information learned from AI models. By allowing a lawyer to focus on the medium- to high-risk areas, your legal team can reduce contract lead times, automate guidance and proactively address common pain points in the legal workflow.

In the post-signature contract phase, AI-driven data extraction allows you to complete projects at scale and at a fraction of the time manual processes take. Additionally, you can gain powerful insight from your contracts in real-time when coupled with a contract lifecycle management solution.

  1. Implementing a CLM Solution That Doesn’t Have All The Bells And Whistles

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process and are ready to implement your new CLM technology. It’s zero hour, and one of the staff asks you if the solution provides for automated risk mitigation – which somehow didn’t come up during the selection process. You learn that this system doesn’t have that feature, and now you’re wondering what other vital elements may be missing. Depending on your specific needs, here are five other features that are must-haves:

  • Conditional Contract Generation: Automatically generate a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Routing and Approval Workflow: The ability to design and build simple to complex workflows to generate and route your contracts.
  • Obligation Management: Give your users the power to manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance.
  • Clause/Template Library: Manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in a centralized and secure cloud-based location.
  • Partner and Client Self-Service: Provide partners and clients an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts.

It can undoubtedly be overwhelming trying to determine the best route to take in your digital transformation project. There are contract management platforms out there for practically every budget – meaning there is no longer a good reason not to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Still, the best advice is to go into your implementation with realistic expectations, a good understanding of exactly what your department needs and a plan to avoid common mistakes.

If you’d like to learn more about contract lifecycle management, here are some additional resources: