Category: Business Process Management

Creating Custom Legal Software: The Apps and Solutions Legal Operations Pros Are Building Themselves

Posted on September 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To meet the needs of today’s modern corporate legal department, many legal operations professionals are creating their own custom legal software. And here’s what they’re building.

But first, let’s take a look at the past year and a half.

Corporate legal departments completed many nimble adjustments as they’ve faced new challenges and demands. Legal operations professionals play a vital role in this success, finding ways to make it easier for lawyers to work while bringing in more efficiency, cost savings and other benefits of operational excellence.

Technology undoubtedly plays a role in supporting these endeavors, bringing automation and AI to systems like enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. However, even the most customized solutions must have the flexibility to evolve with a corporate legal department’s needs – especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise.

Building Your Own Custom Legal Software

Custom-built software for legal traditionally seems like a luxury, requiring precise planning, contributors across multiple departments and a good piece of the budget. But now, with technology innovations, legal operations pros can create Apps (and combine Apps into solutions) quickly and efficiently. They do this with tools that simplify the process and offer no-code-needed interfaces.

Business automation platforms and App builders with drag-and-drop visual interfaces make the creation process more accessible for those unfamiliar with coding. Instead of relying on developers, they can use a platform and its simplified interface to program the software. The key is indeed the underlying business process automation platform, which acts as a blank canvas. While it supports large solutions for legal spend, contract management and matter management, it also supplies the flexibility to enhance those solutions with complementary Apps, create new Apps altogether and combine Apps into solutions to tackle more complex challenges.

A perfect example of this in action is Hack the House, our inaugural virtual hackathon. Five teams comprised of in-house legal professionals, consultants and business analysts identified business cases and built Apps to solve complex workflow challenges in less than three weeks. They created solutions for data breach incident reporting, career development, diversity and pro bono program management. The winning team took it a step further by creating multiple Apps and combining them into a solution to streamline trademark renewal decisions and track trade secrets.

As impressive as that sounds, we’ve seen custom legal software built even faster – with Apps up and running in as little as an hour.

What Legal Operations Is Building

To date, the Onit Nation – Onit’s master App builders, customers and strategic partners – have used the Apptitude platform to build more than 5,500 Apps to solve everyday business problems. Among them are several custom legal software solutions that are helping to automate and accelerate nearly all aspects of legal operations, and we’ve collected many of them in our new App Catalog.

Our corporate legal customers have been prolific in building Apps and solutions. In addition to the Apps mentioned for Hack the House, other Apps have been created to handle:

  • Board Kit Distribution: Centralizes board of director information and notifies board members of new or revised documents while giving them access to the most current information
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations and consolidates all ethics cases in one place for better oversight, collaboration and management
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation on gift and business entertainment requests company-wide to improve compliance with relevant policies
  • Settlement Authority Request and Approval: Provides a workflow for approving documents that detail settlement authority requests
  • Task Assignment: Handles task assignments made to non-departmental resources
  • Whistleblower: Provides anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought to you by employees and allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution

These are examples of just some of what our customers have created to automate processes and solve pressing issues. In fact, the Apps work across the enterprise, automating processes with HR, marketing, risk and compliance, accounting, finance, procurement and more. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration to revolutionize workflows and increase efficiency.

To get started with building custom legal software on Onit’s no-code business process automation platform Apptitude, schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.

How Legal Hold Software Supports Litigation Peace of Mind

Posted on August 26, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Legal hold software plays a vital role in the litigation process, helping companies preserve forms and relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Companies have a duty to demonstrate the proper care to preserve digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk.  This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is considered possible, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Simply put, companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercise the proper care to preserve and collect electronically stored information (ESI).

The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization. Potential consequences include penalties, evidentiary sanctions, adverse rulings or fines.

The History of Legal Holds

In the case of Marsulex Envt’l. Tech v. Selip S.P.A., we see an example of the repercussions of failure to implement a legal hold (also known as a litigation hold). The plaintiff Marsulex sued the defendant for a defective product. After the plaintiff requested that the defendant produce certain documents, the defendant resisted providing particular vital records. The plaintiff maintained that the defendant had not put in place a formal legal hold, and thus did not preserve pertinent evidence. Ultimately, the court found that the defendant’s CEO failed to implement a legal hold. The court then granted the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions and ordered a forensic investigation of the defendant’s computers.

Some of the lessons learned from this case include:

  • Companies must quickly take all necessary steps to adequately implement a legal hold as soon as litigation or a subpoena is reasonably anticipated.
  • Robust legal hold software must be in place so the company is prepared for the threat of legal holds.

Interestingly, even if a company issues a legal hold in a timely manner, other things can go wrong if something gets missed along the way. For example, if the issued legal hold was not broad enough in scope, some employees failed to comply with the order or the company’s legal hold software was simply “broken,” severe court sanctions and financial penalties may result.

The Role of Legal Hold Software

Fortunately, help is readily available. A robust legal hold software solution offers a quick and highly cost-effective way to reduce the ever-present risk of costly court sanctions. The best solutions will feature real-time dashboards, automated workflows, real-time status tracking, custodian record repositories and advanced audit capability. With just the right solution, you can streamline the legal hold process, easily create new holds, gather information from custodians and have the peace of mind of ensured compliance, swift deployment ability, enhanced visibility and maximized performance.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Software

If you would like to learn more about legal holds and legal hold software, here are three resources. They discuss the significance of legal holds in today’s corporate environment, why you need gold-standard legal hold automation software and strategies to fuel your company’s path toward a robust legal hold process.

Automated NDA: Speed Up Non-Disclosure Management for In-House Counsel

Posted on August 19, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today, with our customers telling us that they process anywhere between 500 and 100,000 NDAs every year. Processing that volume of contracts, no matter how standardized or routine, quickly adds up in cost and creates a real risk of spreading your legal department employees too thin.

Onit is transforming automated NDA with the introduction of Automate NDA, an easy-to-implement, best practice solution that automates NDA management and cuts time spent on them by up to 70%. Automate NDA brings together the best aspects of Onit’s workflow and AI platforms, Apptitude and Precedent, to automate drafting, review, negotiation, execution and management of NDAs at a price that won’t break the bank. All of this happens in an accessible, simplified legal portal that enables self-service.

Hear about NDA Automate and how it helps corporate legal departments from Nick Whitehouse, the GM of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. He discusses what it does, why it’s important and how it works in this podcast.

The Challenges of NDAs

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456.1 Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year and the price tag skyrockets easily.

Despite this volume and expense, NDAs are still frequently considered to be low-value work, even though they’re often the most frequent touchpoint between the legal department and the wider organization. This is a low-value dynamic that serves as a great source of frustration and friction – and is usually a lose-lose situation for the legal department.

There’s a widespread misconception out there that NDAs are always straightforward. That is most definitely not the case, particularly in increasingly competitive environments. This increasing complexity, when added to the sheer volume of NDAs at most organizations, creates a perfect storm of pressure and time demands on those reviewing the NDAs.

Finally, the mental toll this type of work takes on attorneys deserves consideration. In 2018, the American Bar Association conducted a study of 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout.

The study cited these culprits: tedious, boring work, long hours and overwork, and high-stress situations. Voluminous routine processes like NDAs contribute to all three.

A Step-by-Step Look at How Automate NDA Works

Automate NDA is a cost-effective solution that requires minimal effort to implement and speeds up the end-to-end NDA process by 70%.

The process starts with online submission. Anyone in your organization can visit the Automate NDA portal and request an NDA to be drafted or reviewed or ask for help.

Automate NDA Portal

When a request is submitted, Automate NDA automatically routes it through the appropriate workflow, be it generating your standard NDA and sending it for e-signature, or reviewing and redlining a third-party NDA.

In the example of a third-party NDA review, once you upload the NDA, Automate NDA will review and redline the contract based on the corporate legal department’s contract playbook and provide a link to the edited Word document. If there are major issues, Automate NDA will instead escalate the NDA to the legal team.

Automated NDA reviews and redlines contracts

The legal team can track all of this work from the Automate NDA dashboard.

Automate NDA dashboard

Interested in creating a streamlined, automated NDA experience? Schedule a demonstration today to learn more about Automate NDA.

1 Based on 1-4 hours of work per each NDA and the average rate per hour for an in-house attorney of $114 according to the 2019 Association of Corporate Counsel Global Legal Benchmarking Report.

How to Intentionally Design World-Class In House Legal Operations

Posted on August 17, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The rise of in house legal operations is changing the way organizations approach and structure their legal function. As the discipline of legal operations continues to evolve, so does the conversation on what world-class operations should look like and how to intentionally design them to meet that status.

Last month, we sat down with Brad Rogers, Onit’s Vice President of Strategy and Growth and a former leader of operational excellence in Fortune 500 companies, to discuss what it takes to build world-class legal operations in today’s demanding legal environment. (You can find his full podcast here.)

In our first installment, we discussed the goals of an in house legal operations transformation journey and how to secure the funding to build the legal ops function your organization needs.

Now, we turn our attention to what that legal ops function should look like.

Legal ops should deliver productivity back to lawyers, significantly reduce and reallocate legal spend and future-proof the environment your lawyers are working in. But what would that legal ops function look like if it were intentionally designed?

Brad laid out three elements that are crucial to world-class legal ops: technology, support services and partnerships and business discipline.

In House Legal Operations Technology

Technology is a major factor in any legal ops transformation journey. We live at a peak time for innovation, with capabilities for legal professionals that are constantly evolving through advancements in areas like AI.

When you’re building your in house legal operations function, you should be thinking about your entire technology ecosystem – that means not just your foundational tools like matter management, e-billing and document management, but the surrounding technologies as well. You want to structure a solution set for your lawyers, not simply gather a collection of disparate tools for them to learn how to use.

A successful transformation journey requires a road map that connects all your capabilities to give you a better understanding of the nature and trends of your business. Once you understand that, you can start considering things like how AI would enhance your capabilities even further or where there are additional workflow efficiencies to be gained.

Support Services and Partnerships

One of the most beneficial capabilities a mature in house legal operations team can bring is the ability to leverage support services and strategic partnerships. When you’re first building out legal ops, however, this might look a little different.

You might start by approaching the lawyers and telling them to refer any nonlegal work they’re handling to legal ops. Even further, you can help them identify that work and cement your legal ops department as a valuable support team for legal. Going forward, legal ops should be involved in projects from the start and serve as proactive problem-solvers. Lawyers should be practicing law, not focusing on things like project management and business improvement. A strong legal ops team should also offer support for billing, which historically leads to significant lost time and inefficiency for legal departments.

The final aspect is managing the legal department’s internal partnerships with other departments, such as HR, risk compliance and security, and its external partnerships with vendors. Legal departments shouldn’t have to do everything by themselves. The point of legal ops is to let the lawyers focus on the law while ops handles the rest.

Business Discipline

One thing people often overlook when building world-class legal operations is the ability of in house legal operations to harness the power of data – both your internal data and data that exists outside the organization. Data analysis is key to understanding your business and trends in the market, allocating resources and making strategic plans for your organization.

Legal ops should be looking at all the available data and making informed decisions for the business. This can include outsourcing work, vendor management, strategic hiring and more. The goal is to get as much nonlegal work off the lawyers’ plates as possible to allow them to practice better law. Every legal department has hidden factories – pockets of inefficiency – that prevent them from being the most effective, disciplined legal function possible. Legal ops should ideally always be looking for those areas and figuring out the best way to eliminate or transform them.

For more legal ops insights, you can listen to the full podcast discussion with Brad here. You can also subscribe to the Onit podcast anywhere, including through Apple and Spotify or any service you use to listen to podcasts.

Discover the Latest Workflow Automation Apps for Accounting, Finance and Procurement

Posted on August 12, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Apps for accounting, finance and procurement professionals have spurred a significant digital transformation in recent years – especially those focused on workflow automation. Workflow automation Apps are making headway in these professions, streamlining tasks that were once purely manual and gathering and analyzing valuable data.

Members of our Onit Nation – Fortune 500 customers, industry partners and employees who build on Onit’s platforms – have identified process challenges in these departments. To address them, they did what comes naturally. They quickly made Apps for accounting, finance and procurement on Onit Apptitude that do everything from expense management to PO requests.

Apptitude is a workflow automation platform that allows users to easily create, modify and deploy Apps without special technical training or expertise. Any business user can access its visual, drag-and-drop interface to quickly build the Apps needed to address an organization’s biggest (and smallest) challenges. How fast does this happen? We’ve had customers complete builds within an hour.

Apps for Accounting, Finance and Procurement

As with legal, accounting and finance are professions that require precision. Errors can have significant consequences that can complicate business.

With these Apps for accounting, finance and procurement, the Onit Nation has found ways to streamline processes and improve accuracy by automating reporting, balance sheet reviews and more. They include:

  • Board Approval: An App that tracks and manages internal board of directors appointments and approval workflows
  • Balance Sheet Review: An App that runs a quarterly review of a company’s balance sheet for various businesses, allowing balance sheets to be circulated, reviewed and approved worldwide
  • Application for Expenditure: An App that handles the approval of expenditures, including tracking for costs and benefits over time
  • Fund Management: An App that oversees the asset transfer between receiving and contributing entities within a company and includes various steps that are approved through e-signature workflows
  • PO Request: An App that facilitates request and payment approval for purchase orders

The Onit App Catalog – Representing More Than 5,500 Apps

These Apps, and many others, are now collected in one place – our new App Catalog.

The App Catalog showcases the breadth of Apps built on Apptitude and represents a decade of innovation creating digital transformation one App at a time. The 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.

With the App Catalog, all of our customers can now draw from the innovation of others to find the inspiration they need to build the tools that will automate processes and solve their most pressing issues.

Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. If you’d like to see these Apps in action, you can schedule a demonstration here.

Corporate Legal Market Trends for August 2021

Posted on August 5, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Welcome to the August edition of our monthly look into corporate legal market trends. In this edition, we share some thought-provoking articles covering innovative GCs, the digital transformation of BT’s legal operations and how AI and contract lifecycle management help legal departments run like a business. We hope you find some practical takeaways in the following articles.

1. Examples of Operational Excellence from Legal Teams Running the Department like a Business

Running corporate in-house legal departments like a business is quickly gaining traction in legal departments around the globe. The age-old complaint that lawyers are holding up critical processes is rapidly turning into a thing of the past. Technology solutions have significantly contributed to alleviating this problem, providing faster processes and newfound collaborative abilities at unforeseen levels. Of particular note: Lenovo’s contract management transformation, which happened thanks to a strong vision and the adoption of contract lifecycle management technology and AI.

According to the article:

Lenovo has recently digitised its contracting processes and is now able to measure how much time is spent on a contract, how many lawyers worked on it, and how much a template has been modified. “Data analytics has enabled insights we never had before,” says [Marcelo] Peviani [legal director at the centre of excellence for Lenovo].

Source: Financial Times

2. The Next Legal Market Trend to Put on Your Radar: Running the Post-Award Phase of Contract Management

According to a World Commerce & Contracting Association and Deloitte survey, contract professionals are shifting their focus to the post-signature phase of contract management. The results show a growing emphasis on the post-award stage of contract management. According to the survey, “less than 30% of organizations currently have centralized or center-led post-award contract management resources” and “only a little over 20% attempt to monitor or calculate the costs or overall benefits associated with contract management.” It also discovered that nearly 40% of the participants are looking to improve post-award processes, and more than one-third are striving to introduce more “robust approaches to obligation management.”

Source: World Commerce & Contracting Association

3. Hear BT Discuss Its Award-Winning Legal Operations Digital Transformation  

David Griffin, head of legal technology and change at BT, joined the Onit podcast recently to discuss his company’s award-winning legal operations transformation. He shared how the company led legal market trends by replacing manual and disconnected process and management tools. The change helped the department handle workload and matters across the teams from inception to closure.

Judges for the Legal Innovation Awards took note, sharing with Law.com that BT stood out “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.”

BT won the Legal Innovation Award for “Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations” and was named a finalist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. You can hear David’s story here.

Source: Onit

4. Thinking outside of the Box Reaches New Level among In-House Lawyers

The Financial Times has featured 20 highly experienced GCs who are directly challenging traditional legal roles. By redefining themselves as strategic thinkers, they are making market-leading headway when it comes to sustainability and digital transformation. Companies are now operating in ways that require lawyers to use their skills and experience in new ways. The continuing proliferation of implementing legal technology gives these lawyers more time to focus on high-impact legal work.

Source: Financial Times

5. AI and Contract Lifecycle Management: What Should You Expect?

If you’re following legal market trends, you’ve probably already heard how contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management. But now that AI is in the mix, how does that affect contract lifecycle management? A new visual guide tackles this topic to get you up to speed in no time. It explores questions such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Source: Onit resources

Bonus Resources: The Latest on CLM and AI

Year after year, legal market trends have pointed to lawyers and legal departments finding ways to be more efficient while controlling costs. Adopting cutting-edge technology, thinking outside of the box and running the department like a business are important ways to achieve these objectives.

Combining contract lifecycle management tools with AI is a prime example of working toward those means. When paired, they offer streamlined processes, a decrease in friction for employees across the enterprise and deliver more business value. If you’d like to learn more about legal market trends for contract lifecycle management tools, check out some of our recent blog posts:

Ensure Accurate Legal Billing By Avoiding These Four Common Invoicing Problems

Posted on August 3, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

While having accurate legal billing is something all parties involved can agree on, it’s still a complicated process for large corporate legal departments. A single law firm bill may have hundreds of pages, clock in at millions of dollars and cover multiple matters, tasks and timekeepers. Outside counsel guidelines, billing code confusion and the sheer volume of bills further complicate invoice review.

As a result, charges can routinely fall in a gray area or violate outside counsel guidelines. They can slip past first-pass reviewers who are short on time and have multiple responsibilities. Even the most stringent automated billing rules may not flag some costs because of a wide variation in descriptions and billing tactics.

Take travel, for example. With lockdowns over the past year, accurate legal billing for travel-related costs should be a given. You logically expect that travel charges from law firms substantially decreased during that time. However, that wasn’t the case.

When Onit’s AI-enabled invoice review tool scoured historical invoices from a set of Fortune 500 customers, it discovered an average of six figures of savings in travel-related billed time and expenses submitted to customers. These are “gray area” charges that surpassed what had already been found by traditional billing rules and standard invoice review.

Common Invoice Errors That Make Accurate Legal Billing Challenging

Corporate legal departments want to know what services they’re paying for as part of their law firm partnerships. Otherwise, it’s difficult to make proper efficiency and cost control refinements.

We recently conducted an informal poll, asking corporate legal customers to name problems they encounter when reviewing invoices. Each of the following top-four improper e-billing and invoicing practices is a significant barrier to understanding and controlling legal spend.

  1. Vague or insufficient details in invoices

“For services rendered” or other vague descriptions are insufficient explanations of legal services. While each poor description may not seem like a pressing concern, the cumulative costs of this practice over several invoices reveal a much larger problem. Vague billing descriptions make understanding and controlling legal spend a nearly impossible task to undertake.

  1. Block billing

Block billing, or the practice of putting multiple work segments on multiple dates into one line item description, is raising red flags at corporate legal departments – especially when “going lean” is the name of the game. While it was a somewhat accepted standard for years, the dollars add up quickly and are difficult to catch. The practice also acts against conveying the value of law firm contributions since there is no transparency for the work they undertook.

How much of an impact can block billing have on spend? One legal operations leader reported a block billing charge of more than a million dollars – one that AI caught but only after it had made it past first reviewers.

  1. Improper coding of invoices

While it sounds like a simple task, you’d be surprised how often improper coding happens in a single day. Often the mistake is as simple as billers failing to select appropriate codes on dropdown menus. When work is attributed to the wrong billing code, it may trigger an additional review, taking extra time while also skewing legal spend analytics.

  1. Work being done by wrong staff class

How often have we done other people’s work and vice versa, whether above or below our pay grade? Not a real problem, right? Wrong. Sure, it happens, but it can add up quickly and work against accurate legal billing.

Certain types of work are better suited to a paralegal, legal assistant or intern than an attorney. Too often, though, those work efforts are being done by an attorney at a much higher rate. Or perhaps a task that would take a higher-billing partner five minutes to complete would take an associate much longer and so cost more. At the end of the day, corporate legal departments want the work performed by the appropriate level of staff.

Alleviating the Pain of Legal Invoice Review

Lean legal – doing more with less money and fewer resources while maintaining the same high quality – is the new paradigm at corporate legal departments. Technology plays a prominent role in achieving legal ops objectives with “less.” As hard as we try, law firm billing errors still happen, and corporate in-house legal teams will struggle to catch them. Well-chosen technologies – like AI and automated billing rules – bolster the opportunity for accurate legal billing.

If you’d like to read more about alleviating invoice review challenges, here are some resources:

Onit Portals: The Welcome Mat for Your New Business Intake Process

Posted on July 29, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Streamlining the new business intake process and automating inefficient processes are high on the list of priorities for most busy corporate legal departments today. Any technology that can help with legal service requests and allow users from other business units to engage in self-service tends to be welcomed with open arms.

Enter Onit portals. They’re powerful dashboards with Apps that let users solve their problems without wasting time finding the proper channels to reach legal. From legal service requests to contract review to audit help, a portal puts the functions your company needs most front and center for the entire organization.

You can think of your Onit portal as the welcome mat for your legal department: the best, most efficient way to enable self-service or route work to the legal professional most suited to handle it.

How Portals Streamline the New Business Intake Process

Your portal acts as the main landing page for legal (that welcome mat to your legal department we mentioned). On it, you can include as many Apps as you want that allow users from across your organization to submit workflow requests like audit requests, employee incident reports, investigations, legal service requests and more. The Apps then automate the new business intake process for each submission, delivering the project to the right legal contact, tracking progress and notifying appropriate parties.

Onit portals are customizable for the needs of any organization, from small businesses to the largest Fortune 100 corporations. We can build out the portal that works for both your organization’s size and the types of workflows you most need.

Better yet, we don’t charge per user. Under our flat-rate user model, you can open up the power of Onit to everyone in your organization, whether you have 200 employees or 20,000 employees. It also means your workflows don’t have to be strictly tailored toward your legal staff. Your portal represents a powerful opportunity to increase collaboration between legal and other units and allow business users to engage in a higher level of self-service than ever before.

Building the Perfect Portal

When it comes to building your portal, your options are nearly limitless. No two legal departments are the same, so your portal shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all.

Think about your most significant pain points regarding the new business intake process for your legal department. Is handling and routing legal service requests your biggest headache? Do you need a better way for sales and procurement to redline routine contracts? Do your users struggle to open new matters in your matter management system?

Whatever workflows you need can be linked in your portal. With over 5,500 Apps currently available in Onit’s new App Catalog, all of which can be connected in your Onit portal, the possibilities are endless.

Workflow requests submitted through the portal don’t just disappear into the ether. As part of the portal process, some rules help to route specific requests to the right department or employee whose job it is to handle the task at issue. This can be as simple as a standard assignment for certain types of work, as complex as an auto-assignment system based on attorney capacity, or anything in between.

Via your portal, Onit does the heavy lifting of making sure the workflows are directed properly and the work is being assigned as efficiently as possible. This triage component, coupled with notifications that are sent to the responsible party, creates a centralized system for handling legal requests.

There’s no workflow too big or too small – if you need it, your Onit portal can handle it. Portals give your organization better access to your legal department while making workflows more efficient and streamlined for your legal employees.

Schedule an Onit demo today or email [email protected] to learn more.

CLM Process Flow: Making Contracting Easier for Legal

Posted on July 27, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The contract lifecycle management (CLM) process flow challenges many corporate legal departments. While contracts play a critical role in the success of any business, getting them to execution can be an uphill battle, thanks to antiquated processes and outdated tools. Popular software like Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and SharePoint doesn’t offer the transparency you need during drafting, review and approval to keep contracting processes moving forward in a timely manner.

That’s where contract lifecycle management (CLM) software comes in. Managing your contracting doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The right contracting tools create a CLM process flow that allows corporate legal departments to eliminate delays, keep relationships with suppliers, vendors and customers running smoothly and gain insight into the contracting process to help with risk management and compliance.

Eliminating Contracting Bottlenecks In the CLM Process Flow

When the legal department is responsible for drafting, reviewing and approving even the most routine agreements, bottlenecks inevitably happen. Without a proper system for keeping track of contract volume and status, legal will inevitably be overwhelmed by contract requests from other departments, causing a backlog and frustration that will reverberate throughout the organization.

With the right CLM process flow, however, you speed up the creation and review process and free your lawyers to focus on high-value matters rather than administrative tasks. CLM software can remove delays in all stages of the contracting process, including creating intake forms configured to specific contract types, using data from those forms to automate the contract assembly process via templates, tailoring workflows to a contract’s subject matter, prioritizing contracts for review based on risk and more.

Gaining Transparency Into Review and Approvals

In the past, contract review occurred via inefficient emails between all the various stakeholders, making the approval process unclear and leaving contracts stagnating in inboxes for far too long. A better collaboration tool is necessary for legal to properly coordinate with procurement, sales and other departments, regardless of location or contract complexity.

Cloud-based CLM that’s designed and implemented to meet the needs of a specific organization can allow all parties in the approval chain to access the current status of contracting no matter where they are. More sophisticated CLM systems can create parallel approval processes incorporating e-signatures, eliminating hard copies and significantly accelerating the contracting timeline.

When you add AI to the CLM process flow, it accelerates it even more. Contract AI lets business users can run an AI-powered redline in less than two minutes. It can also identify potential issues and then automatically escalate critical issues to legal as necessary. The AI redlining essentially allows business users to self-service the review of common contracts such as NDAs.

Keeping Track of Executed Contracts

Many organizations lack a centralized contract repository, meaning that contracts are typically tucked away after being signed, too often in a place where they’re difficult to find again when they’re needed. Hard-copy storage and scattered electronic filing cabinets create disorganization, which in turn creates the risk of missing important dates or necessary compliance updates.

Having a single, designated repository for all contracts as part of your CLM process flow eliminates these problems. Contracts are simple to find, even after those who were originally involved with them have moved on. The right repository will be searchable across all document formats, so less time is spent trying to find contracts and more time is spent focusing on high-value work.

A CLM Process Flow that Stays on Top of Compliance

Compliance is critical to minimizing organizational risk. That means complying both with legal and regulatory requirements and complying with the terms of your contracts themselves. The best way to ensure compliance on all fronts is to implement CLM tools that track the terms of all your contracts, including conditions and pertinent dates, rather than leaving that task open to manual processes and costly human error.

CLM software with AI can extract the necessary data to have a clear picture of all your obligations and relevant legal standards. It can also track all changes to contracts and generate reports to create a reliable audit trail to lower your risk. For example, the contract AI can identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes and extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.

To capitalize on all these benefits of CLM process flow, you need a CLM solution that’s flexible enough to work the way your department works and can meet the needs of your entire organization, not just legal. Onit CLM is the simple, flexible, agile solution you need to stay on top of your contracting and boost your efficiency.

Contact Onit today to schedule a demo or email [email protected] to learn more.