Category: Contract Lifecycle Management

Harness the Power of AI in Operations Management for Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 28, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

By now, businesses across all sectors recognize the benefits of legal AI in operations management – especially for processes such as contract management. Along with other technologies, AI is helping to reduce the financial pressure on operations teams and corporate legal departments who need to find ways to be more efficient. Particularly in the past year with the pandemic demands, there have been significant investments to decrease workloads for employees across businesses by streamlining things like workflow and approval processes. For example, this study found that contract AI in legal departments can increase efficiency by more than 50%.

In the first installment of our three-part blog and podcast series published earlier this month, we touched on AI’s ABCs. Now, we take a more in-depth look at some fantastic ways AI for operations is powering corporate legal departments. (You can find the podcast of this by scrolling down.)

Pushing Past the Buzz: Is It Really AI?

There’s no disputing that AI is a hot commodity now and a buzzword you hear often. AI in operations management and for legal teams is no exception. While you think your organization may be using it, you may be surprised. In reality, it can be challenging to identify, as AI in legal operations in day-to-day practice doesn’t always look like the images of AI we might have in our heads.

There are five ways to determine if you have an AI-driven system in place.

  1. Use of an interactive system – A fundamental cornerstone of AI is the ability to interact with your system more conversationally through the concept of a virtual agent.
  2. A wizard powered by learning to guide users – AI-enabled wizards lead users to the right workflows and tools, such as contract templates. This is based on learning from previous contract requests to offer more interactive guidance for your staff.
  3. Identification – Semantic analysis by AI can find patterns in related words relevant to an issue and then applies appropriate tags. This AI enabled semantic analysis is frequently used to identify issues in contracts, for example.
  4. Advanced analytics – AI builds off the identification process and allows you to utilize the identified terms very quickly by providing actionable recommendations for tasks.
  5. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – RPA can be used for approval of changes, not only in workflow but to help your system streamline the approval process by learning from decisions made in prior cases. Essentially, you’re changing the workflow based on past learning and providing recommendations to approvers based on previous actions.

Corporate legal departments vary widely in their current technology levels, so you may not see all of these hallmarks in your organization. Nonetheless, if you can do any (or all) of the things listed above, you’re currently using AI. The next question is how to ensure you’re fully taking advantage of it.

The Benefits of AI in Legal Operations

AI has significant impacts on lawyer productivity. Onit recently conducted a study of legal AI contract review software to see how it affected in-house lawyers’ productivity. The results showed that new users were immediately 34% more efficient and 51.5% more productive. Team leaders could reallocate 15% of their time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities if they use AI in operations.

Consider those results in the context of a typical midsize company that has 28 lawyers and reviews 4,850 contracts annually. With 51.5% more productivity, that same team of 28 lawyers could process 2,498 additional contracts each year. That’s the equivalent of adding nine lawyers to the team. The additional capacity could also reduce costs and free up lawyers to perform higher-value functions to support the business.

The benefits of legal AI don’t stop with productivity. Legal departments must have access to data, and AI for operations allows departments to combine data from all corporate data sources. AI can also flag suspect transactions or questionable third-party relationships and quickly assess their risk level. Having a value chain of data with an intelligence layer around it is essential. Being able to connect that intelligence layer to your legal operations is crucial.

Listen to the Podcast Now: Contract AI in Legal Operations

For a more in-depth discussion of AI enabled contract management and its importance for legal operations, you can listen to the entire podcast interview below.

In our third and final installment of this blog series coming next week, we’ll dive into some of the most useful forms of AI being used in business today.

 

Empower Legal Operations Automation with the Best CLM Tools

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

The right legal contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution is a crucial component of your legal ops toolbox.

When you work in legal operations, you’re required to wear a lot of hats. On any given day, you’ll work closely with general counsel as well as business stakeholders at all levels of your company. Legal operations is key in creating processes and practices that improve the day-to-day efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s legal team and, in turn, the company as a whole. Contracts are the lifeblood of corporate legal departments, and having tools to manage them is critical to the efficiency legal ops is trying to achieve.

Contract Lifecycle Management in Day-to-Day Legal Operations

It’s nearly impossible to think about legal operations without thinking about contracts. On a daily basis, you’re requesting and drafting contracts, monitoring their progress and obtaining signatures. On top of that, you’re responsible for implementing tools to streamline your organization’s legal practices, developing and enforcing processes and policies to manage outside counsel usage and spend, assisting with budget matters and optimizing workflows within the legal department, and managing the design, rollout and training for new systems – just to name a few things.

With that many important roles on your plate, monitoring contracts doesn’t need to be taking up any more of your time than it has to. With the right tool for managing your contracts from start to finish, you’ll be freed up to focus on tasks that are more critical to boosting efficiency and creating value for the organization.

Finding the Right CLM Solution

As is the case with most legal technology these days, there’s no shortage of options when it comes to choosing a contract lifecycle management solution. In making your choice, it’s important to keep in mind the pain points you’re trying to address in legal operations and the functionalities you want to achieve from your new tool.

Among the biggest challenges that legal ops professionals tend to face when it comes to CLM are:

  • Having a lack of visibility into where your deals stand, who’s responsible for them and what the next steps are at any given time
  • Having no easy way to keep contract drafting and negotiation moving forward
  • Needing an effective way to reduce risk and improve governance
  • Needing to accelerate contract turnaround time while also reducing costs
  • Having no means of self-service, and instead having to rely on others to handle contracts

The ideal CLM tool will serve as a single point of truth for all your contract data, allowing you to standardize your processes and increase efficiency through automation. You’ll have real-time insight into where each contract stands and who might be holding it up, so you can nudge them along and keep everything moving smoothly. CLM solutions also allow you to easily find contracts and have visibility into your renewal and amendments cycles without overwhelming you with information – the best tools allow you to see only the information you need to see, when you need and want to see it.

Implementing CLM in Legal Ops

Legal operations professionals are no strangers to developing, implementing, and using today’s most cutting-edge legal tech solutions. Using technology to manage contracts should be no exception. CLM tools help bolster the practice of corporate law, streamlining the contractual processes that are so integral to the operation of every legal department, and, indeed, every organization operating today.

Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you with end-to-end automation of your entire contract management process.

How Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management Software is Changing the Game for General Counsel

Posted on January 14, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Managing risk at an organization is a full-time job, especially for a general counsel (GC) or chief legal officer (CLO). As a company’s chief internal lawyer, they are expected to provide legal advice on a vast range of subjects – legal rights, risk mitigation, compliance with new and existing laws and so much more.

If that weren’t enough, GCs and CLOs are also expected to manage the organization’s legal matters, oversee outside counsel spend, conduct legal research, review internal litigation strategy, and be the ultimate approver and keeper of the organization’s contracts. Despite handling all these critical, sensitive matters, legal departments are often seen as “cost centers” and therefore are forced to do their challenging jobs without all the resources they need to succeed.

Technology, automation and artificial intelligence are key to doing more with less and streamlining processes, particularly when it comes to contracts. Enterprise contract lifecycle management software allows busy lawyers end-to-end control over contracts, freeing up time to focus on other tasks in the process. They can also play pivotal roles in helping corporate legal departments reduce contract management costs. For example, Pearson’s commercial transactions shared service center for more than 10,000 users worldwide achieved a 35% cost reduction and 30% improved contract turnaround time.

Contractual Pain Points

Even the simplest contracts can expose an organization to risk and liability if it’s not handled correctly. GCs and CLOs are tasked with overseeing the crucial job of examining and creating draft agreements, maintaining knowledge of the organization’s operations and legal documents, approving non-standard contract language and more.

Without a centralized solution for managing contracts on an organization-wide basis, legal departments run into countless hurdles, including:

  • Inconsistent language between contracts, often caused by employees using out-of-date contract templates
  • Competing objectives of moving contracts through quickly yet still having enough oversight to effectively manage risk obligations
  • A lack of insight into all the organization’s current contracts
  • An inability to track changes in contracts and ensure that contracts are in compliance with new and existing laws and regulations
  • The risk that contracts might expire or renew without notice because no one’s tracking them
  • Complicated review and approval processes for even standard contracts
  • Manual review and approval processes that create longer contract cycle times
  • Human error and inconsistencies inherent in manual processes, increasing the organization’s risk exposure
  • Lost revenue when add-ons, upgrades and renewals are missed
  • Being seen by other aspects of the business as a barrier to closing deals

The above list is by no means exhaustive. Given the large volume of contracts at today’s modern businesses, the challenges presented by trying to manage those contracts can become overwhelming when you rely on manual processes or basic contract tools that lack automation and AI for general counsel, as well as a means of creating a single source of truth for the organization’s contracts.

The Benefits of Contract Lifecycle Management Tools

While the challenges outlined above may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. CLM tools use automation and AI to remove the tedious, manual aspects of traditional contract management, increasing accuracy and efficiency, eliminating errors, and freeing up precious time that GCs and CLOs can use to focus on the many other critical tasks they’re responsible for handling.

Leverage the benefits of contract lifecycle management software to take control of your corporate legal budget and take the headaches out of risk management.

Among other things, the right enterprise contract lifecycle management software will allow you to:

  • Find every contract you need, when you need it
  • Store all your contracts in one cloud location, creating a single source of truth for your organization’s contract data
  • Have full visibility at all times into the status of contract drafting, negotiations, amendments, and renewals, ensuring that nothing’s missed or overlooked
  • Implement uniform templates and playbooks to speed up contract cycle times, reduce manual errors and ensure you’re always using preferred terms
  • Automate approval processes to eliminate bottlenecks
  • Be notified of contract renewals to get a jumpstart on the process
  • Allow for self-service, so that other departments can create standard contracts with the correct language without legal review
  • Improve legal risk management across the organization
  • Improve efficiencies and free up the corporate legal budget for strategic use by automating contract lifecycle management
  • Demonstrate that the legal department is a strategic partner of the business, not a cost center

The ideal CLM tool will give you real-time insights into all phases of the contract lifecycle and provide you with actionable intelligence to make informed decisions for the business. More information means a better ability to identify and control risks across the contract process.

It’s time to take control of your contracts and let contract lifecycle management for general counsel and automation do the heavy lifting for you. Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you implement end-to-end CLM for your organization.

The General Counsel’s Guide to AI Based Contract Management

Posted on December 29, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Essential Steps to Establish a Single Point of Truth

Contracts are the lifeblood of most businesses, yet too many companies lack a comprehensive and effective solution for contract lifecycle management (CLM). Legal departments looking to digitize their contracts will find the most success with a platform technology strategy that avoids creating data silos and serves as a single point of truth for all contract data. Increasingly, most enterprise businesses are looking to AI-based contract automation to help them set up automated legal contract management processes.

Prosus, a global consumer internet company and one of the largest technology investors in the world, recently implemented a new CLM system from Onit with the help of Cognia Law, an international company that helps law departments and law firms find cost-effective, process-optimized, and technology-enabled solutions. Steven Van Oss, Group Sr. Legal Council at Prosus and Tyson Ballard, Head of Legal Consulting at Cognia, recently spoke with Onit to share valuable insights on choosing and implementing the right legal AI and CLM system.

General Counsel Seeks Contract Lifecycle Management

Like many companies, Prosus initially had some technology in place for contract management, but for the most part those solutions relied on legal staff to know how everything operated. At a certain level, such an approach becomes infeasible, as employees leave or the business grows.

Other solutions proved ineffective as pain points developed after implementation. A lack of continued buy-in from colleagues in other departments quickly saw the company back at square one. They had to define their legal automation and contract management needs. They needed a solution that was easy to understand and would allow them to gain insights from the large amount of contract data they had.

The answer was to partner with Cognia to workshop a strategy for legal operations, and it immediately became clear that the legal contract management process was a major pain point. Prosus needed to get a single source of truth for contracts while standardizing processes at the same time. Cognia’s job was to help Prosus navigate the vast jungle of legal tech that exists on the market today to find the right AI-based contract management tool.

Choosing the Right AI-Based Contract Management Tool

It’s critical to understand your people and the legal contract management processes before choosing your technology. You can have the best tool on the market, but if no one actually uses it, it’s essentially worthless.

Prosus had scoured the market and gotten lost in the legal tech jungle. Cognia helped them identify their needs, creating a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves, then guided Prosus through the possibilities and potential solutions.

The right AI-based contract management tool will provide the basic foundations of contract management every legal department needs – a good repository for searching and finding contracts, the ability to import and harness data to help with decision-making and understanding risk, and the ability to generate workflows. Too many solutions focus on a lot of bells and whistles, rather than providing the necessary base functionality for CLM.

Integrations were essential to the general counsel at Prosus. While the company initially focused on their need for CLM, they quickly realized that they needed to manage their vendor compliance efforts as well. The best place to capture vendor data is in your CLM tool, since it serves as a single source of truth for that data. Prosus needed its CLM solution to integrate with ethiXbase, it’s preferred third-party compliance screening tool.

In the end, Prosus got not only its must-haves, but its nice-to-haves, too, with contract lifecycle management from Onit.

Advice for General Counsel Implementing AI-Based Contract Automation

Choosing the right CLM solution isn’t the end of the story – in reality, you’re really only halfway to the contract management goal at that point. Implementing that solution always comes with a few hurdles.

  • The first is timing. Implementation of your AI-based contract automation will almost always take longer than you think it will, since it relies on a large number of internal and external resources to complete. Add more time to your expectations. In other words, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
  • You should also be prepared to take a deep dive into all your legal contract management processes. Even day-to-day processes that may seem simple to you require an extreme level of detail to implement into your CLM tool. Chances are you’ll be thinking about the processes at a level you never even considered before.
  • Finally, it can be hard to maintain the excitement you had when you first choose your AI-based contract management solution. Throughout the implementation process, it’s important to remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing and stick with it. By keeping to a simple implementation approach, you’ll end up with both your must-haves and your nice-to-haves.

The right contract management solution can change everything for general counsel. Visit here to hear the entire discussion between Prosus, Cognia and Onit on creating a single point of truth for your legal contracts.

The Latest Onit Acquisition: Your Contracts Drafted 10 Times Faster with Document Automation from AXDRAFT

Posted on December 17, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Hear Onit’s CEO and the General Manager of AXDRAFT discuss Onit’s latest acquisition and what it means for contract lifecycle management, document automation and contract drafting in our latest podcast below.

AxDraft - An Onit Company

Drafting contracts just got easier with document automation from AXDRAFT – now an independent Onit subsidiary.

Onit announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator-backed company today. AXDRAFT – now AXDRAFT, an Onit Company – enables in-house counsel to draft legal documents 10 times faster and complete contracts like nondisclosure agreements and service agreements in less than five minutes.

This is Onit’s second acquisition announcement in 30 days. In November, Onit acquired legal AI company McCarthyFinch and immediately launched Precedent, its intelligence platform, and ReviewAI, software that accelerates contract review by up to 70% and improves user productivity by more than 50%.

Continued Contract Lifecycle Management Innovation

The AXDRAFT acquisition addresses Onit’s commitment to innovating its offerings, especially contract lifecycle management (CLM).

“Disruption is in Onit’s DNA, from launching the industry’s first no-code business process and automation platform, Apptitude, to bringing machine learning and natural language processing to the practice of contracting with Precedent and ReviewAI. We’re also the first in our space to offer two platforms, one for workflow automation and one for artificial intelligence. AXDRAFT is a disruptor to old-line businesses in the document automation space. Our guidance and resources will help the company scale significantly, secure new customers worldwide and contribute to Onit’s aggressive growth strategy,” said Onit’s CEO and co-founder Eric M. Elfman.

Addressing the Challenges of Contract Drafting with AXDRAFT

The contract drafting process comes with multiple challenges – especially when a corporate legal department has a high volume of them to complete. It’s highly manual, repetitive and time-consuming. Plus, as a manual process, there are numerous ways to make mistakes.

AXDRAFT breaks that cycle with its document automation by providing lightning-speed, error-free and multilingual contract drafting.

Yuriy Zaremba, co-founder of AXDRAFT and now its General Manager, understands these challenges firsthand.

“When I was a lawyer, I experienced how routine legal work can be when you draft the same types of documents over and over again. It’s a process that invites mistakes and keeps attorneys from focusing on higher-value contributions,” he explained. “AXDRAFT drafts the contracts and other legal documents in less than five minutes, making it significantly easier for legal professionals to maintain accuracy and collaborate with the businesses they support. We’re excited to join Onit and begin the next phase of our company’s evolution.”

Fueling AXDRAFT is a proprietary algorithm created by its co-founder and now CTO, Oleg Zaremba. The algorithm enables streamlined and extensible document drafting in any language, including Chinese and Japanese. It supports live document preview and data integrations to transform complex documents into simple Q&A processes. Another important distinction: AXDRAFT onboards customers’ documents at no cost, making it a truly turnkey solution.

AXDRAFT is available immediately as a stand-alone, out-of-the-box document automation tool.

Listen to the Latest Episode of Onit’s Podcast 

You can hear more about the acquisition in this podcast interview featuring Eric M. Elfman and Yuriy Zaremba.

To find out more about the AXDRAFT acquisition:

  • Read the press release.
  • If you are an Onit customer, speak with your account manager.
  • Visit the AXDRAFT website at AXDRAFT.com.

 

 

Legal ReviewAI and Drafting with AI Improves Productivity

Posted on December 8, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract review and drafting can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. The process is often painfully tedious and repetitive – especially if it is paper-based or spread across multiple systems like emails and private drives. Without a more effective digital enablement, the process to review and draft legal contracts is slow and inconsistent, requires enormous attention to detail and continues to be prone to costly errors. These challenges directly impact a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes and achieve business objectives.

With ever-increasing pressure on legal teams to do more with less, enhancing contract efficiency through automation and the latest technologies represent a significant opportunity to improve business performance.

Artificial intelligence, specifically legal contract AI, has the power to deliver significant productivity gains and allow lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives. Onit undertook a study of its AI for the pre-signature contract phase, ReviewAI, to determine just how much it can help and found commendable results (you can read more about them here.)

Key takeaways from the contract AI study include:

  • Testers found that ReviewAI accelerated legal contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increased legal team productivity by more than 50%.
  • New users were immediately 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive. The average midsize company employs 28 lawyers who review 4,850 contracts annually. Unlocking more capacity – up to 51.5% – means those same lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually. It’s like adding nine lawyers to your team.
  • The team leader, a senior lawyer, was able to reallocate 15% of his time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities.
  • The efficiency and productivity gains from using ReviewAI increased over time, allowing corporate legal departments to optimize team performance, reallocate resources to engage the business better and reduce the amount of contract work handled by external counsel.

To learn more about legal contract AI software, contract review and drafting, read about the study’s results.

 

Five Ways Artificial Intelligence Accelerates Pre-Signature ReviewAI

Posted on November 24, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that its participants don’t realize how manual it actually is. This is commonly the case for contract management review.

Many corporations rely on vastly manual processes to handle contracts, such as cutting and pasting into templates, emailing, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. However, a manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks such as inadequate delivery to customers, failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, time lost from disorganization and errors and additional work due to inefficient processes.

One area of particular concern is contract review. When combined with highly manual or ineffective processes, it has the potential to hinder the execution of powerful agreements that lead to increased revenue, enhanced partnerships and valuable purchases. In short, a nickel – albeit a necessary nickel for legal review – is holding up a dollar.

ReviewAI and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Legal teams have long been asked to do more with fewer resources and a shrinking budget – all while taking on more work. This is not a scalable process without technology. Artificial intelligence and advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning are evolving the legal profession as we know it.

While legal professionals’ expertise and judgment will always be the core of legal processes, AI can provide pre-work much in the same way that a paralegal or junior lawyer might mark up a document or run a checklist before a partner’s final review. As a result, corporate legal departments can use AI to decrease the time it takes to review contracts, increase productivity, reduce risk and save time.

Here are five ways AI can accelerate the pre-signature contract review process.

  1. Self-Service ReviewAI

With AI, legal professionals can slash the time for a first-pass review from days or hours to mere minutes. A business user can request a standard contract or submit a third-party contract for initial review via email or a web portal. AI learns corporate standards from transaction histories and feedback and then reviews and redlines contracts and returns them in Microsoft Word – often within two minutes.

  1. High-Volume/Low-Edit ReviewAI

Some contracts, like nondisclosure agreements, require near real-time turnaround and often do not depart from standard terms. They’re high-volume and low-edit documents – prime candidates for AI review. Instead of an attorney handling contracts like this, AI can review the contract and suggest revisions to bring it to corporate standards if necessary. From there, the NDA or similar contract can be tendered directly to the other party or undergo one last round of internal review if deemed necessary. Lawyers can spend time on projects that bring more value to the company.

  1. Complex Contract Drafting and Negotiation

Master service agreements, statements of works and other complex sales or purchase agreements can also benefit from AI. It leverages the full company playbook and clause library to guide the contract drafter and reviewer along the negotiation at agreement pass.

  1. Third-Party Contract Risk Review

AI assesses the risk of contracts during the pre-signature review phase by reviewing third-party paper against corporate standards and checklists. It then summarizes the risks, flags key issues using contract review templates and unique company clauses and suggests proper edits.

  1. Playbook Management

Combined with a user-friendly AI platform, AI-driven contract review allows legal teams to manage, collaborate and use AI to apply corporate playbooks and precedents automatically. Legal professionals can then use the real-time data and insight provided by the platform to improve playbook standards and understand enforcement across the business.

Conclusion

Businesses want as many agreements on their contract terms and paper as possible. When a contract is on “other party paper,” it is difficult to adhere to a company’s playbook and enforce guidelines. Ultimately, it slows down contract execution. However, by relying on AI, corporate legal departments are aptly equipped to pave a rapid path to contract closure and signature and accelerate business while increasing contract compliance.

To learn more about AI and tools for contract management, read a recent study that details how AI and contract review increases corporate legal productivity by more than 50%.

Be Among The First to See Onit’s Legal AI Technology Including a Platform and ReviewAI Software

Posted on November 19, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

You might have heard our big news earlier this week: Onit has acquired legal AI contract review software company McCarthyFinch. Besides welcoming some of the brightest AI technologies and minds, we’ve also launched the next generation of Onit for legal operations professionals.

Onit is Artificial Intelligence

Onit is building its future on legal AI technology, with a vision to include it in our entire product portfolio.

Onit Precedent represents our first AI legal technology, an artificial intelligence platform that automates existing mundane, manual and costly legal processes and empowers continuous learning and workflow. It has a single mission: to help business professionals get more work done faster.

The first release on Onit Precedent, ReviewAI, reads, writes and reasons like a lawyer. It provides a review of any contract and automatically redlines, annotates and provides a risk rating based on your company’s playbook. Its AI learns based on user feedback and can be applied to many different use cases, including NDAs, MSAs, purchase agreements and third-party contract review.

ReviewAI delivers impressive results by:

  • Improving productivity by more than 50%
  • Accelerating contract approvals by 60-70%
  • Reviewing and redlining a contract in less than two minutes

Learn More about Onit’s AI ReviewAI

Visit here to request a demonstration of ReviewAI, including its Microsoft Word add-in, contract review summary, email and portal review, contract review templates, customizable clause library and automated alerts.

Building a Future on Artificial Intelligence in Contracts: Onit Acquires McCarthyFinch

Posted on November 17, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

Hear Onit’s CEO and the GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence Discuss the Acquisition of McCarthyFinch and the Evolution of the Company in Our Latest Podcast

Today, we launched the next generation of Onit – one powered by artificial intelligence in contracts and a plaftorm.

Onit has acquired McCarthyFinch, a New Zealand-based company with an artificial intelligence platform. With this technology, legal professionals can accelerate contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increase productivity by more than 50%.

According to Onit’s CEO and co-founder, Eric M. Elfman, “AI is a natural extension of our evolution. Our vision is to build AI into our workflow platform and every product across the Onit and SimpleLegal product portfolios. In addition to acquiring award-winning technology, we have gained some of the brightest minds in the AI space.”

The Next Generation of Onit

McCarthyFinch is now the Onit AI Center of Excellence dedicated to AI innovation for contract lifecycle management, enterprise legal management and more.

Nick Whitehouse, CEO and co-founder of McCarthyFinch, will serve as General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. For more than 15 years, he has consistently delivered technological innovation with extensive experience in artificial intelligence and digital transformation. He is joined by Jean Yang, who is now Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence.

Introducing Precedent and ReviewAI

The technology from the McCarthyFinch acquisition powers two new AI-based products from Onit.

Precedent is Onit’s intelligence platform that reads, writes and reasons like a lawyer. It joins Onit’s workflow automation platform Apptitude, making Onit the first in its space with two platforms.

ReviewAI is the first release on Precedent. It brings AI to pre-signature contract review, streamlining intelligent activities like contract creation, redlining, complex negotiations and risk rating contracts.

“Drafting contracts and redlining documents shouldn’t take up 70% of a lawyer’s time, as statistics suggest. There’s a better way to work,” says Whitehouse. “With AI, we’ve dramatically changed the contract management lifecycle and enabled businesses to move faster, provide higher-quality services and lower the cost of legal services. We are excited to join the Onit team and apply AI to Onit’s contract lifecycle management solution and expansive product offerings.”

Listen to the Podcast

In this podcast, Elfman and Whitehouse discuss the acquisition, the new platform and products and their vision for Onit and artificial intelligence in contracts.

Register for the Webinar and Find More Information

If you would like additional ways to learn more about the acquisition, consider these options:

  1. View the launch video.
  2. Read more about Precedent and ReviewAI.
  3. Read the press release.
  4. Register for the webinar on December 10 to see a demo of the AI Precedent platform and ReviewAI.

Three Challenges to Anticipate – and Avoid – During Your Contract Lifecycle Management Technology Implementation

Posted on September 29, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Today, Onit welcomes Michael Stevens, managing director of Duff & Phelps, as a guest contributor and an expert in contract lifecycle management technology implementations. We announced last week that Duff & Phelps reached the Premier status of the Onit Strategic Alliances program. Duff & Phelps has been a trusted Onit partner since 2017, having worked on more than 20 projects in the U.S. and Europe across various industries such as pharmaceuticals, insurance, high-tech, oil and gas, manufacturing and more.

Managing contracts is a complicated business. The process for even just one contract may often spread across multiple companies, departments, stakeholders, versions and systems. Tracking progress and capturing feedback in spreadsheets and emails rely on manual updates.

And that’s just to get a contract signed.

The management must continue beyond execution to maintenance and renewal. If businesses are not diligent about receiving or delivering everything agreed upon, the advantages gained through negotiations will be forfeited.

More corporate legal departments are adopting contract lifecycle management technology, as evidenced by data and – in my case – experience in the industry. First, workloads are increasing. I’ve heard and seen this during my corporate legal work, but numerous surveys have verified this trend. Second, COVID-19 has impacted general counsel, with this report showing that 67% of general counsel participants consider contracts as a top legal risk in the wake of the pandemic. Finally, let’s look at the numbers. Analysts anticipate that the global software market for contract lifecycle management software will reach $2.4 billion by 2024, growing at a rough rate of 14%.

Altogether, these statistics and trends set the stage for large-scale adoption of contract lifecycle management solutions.

I’ve worked with corporate legal departments on technology implementations for more than 30 years and on over 50 contract lifecycle management technology implementations. My colleagues at Duff & Phelps and I have compiled some of the top challenges to implementation and how to address them.

  1. Legacy Data Migration

There are significant benefits in migrating at least the current active contracts into a contract lifecycle management software and removing them from existing repositories. First, it creates a one-stop shop for users to find existing contracts and request new ones. Second, when doing a new amendment, it is essential to have the original contract and all existing amendments readily available to be able to file the new amendment appropriately. Identifying all existing repositories of contracts is a critical step.

  1. Integrations with Other Business Systems

Every contract documents a business transaction that is being executed by one or more business groups. Those business transactions are often managed in one or more business systems. For example, a sales opportunity may start in the customer relationship management (CRM) system, which leads to the need for a contract. Once the sales contract is signed, order processing and fulfillment may be managed in different systems. For a sales contract, you may wish to integrate with both the upstream CRM system and the downstream order management and/or ERP systems. It is crucial to define all the contract types you wish to automate in the contract lifecycle management software and the corresponding business systems that govern those transactions.

  1. Counterparty Source of Truth (Master Data)

To integrate with other business applications or share useful data with the rest of the company, it is beneficial to integrate with a company-designated source of truth for counterparties. This is a directory of customers, vendors, suppliers and other companies that the target company does business with. Here are the key questions when exploring whether your company has a single source of truth for counterparty and whether it will be useful for contract management.

  • Is there a single source of truth for ALL counterparties or separate sources for customers vs. vendors/suppliers vs. partners/other types of counterparties? Some companies maintain different directories for customers and venders/suppliers. The challenge with separate sources of truth by counterparty type is that sometimes the same company is both a vendor and a customer, thus creating duplication.
  • Do all geographies/business units share the same source(s) of truth? If not, this creates the same duplication problem as above.
  • Does the source of truth contain prospective counterparties and not just approved/active customers and vendors? If it does not contain prospective counterparties, this is problematic for contract lifecycle management software because you need to be able to enter into NDAs and start contract negotiations for other types of contracts with prospective counterparties.
  • Does the source of truth use counterparty legal entity as the foundational data element, and does it capture the relationship between parent and subsidiary legal entities of the counterparty? This is important because contracts are with legal entities of counterparties, not bill-to or ship-to addresses, which are secondary attributes of legal entities. Also, knowledge of the counterparty’s legal entity structure is useful because contracts are often written to allow subsidiaries to operate under the contract with the parent company.
  • How good is the data in the source of truth, and is there a data governance protocol?

Visit here to learn how Duff & Phelps can analyze and enhance how your company manages contracts throughout a lifecycle.

To learn more about reducing costs and increasing profits by automation the contract lifecycle, visit Onit Contract Lifecycle Management. 

About our Guest Author 

Michael Stevens is a managing director of Duff & Phelps and has been helping global companies improve contracting processes and systems for the majority of his career. Stevens is a part of the Duff & Phelps practice group that helps clients with a range of operational improvement and compliance initiatives including contract management, information/document management and governance, legal department operations, intellectual property and merger and acquisition integration.