Category: Contract Lifecycle Management

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.

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].

Onit Acquires BusyLamp, a Premier Provider of Enterprise Legal Management Software in Europe

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

The Onit family of enterprise legal management software providers has grown today with our acquisition of BusyLamp. We are now one of the largest enterprise legal management conglomerates globally, with more than 600 implementations completed worldwide by Onit and its subsidiaries.

Who Is BusyLamp?

BusyLamp, based in Frankfurt, Germany, serves in-house counsel with the information, data, trust and tools they need so they can focus on the strategic tasks that matter most. Founded in 2012 by co-CEO Dr. Michael Tal, co-CEO Dr. Manuel Meder and CTO Konstantin Tadrowski, the company has been recognized by Hyperion Research as “highly innovative” and a “market leader.” Corporate legal leaders across sectors including automotive, telecommunications and banking rely on its award-winning eBilling.Space and recently launched matter management solution Matter.Space every day.

BusyLamp joins Onit as an independent subsidiary.

What Does This Mean for Onit and Enterprise Legal Management Software?

The acquisition of BusyLamp makes Onit one of the largest ELM software providers in the world, capable of meeting the requirements of any corporate legal department.

It also aligns with several of Onit’s top strategic priorities, including continuing to innovate through disruption, expanding our presence worldwide and pursuing rapid growth. This acquisition, along with the acquisitions of SimpleLegal and Bodhala, positions Onit as one of the largest global conglomerates of ELM software providers and offers an even broader pool of best practices and best-of-breed technologies to help us serve customers around the world.

BusyLamp expands Onit’s existing presence in Europe with some of the brightest minds in legal technology abroad – experts deeply embedded in the local community who understand the challenges and complexities of the business of law in Europe and beyond. To complement the expertise, BusyLamp also brings an industry-leading offering well-equipped for considerations such as VAT, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and regional tax policies.

Continued Legal Technology Disruption and Product Innovation

Onit is continually looking to innovate and expand our offerings for our customers and throughout the legal space. Acquisitions play a pivotal role in our commitment to this.

The BusyLamp acquisition is the fourth for Onit in less than 12 months and the fifth overall.

In 2019, Onit acquired SimpleLegal, modern legal operations software provider. Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch in 2020, establishing its AI Center of Excellence. Thirty days later, document automation provider AXDRAFT joined the Onit family of companies. Most recently, Onit announced the acquisition of Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence company.

Like BusyLamp, SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT and Bodhala all operate as independent subsidiaries of Onit.

In addition to acquiring disruptive companies, Onit also continues to innovate its product offerings – especially for AI. In less than 12 months, Onit has introduced five AI-based offerings to optimize critical business processes for corporate legal departments.

Onit’s InvoiceAI, which debuted to customers in May, uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments increase potential savings and reduce time reviewing invoices from outside counsel and legal vendors. Onit released the news in this video announcement. On average, InvoiceAI identifies an extra 10-20% in potential savings in addition to enterprise legal management and bill review savings.

In addition to InvoiceAI, Onit also offers:

  • Precedent, an AI-based business intelligence platform
  • ReviewAI, AI technology that reviews and redlines contracts in less than two minutes
  • ExtractAI, which analyzes, reviews and exports contract data in seconds
  • Automate NDA, a best practice solution that helps automate and manage the NDA process, reducing end-to-end processing time by 70%

Learn More about BusyLamp and Onit

To learn more about BusyLamp, visit www.BusyLamp.com, or you can request a demo here.

You can request a demo of Onit’s highly configurable platforms and solutions here.

Customers of Onit and BusyLamp can reach out to their account managers to find out more about the acquisition.

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:

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 Does A Contract Management System with AI Improve the Way Lawyers Work? Let’s Look at the Numbers [Infographic]

Posted on August 24, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract lifecycle management systems allow companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. It eliminates data silos, automates workflows and reduces the overall time spent – which means it adds to business value.

When you add AI, the value of a contract lifecycle system increases drastically as technology continuously learns and improves to support in-house counsel.

The Pitfalls of Managing Contracts Manually

Many corporations rely on manual (or mostly manual) processes to handle contracts from inception to execution and beyond. Not surprisingly, these methods include cutting and pasting into templates, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. The process is inefficient and poses risks such as a failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, inadequate delivery to customers, errors and a reactive vs. proactive approach to contract management. These challenges increase drastically considering that the contract process extends across multiple departments, geographies and external participants.

Signs that Your Corporate Legal Department Needs a Contract Management System

How can you tell if you need a contract lifecycle management system? Start by taking a look at your overall contract management methodology. If these problems keep occurring, it’s time to explore new options:

  • Inability to manage changes – Businesses need to be up to speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that require discussions with customers or vendors specifically about the contractual relationship. The ability to manage contracts – particularly changes over time and the renewal process – can directly impact customer retention rates.
  • Information silos and manual processes – A business can impair contract management progress and quality if it can’t maintain everything in a centralized location, accessible with permissions to involved parties and with changes tracked in real-time.
  • Inconsistent legal language – Gaps in standardized language introduce risk and confusion. If participants can’t determine if contracts contain accurate language or what is different between them, lawyers might have to get involved in every single deal. This also increases the risk of being noncompliant or leaving revenue on the table.
  • Lack of insight into contract processes and variables – Agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged. When corporate legal doesn’t have insight into contract terms, obligations and value, it cannot ensure the business is getting the correct value for deals and money may be lost.

Contract Lifecycle Management Systems Quantified

Businesses that implement a seamless contract lifecycle management process compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction.

How do the numbers add up? We’ve collected the latest statistics in a new infographic to demonstrate the impact of CLM and AI.

Please include attribution to https://onitprostg.wpengine.com with this graphic.

The benefits of a contract management system with artificial intelligence infographic

Onit’s AI-powered CLM solution can change the way your corporate legal department does business. Schedule a demonstration or email us at [email protected] to learn more.

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.

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:

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.