Category: Company News and Events

20 Minutes of Your Time Can Impact the Entire Legal Operations Profession

What do the next 10 years hold for legal ops? According to the Blickstein Group, it’s likely to be more change at an even faster pace in law departments, in law firms and industrywide. More and more general counsel agree on the need for LDO professionals and the skills they embody. They are also actively pushing their lawyers to conduct business with the level of “operational awareness” required to succeed in today’s legal market. What is a quick way to make an impact toward improving the LDO profession as a whole? Take a survey!

Onit is excited to be a sponsor of the Blickstein Group Law Department Operations Survey and we invite you to take the survey, which is the only way to receive the full results with unique and valuable insight into law department management trends.

Blickstein Group’s Law Department Operations Survey is the longest running research specifically covering legal operations. It is designed solely for the professionals who manage complex legal department operations for their companies. Onit has been a part of it for years and are thrilled to do so again.

The survey will take you only 20-25 minutes to fill out. There is no cost, but only survey participants receive a copy of the valuable proprietary results – including 300 data points you can use to benchmark and better understand trends in legal operations!  You can access previous years’ survey reports, with a summary analysis of results, here.

All responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate form.

Please complete the survey by October 4.

Contract management has always been a siloed entity from the rest of the company that is normally handled by the legal department or dedicated contract managers with legal knowledge. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is contract management? In simplest terms, contract management is the process of managing contract creation, deliverables, deadlines, terms, conditions, and execution, while ensuring all parties involved comply with the signed agreement until the contract lifecycle ends. Many companies still use manual processes to manage their contracts but this can become a very labor-intensive and time-consuming operation that ultimately ends with an overflowing file cabinet that is eventually lost or forgotten. When contracts aren’t managed or analyzed properly, companies can unknowingly become non-compliant or miss substantial profits.

Therefore, by driving technology and automation to manage the contract management lifecycle, companies can dramatically increase efficiency by reducing contract processing times, mitigate risk by tracking all contract agreements and improve overall customer and vendor satisfaction in the process. Onit observed that most customers experienced this pain when it came to the management of their contracts and decided to take action.

Today, Onit launched its new contract lifecycle management (CLM) software which empowers legal and business teams with end-to-end automation of their entire contract management process. Onit CLM is a cloud-based contract repository with automated functionality that supports all phases of the contract lifecycle from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management.

With Onit CLM, companies can automatically generate well-formed custom contracts and include/exclude clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata. It also empowers users with Microsoft Word integration, allowing them to create, review, approve, and execute on contracts straight from their preferred word processing tool while maintaining a secure link to Onit CLM. Seamless eSignature integration with DocuSign and Adobe Sign is another out of the box feature that comes with Onit CLM, to ensure convenient and rapid execution.

Onit developed CLM to allow companies to not only dispose of their outdated manual processes or legacy systems but to combine the management of contracts throughout the enterprise into a single cloud-based platform. Deployed in the world’s most advanced cloud platform, Amazon AWS, companies are able to achieve maximum performance, reliability, and scalability. With this cloud-based approach, Onit CLM is accessible on all major web browsers and mobile devices allowing end-users to access their business-critical contract information anytime, anywhere.

In conclusion, technology is paving the way for organizations to maximize control, speed, and provide greater insight throughout the entire contract lifecycle. Effective contract management can maximize reward, minimize risk and ultimately create powerful business relationships and pave the road to greater profitability over the long term.

Click here to read the entire press release or listen to a podcast from Onit’s CLM product manager Victor Cizinauskas.

We’re thrilled to announce our latest podcast! In this episode, Onit’s Senior Product Manager for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Victor Cizinauskas offers some interesting insight into Onit CLM.

Vic begins by covering a bit of background behind the development of Onit CLM, the next evolution of Onit’s current contracts offering. He goes on to share some of the business benefits of this contract management tool, such as streamlining and automating manual processes. Manual, disconnected contract processes still plague many organizations of all sizes, and Onit CLM makes these processes much less error prone. This significantly mitigates risk in the contract process. For example, sales wants the contract done quickly, while legal wants to take time to review and make sure everything is absolutely correct. Onit CLM goes a long way in balancing these two seemingly opposing forces, driving faster revenue and managing risk appropriately.

Vic then explains how Onit CLM is unique. It is built on Onit’s proprietary software platform which allows Onit CLM to integrate seamlessly with our other products – legal holds and enterprise legal management for example. Onit CLM is also integrated with MS Word, much to the delight of lawyers and legal operations professionals worldwide.

In closing, Vic tells us why implementing contract lifecycle management technology should be a top priority for any organization. “To save time and money,” he simply explains. It’s hard to think of better reasons than those.

Listen to the podcast.

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We’re excited to announce our latest podcast! This episode is even more special since our guest speaker is with HBR Consulting, one of Onit’s key alliance partners. Together with HBR, we’ve worked on 15 projects throughout our years together. This newest podcast features Lauren Chung, practice group leader with HBR’s Strategy and Operations Group.

Lauren begins by telling us a bit about the HBR Law Department Survey, the leading source of benchmarking data for U.S. and global law departments. The survey provides key metrics concerning legal spending, law department staffing, industry trends, diversity, and customized results. The comprehensive nature of the survey is what makes it unique. The survey is crucial in providing participants a detailed look at how they compare with their law department peers. In this way, departments can see areas in which they are strong or lacking. The survey is also a key performance management indicator to justify hiring, spend, and how effectively the department is managing resources. In fact, the survey has proven itself to be an effective tool in driving law departments’ performance management programs.

Lauren closes by explaining how to participate in the survey. The deadline for this year’s survey is mid-August, and those interested in participating may write to [email protected]. Survey results will be published sometimes this fall.  The upcoming 2019 survey will reveal somewhat of a hidden surprise for participants – results will be displayed in a dynamic recorded format.

Listen to this podcast.