Category: Digital Transformation

Legal AI Technology: How Its Adoption Leads to Real-World Results

Posted on March 15, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Legal AI technology, along with other forms of AI, was once the stuff of science fiction. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has entrenched itself in the mainstream. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions floating around about what AI is and what it can do, one thing is clear: AI gets results.

That’s why more and more corporate legal departments and legal ops professionals are turning to AI-powered solutions to boost efficiency, cut costs and more. As the year goes on, one of the top legal operations trends we expect to see is companies capitalizing on the practical, real-world results that AI can provide.

The Prevalence of Legal AI Technology

We’ve come a long way from the early days of AI, which were largely dominated by chess games and robot movies. Today, AI is present in nearly every aspect of business, with legal AI technology serving as an integral part of how modern legal ops teams function along with the benefits of a contract management system.

There’s no question that general AI adoption among companies of all sizes is on the rise. McKinsey’s State of AI in 2021 Report found that 56% of survey participants across multiple industries adopted AI in 2021, up 50% the previous year. This adoption significantly impacted companies’ bottom lines, with 27% of respondents saying they could trace at least 5% of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to AI.

Corporate legal departments are part of this upward trend. According to CLOC State of the Industry Reports, in-house AI usage increased from 12% in 2019 to 22% in 2021. Not surprisingly, the AI legal software market is predicted to grow by more than 28% between 2021 and 2026.

AI Results in Action

AI is a technology that learns, reasons and acts for itself. It can make decisions that usually require a human level of expertise, meaning it can help lawyers and legal ops professionals anticipate problems and address issues as, or even before, they arise.

AI is ideal for data-intensive tasks because it identifies patterns, learns from them, and generates insights faster and more accurately than humans. Legal work is increasingly made up of data-driven tasks, meaning more legal ops professionals should be turning to AI. A perfect example is contract management.

A study showed that legal contract review software makes new users immediately 51.5% more productive and roughly 33% more efficient by conducting first-pass contract review, making redlines and delivering a contract risk profile, all in a matter of minutes. If you take a typical midsize company with 55 lawyers who collectively review an average of 9,526 contracts each year, a 51.5% productivity increase allows the same legal team to process 4,906 additional contracts each year – the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to the team.

The benefits of AI based contract management don’t end when the deal is signed. Your contracts contain mountains of valuable data that can help you better run your business and increase efficiency. The only problem is that you historically needed someone to review all those contracts to get at that valuable data, and few legal departments had the time or staff to do the job correctly.

Legal AI technology, though, can review thousands of contracts at once and export data in five seconds or less. When you apply that power to time-intensive, voluminous tasks like repapering, batch review, legacy contract migration and more, AI can save in-house counsel and legal ops professionals a significant number of hours. And that time savings can be reinvested into tasks that create value for the company. In fact, it’s been shown that properly managing contracts from start to finish can increase revenues by up to 9.2%.

A World of Possibilities for Legal AI Technology

Contracting is just one area where in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals are seeing real-world results by implementing AI. As innovation continues to disrupt the legal tech world, AI is being introduced into nearly every aspect of practice and business. But now, AI has evolved beyond a buzzword to provide meaningful – and impactful – results.

To read more about how legal AI technology impacts legal departments and other top trends shaping legal ops today, download our white paper Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.

How to Improve Legal Spend with Technology

Posted on March 10, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

If you work as part of a legal operations team, chances are you spend plenty of time thinking about how to improve legal spend – specifically, how to manage and reduce it. Under ever-increasing pressures to do more with less, the spotlight on legal spend is brighter than ever.

The following are just a few examples of enterprise legal management software can go a long way toward reducing legal spend.

1.   Improve Legal Spend by Moving to Electronic Invoices

You can’t improve legal spend without understanding what your baseline is. If your law department and its law firms are working with paper invoices, you limit the chances of understanding what your spend truly is and where you may be overcharged. Plus, paper invoices limit insight into vendor management, evaluations and comparisons.

Why? Because for most corporate legal departments, manual invoice review is time-consuming, tedious and can lead to human error. There are simply too many invoices and not enough time or resources to vet line items. Plus, it’s hard to compare and analyze costs when all information is on paper.

E-billing enables a corporate legal department to adopt industry standards for formats and billing codes. From there, legal ops can begin to capture and “digest” precious data for reporting and analysis – valuable indicators such as overall spending, trends and more – and compare them to industry benchmarks (more on that below). It also minimizes the time spent inputting invoices into billing systems for review and payment processing.

2.   Use a Specialized Legal E-Billing System Rather Than a General Tool

There are a lot of e-billing systems on the market, but many of the most popular ones aren’t designed to handle legal billing. Too many corporate legal departments fall back on general e-billing tools when a legal e-billing system can better deal with legal-specific billing problems and improve legal spend.

Among other things, the right legal e-billing system will offer the following functionalities, which are traditionally not available in general e-billing tools: supporting electronic timekeeper rates from outside counsel, preventing law firms from billing to matters without approval, receiving invoices in the industry-standard Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) format or comparing LEDES invoices against company billing guidelines, permitting write-offs or rejections of individual invoice line items, allowing for comparison of invoices against budget, supporting the automatic allocation of invoices to specified cost centers or codes, and allowing for reporting on spend by relevant factors such as time, activity, matter, firm and more. All of these capabilities are critical to accurate and efficient legal invoicing.

3.   Automate Billing Guidelines that Comport with Outside Counsel Guidelines

Compliance with outside counsel billing guidelines is one of the most important goals of reviewing invoices. Manual review is not up to the task. Technology is, so make sure you have a tool that allows you to input your specific billing guidelines so they can automatically and consistently be applied across all your invoices to identify areas of improper charges and prevent overpaying.

The billing rules often come as part of legal spend management systems. They automatically scour incoming invoices from law firms and legal vendors for discrepancies and fix or flag the invoice for further review. This relieves reviewers from manually combing through each line item, often resulting in immediate savings.

4.   Implement AI that Looks Between the Billing Rules

Legal invoice review has long been rules-based. While billing rules represent an excellent first step for reducing legal spend, it’s only the beginning. Invoices may still slip through the cracks with a purely rules-based approach or be incorrectly approved for payment.

How does this happen?

Billing rules, while valuable, rely on specific descriptions or words to identify potentially improper charges. If by some chance, an invoice employs different keywords or descriptions not included in billing rules to describe a line item, billing rules may not flag the charge. It may, instead, not identify the noncompliant charge and approve it for payment. After all, you can’t program billing rules to consider every potential variable in word choices.

If you want to further improve legal spend, consider an AI-powered invoice review tool that looks between the rules to find hidden legal invoice review errors and even more savings. These technologiesdf work in conjunction with enterprise legal management systems. They are trained on millions of legal invoice charges to look for areas where overpayment is common, or correction is typically needed – things like block billing, vague descriptions, work done by the wrong class of staff or non-work travel.

When these issues are identified, InvoiceAI can either automatically adjust the charge to comply with outside counsel guidelines or it can bring the problem to reviewers’ attention, significantly reducing the likelihood of improper payment and lowering overall legal spend in the process.

5.   Leverage Benchmarking Technologies

Knowing how much you spend on a particular law firm is great. Even better, though, is knowing how much you should spend based on what everyone else is spending – even down to a law firm in a specific location for a particular task. This is where benchmarking comes in.

Benchmarking is a critical part of any sound legal spend management system. But the benchmarking technology you select needs to provide attributes such as practice area, timekeeper level, work type and discounts, which will provide you with the negotiation leverage you need during conversations with your law firms.

For example, a top private equity firm saved 17% on its rates, realizing more than $27M in savings in the first year by leveraging smart benchmarking data.

Also, to ensure that you always understand the going rate for upcoming matters, make sure your benchmarking solution also has proprietary competitive cohorts of law firms based on at least 100 factors, including general firm expertise, rates and even individual partner expertise.

Conclusion

The pressure to do more with less likely won’t end any time soon, but there are ways of meeting that demand by implementing the right technology. Contact us today to learn more about how InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system can help you reduce your legal spend. And if you’re interested in leveraging the power of legal services benchmarking and market intelligence, reach out to our subsidiary Bodhala.

Leading Legal Ops Priority: Diversity and Inclusion in Law Firms

Posted on March 8, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) have taken center stage at corporations in recent years. Making D&I a priority isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also good business sense. It’s been consistently shown that greater diversity leads to stronger work quality and helps businesses remain competitive.

Nonetheless, the idea of corporate legal departments pushing for diversity among their full-time employees and in their outside law firms is still relatively new. Only 11.5% of GCs at Fortune 1000 companies in 2020 were racial or ethnic minorities, a 2% decrease from the prior year.

Efforts in this area are improving, however. Pursuing D&I initiatives in law firms is one of the top trends for corporate legal operations in 2022. Advancing D&I requires legal ops professionals to look at their internal staff and practices and make an honest assessment of the outside vendors they work with to determine where they can help spur change.

Internal Diversity and Inclusion in Law Firms

Today, many legal departments and law firms are looking to increase headcount by attracting and retaining a diverse talent pool. Legal operations professionals are a crucial part of this movement and are prioritizing diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs as companies start the process of emerging from the pandemic.

Improving D&I involves both process and data, according to Bloomberg’s 2021 Legal Operations Survey. Legal operations staff have discovered three key processes that can help enhance D&I among their ranks: internal diversity training, increasing remote work opportunities and changing recruiting patterns. On the data front, the same survey showed that 71% of legal ops teams plan to track diversity metrics going forward to push D&I even further.

Another frequently overlooked area is the pipeline from law school to law firm promotion structures to in-house legal department employment. Many would argue that disparities in the legal profession begin with law school admissions. Though overall law school admission rates have been down for all groups since 2014, the number of Black and Hispanic applicants has declined more than the number of white applicants in recent years. Focusing on D&I in recruiting can help address these disparities before they worsen.

Focusing D&I Efforts Outside

While the efforts highlighted above will go a long way toward creating a more diverse workplace, what else can legal ops do to promote diversity and inclusion (D&l)?

One crucial action is for legal departments and legal ops professionals to hold their external vendors to the same D&I standards they’ve set for themselves. Chances are, your legal ops team already uses a number of metrics to formally evaluate vendor performance before making vendor hiring decisions, and D&I should be one of those metrics.

The focus on outside vendor D&I should start as early as possible. The RFP process is a great starting point for considering whether your vendors and potential vendors share your commitment to D&I before you’ve brought them on board. Another great way to assess your vendors in the area of D&I is to have them complete the ABA Model Diversity Survey as part of the vetting and hiring process.

A Cultural Shift

Creating a diverse workforce requires efforts on multiple fronts. Legal departments concerned with D&I need to be looking in every corner to find additional opportunities to eliminate disparities. As calls for corporate legal departments to drive D&I are becoming more and more common, in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals need to pay more attention to the diversity of their own internal ranks and the staffing of their outside counsel and other vendors.

Going forward, legal operations professionals will continue prioritizing D&I programs, and in-house legal departments will increasingly be seen as a driver to improve diversity issues in the greater legal industry through outside counsel hiring. Organizations such as the ABA and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association are encouraging corporate legal departments to ensure their teams are reflecting diversity, but the real heavy lifting rests on the shoulders of the lawyers and legal operations departments.

To read more about D&I, as well as the other top trends for legal ops, download “Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.”

In House Legal Software: Aligning Growing Legal Tech Budgets with Roadmaps

Posted on February 24, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

There’s no question that in house legal software has significantly changed the way law departments conduct the business of law. From the predecessors of enterprise legal management more than 40 years ago to today’s AI-driven contract lifecycle management systems, technology has done its part to drive efficiency, promote transparency and capture valuable analytics.

Yet, legal operations professionals have confessed that their law departments have sometimes struggled in this area. In Gartner’s 2021 Legal Planning & Budgeting report, legal operations participants cited “technology solutions and level of adoption” as one of the top-four weaknesses revealed during COVID-19. The report notes the following two challenges as “knowledge management and coordination” and “effectively balancing routine and unplanned workloads.”

A lot has changed in the short time between then and now. More and more corporate legal departments have evolved their legal operations and pivoted to embrace or update in house legal software.

The proof is in legal technology budgets, which are growing. Gartner predicts that legal technology budgets will increase threefold by 2025.

In House Legal Software Adoption – Technology Roadmaps On the Rise

How will corporate legal departments allocate these bigger legal technology budgets?

Almost 90% of surveyed general counsel and CLOs in organizations earning $1B or more cited efficiency as the number one factor in deciding when to purchase technology (far outweighing cost reduction, which was cited by only 8%). This is great news for busy legal professionals, who, according to this survey, often find themselves handling more than five distinct business areas.

But, most legal operations teams are focused on a bigger picture. They’re proactive about their in house legal software implementations and planning out thoughtful, long-term technology roadmaps.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) was created to help legal operations professionals and other core corporate legal industry players optimize the legal service delivery models required to support the needs of legal departments of all sizes. One of CLOC’s 12 core competencies addresses technology and specifically addresses technology roadmaps:

“Create a clear technology vision that spans all the needs of your organization. Automate manual processes, digitize physical tasks and improve speed and quality through the strategic deployment of technology solutions.”

CLOC further describes this process by suggesting legal operations create and implement long-term technology roadmaps, evaluate new vendors, assess emerging technology capabilities, determine where to buy and when to buy and structure partnerships with corporate IT teams.

Aligning Budgets with Legal Technology Roadmaps

Rolling out a technology roadmap for in house legal software is the best way to figure out where your organization wants to go in terms of technology and how your budget can align with those goals. Technology roadmaps can account for budgets of all sizes, making it easier for legal operations professionals to stay on top of technology implementation even as budgets for technology continue to grow.

Fifty-four percent of respondents in Deloitte’s 2021 State of Legal Operations Survey said they now have “a defined and actionable legal systems roadmap.” That number is up from just 39% in 2020. This shows that companies understand that knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there is the only way to improve and grow systematically and intentionally.

Among the most popular technologies making up those roadmaps, according to CLOC, are solutions that automate and streamline critical workflows, reduce risk, and enhance data collection and transparency, including tools for e-signature, e-billing/matter management, contract management and document management.

With the sheer number of in house legal software options available on the market today, choosing the right one can feel overwhelming. The upside of all this innovation, though, is that you can find the right technology solution for nearly any budget. One helpful approach is to find an experienced partner who can help you identify recurring pain points and wish lists and turn those into a technology roadmap that can realistically be implemented to help your organization.

You can also lean on resources the explore the capabilities of technology and how they support law departments:

To read more about building legal technology roadmaps and other trends defining legal operations today, download our latest white paper: Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.

Legal E-Billing Systems vs. General E-Billing: Why You Need a Specialized Tool

Posted on February 3, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

There are a lot of options out there when it comes to legal e-billing systems and software. If your IT teams are pushing back on the idea of purchasing a specialized legal e-billing tool, you’re not alone. Many corporate legal departments run into the same problem – being shoehorned into general billing software instead of e-billing and enterprise legal management (ELM) software designed for legal users.

The difference matters.

Because they’re designed specifically with the needs of legal users in mind, legal e-billing systems like ELM and AI-enabled invoice review offer a whole host of benefits for corporate legal departments of all sizes.

In this blog post, Jackson Mayes, vice president of ELM sales for Onit, and Robin Snasdell, managing director of Consilio, discuss the differences. Consilio is a member of Onit’s Strategic Alliances program.

The Downside of General E-Billing

When choosing billing tools, it might be tempting to think that a general e-billing system will be good enough to meet your needs. However, there are a few things to consider with this approach.

Most generalized e-billing systems incorporate some rules and support workflows to guide billing decisions. Still, those rules and workflows are not specific to a corporate legal department’s needs.

General e-billing systems have several shortfalls for corporate legal users. Among other things, these tools:

  • Don’t support electronic timekeeper rates from outside counsel
  • Can’t prevent law firms from billing to matters without approval
  • Can’t receive invoices in the industry-standard Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) format or compare LEDES invoices against company billing guidelines
  • Don’t permit you to write off or reject individual invoice line items
  • Don’t allow you to compare your spend against your budget
  • Don’t support the automatic allocation of invoices to specified cost centers or codes, and
  • Don’t allow you to report on spend by relevant factors such as time, activity, matter, firm and more.

Accurate and efficient legal invoicing requires all of these functionalities, and the inability to perform them can be detrimental to your company’s revenue streams.

The Benefits of Legal E-Billing Systems

Specific legal e-billing systems, which are a part of Onit’s legal management software, address all these shortfalls, and then some.

Legal e-billing systems support the submission, review and approval of timekeeper rates, which accelerates invoice review and reduces the chance of invalid rates being approved, leading to overpayment. Law firms can only submit invoices when they’ve been assigned to a matter by your department, which gives you better financial control and further reduces the chance that invalid invoices will be submitted.

Inbound invoices are automatically allocated to the appropriate matter, reducing the risk of incorrectly allocating spend. As invoices are received, they can be automatically compared against budgets for matters, vendors or matter phases to highlight variances. If you need to adjust or reject an individual line item, you can do so via automated or manual review, saving time and streamlining invoice review across your department.

Legal e-billing systems are also designed to work with invoices prepared in LEDES. They can quickly analyze fee and expense data included in law firm invoices, automatically comparing every invoice line against your outside billing guidelines and capturing the LEDES invoice data into a database for robust reporting on spend. The ability to work with LEDES invoices accelerates invoice review and ensures compliance with billing policies.

Simply put, legal e-billing systems work with the nuances of invoicing in the legal field. Chances are, you wouldn’t consider using non-legal technology for the most critical aspects of your business, like matter management or legal spend management. Billing and invoicing should be no different.

Onit is a leading provider of solutions designed specifically for legal e-billing, including Onit ELM and InvoiceAI. Schedule a demo today to implement the right legal e-billing system for your specific needs or email [email protected].

Consilio is a global leader in eDiscovery, document review, risk management, and legal consulting services. Through its Consilio Complete suite of capabilities, the company supports multinational law firms and corporations using innovative software, cost-effective managed services, and deep legal and regulatory industry expertise. For more information, please visit us at consilio.com.

The Latest in Corporate Counsel and Legal Technology News (January 2022 Edition)

Posted on January 20, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

Welcome to the January digest of leading legal technology news and resources for in-house counsel and legal operations professionals. In this edition, you’ll read about the issues shaping legal and legal technology as we enter the new year, including an expected increase in legal disputes, the legal technology that’s helping GCs succeed and the possibility that the elusive sabbatical may come to the in-house world.

1. Almost a Third of Global Companies Expect Disputes To Increase In 2022, Study Finds

According to a recent report from global law firm Baker McKenzie, almost one-third of the world’s companies expect to see an increase in disputes in 2022. Not surprisingly, issues related to COVID-19 and cybersecurity – two of the most significant challenges in the past year – are expected to be the biggest threats. Specifically, 57% of respondents said cybersecurity disputes were most concerning for their companies, while 48% saw the pandemic as creating the greatest exposure to potential legal disputes. As we move forward in the coming year, companies should be braced for an uptick in court filings.

Source: The Global Legal Post

2. The Software That Lets GCs Showcase Their Value

In recent years, legal technology has played a significant role in helping in-house counsel juggle the competing demands of getting more done for their companies while keeping costs to a minimum. Jared Correia recently sat down with guests (including Matt DenOuden, SVP of Global Sales for Onit) in the latest episode of his Above the Law’s Non-Eventcast podcast to discuss just that. The episode focuses on how in-house counsel can best leverage matter management and legal spend management software to help lower overhead and improve operations. You can listen to the full podcast on Apple and Spotify.

Source: Above The Law

3. The Latest Perk for In-House Lawyers: Sabbaticals

Here’s an interesting trend for those keeping up on legal technology news: Time off! We all know a lawyer or two who could use a break, especially after the past couple of years. The good news is that more might soon get one. Sabbaticals have not often been included in in-house counsel compensation packages. However, a record number of attorneys left the workforce in 2021, mainly due to burnout, increased personal demands, a need for more flexibility and other concerns prompted by the pandemic. This has some corporations rethinking their stance on sabbaticals. Many recruiters are positing that employers might start using sabbaticals as a means of attempting to retain top talent in a competitive legal market.

Source: Law.com

4. The Top Legal Technology News Stories of 2021

There’s no question that 2021 was a year of ups, downs and everything in between for legal technology news. Here, technology evangelist and lawyer Nicole Black lays out the top five legal tech news stories that dominated headlines last year for the ABA Journal. The stories include the evolution of remote work, the uptick in cybersecurity risks, the significant increase in resignations in the legal industry at the associate level, the prevalence of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations in the legal tech space (including Onit’s acquisitions of Bodhala and BusyLamp), and significant legal tech IPOs that occurred in 2021.

Source: ABA Journal

(PS: Onit recently announced its latest acquisition, SecureDocs, which brings contract management to SMB customers. You can read more about it here.)

5.  Legalweek Conference Shifts to March

COVID-19 continues to disrupt conference season. This time, Omicron concerns have pushed  Legalweek. One of the leading conferences for legal technology news and advances is moving from the last week of January to March 8-11. If you’re registered, you don’t have to change a thing except  your hotel reservations. The conference, which legal thought leader Bob Ambrogi estimates to be in its 40th year, welcomes thousands of lawyers, in-house counsel, legal operations leaders and legal IT professionals each year.

Source: LawSites

We look forward to bringing you more news and insights as the new year progresses. As always, if you want to learn more about our legal business solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, AI and more, schedule a demo today or email [email protected].

The State of Law Department Operations, According to the Professionals Who Run Them

Posted on January 4, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Running the legal department like a business is the norm now. One of the most interesting surveys exploring this concept is the Blickstein Group’s Annual Law Department Operations Survey. Its 14th annual edition showcases the evolution of law department operations and shares insights from the operations professionals themselves as they rank their challenges, effectiveness and technologies.

Not surprisingly, one of the most significant themes is doing more with less. Lean legal continues to be a top priority in many corporate legal departments, as they work to drive efficiencies and control costs.

Let’s explore some of the most intriguing takeaways.

Top Law Department Operations Challenges

Law department operations professionals identified their three top challenges, which include business process improvements (59.7%), cost containment and savings/managing the budget (49.3%) and staying abreast of law department technology/managing and handling IT issues (35.8%).

Considering how LDOs spend their time, business process improvements – powered by automation – can play a crucial role in improving what they can accomplish. According to the report, the average survey participant devotes more than a quarter of their time to three areas:

  1. Cost savings, cost efficiency, cost management
  2. Outside counsel management
  3. Vendor management

(FYI: You can read about how ADM conquered vendor management challenges with their App. It  addressed three problems hindering efficiency: standardizing vendor approval,  automating engagement letter creation and execution, and streamlining the RFP process.)

For outside counsel management, most of the participants said they directly handle tracking legal spend, managing billing/audits and negotiating discounts and alternative billing arrangements. These directly link to what respondents said was their top key performance indicator: Actual spend vs. the law department’s total budget.

What Law Departments Are Most Effective At, According to LDOs

While there are always challenges, LDOs indicated that law departments are doing well on the operations front. When asked to rate their law department’s effectiveness, several areas took the lead. Eighty percent said their overall law department operations were “very effective” or “somewhat effective.” Sixty-five percent said the same for financial management and business client engagement and strategic partnering, and more than 60% responded likewise for legal technology.

On the flip side, 60.8% said they were either very ineffective or somewhat ineffective at document management, 48% said the same for alternative fee arrangements and 41.5% agreed that they lacked effectiveness around contract management.

Legal Technology Purchases for 2022

What impact did the pandemic have on digital transformation? According to the LDOs who answered the survey, it accelerated it. Twenty-six percent said it sped up digital transformation substantially, and another 46% agreed that it sped it up marginally.

With that in mind, what legal technologies are LDOs interested in evaluating or implementing this year?

 

34.5% Pre-execution contract management
34.5% Post-execution contract management
32.8% Document/contract assembly
29.8% Workflow/business process automation tools
29.8% Legal service intake/work intake
29.3% Matter management
28.1% Legal spend management

Legal operations are all about optimizing the law department’s ability to help grow the company. This requires a higher level of operational excellence, as evidenced by the embracing and reliance on innovation, increasing demand for automation of repetitive tasks and a workflow-centric approach. For legal departments still in their early stage of tech implementation, Onit’s Senior VP of Strategy and Growth, Brad Rogers, wrote a great article (in the survey) that offers valuable tips on creating digital transformation. Included are his “top five ideas” for companies pursuing such change.

You can read all the LDO survey results here.

Other resources that might interest you include:

 

How Legal Hold Products Help Your Company Preserve Electronically Stored Information

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

At a time when the amount of worldwide electronic data approaches hundreds and hundreds of zettabytes, preserving data represents a sizeable challenge for many companies. Many turn to legal hold products to accomplish this.

Companies have a duty to demonstrate that they have exercised the proper care to preserve and collect digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk. This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is reasonably anticipated, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e) states that when “electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery,” the court may take certain actions. The actions may include sanctions or fines totaling millions of dollars for companies who fail to act.

A legal hold, or litigation hold, is a notification to a company or individuals that material or data regarding an active or anticipated legal proceeding shouldn’t be destroyed. However, it doesn’t guarantee that the material will be preserved. Actual preservation is the responsibility of the notified organization’s leadership and employees involved. Legal hold products can help alleviate the worry and help you sleep well knowing that all bases are covered.

Old Software, More Challenges

Using software that does not simplify the legal hold process is counterproductive and, unfortunately, more common than one may think. Some companies rely on outdated legal hold software or using software that isn’t even designed to handle legal holds. For example, consider programs such as Outlook and Excel. They’re valuable tools used daily in companies worldwide. But using them to manage legal holds would result in a highly manual process that is difficult to track and probably does not meet the necessary level of ESI preservation.

How a Legal Hold Product Preserves ESI

Keeping employees trained and aware of their responsibility in protecting and preserving data is a must. However, legal hold software should be an integral part of the equation. It lets you quickly issue legal hold notifications and manage custodian acknowledgments. Well-chosen legal hold software will also help you:

  • Easily track the status of legal holds to know where they stand
  • Collect and store custodian acknowledgments and questions
  • Send automated notifications and reminders to help track compliance
  • Preserve notices and custodian data in a secure location
  • Gain a complete audit trail of all legal hold activity

When the legal hold product is built on a business process automation platform, workflows can be easily configured and tasks automatically assigned to the appropriate in-house team members.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Products

Companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercising proper care to preserve and collect ESI. The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization.

If you want to learn more about legal holds and legal hold products, here are three resources.

You can also reach out to us to learn more about our legal hold software.

Digital Transformation in the Legal Industry: Inspiration and Advice

Posted on December 7, 2021 by - Digital Transformation

In recent years, digital transformation in the legal industry has been sweeping through companies of all sizes. Legal ops professionals have been tasked with boosting efficiency while decreasing costs. As new challenges continue to arise, many have embraced agility, constantly adapting and optimizing processes.

For many in-house business visionaries and legal operations professionals, the answer to facing down constant change has been technology and innovation. By capitalizing on these new advances, digital transformation has not just changed how legal works, but has brought value across organizations.

To inspire your own digital transformation in the legal industry, we’ve compiled our latest Quick Start Guide, which shares valuable advice on legal digital transformation from the leaders who created it.

Inspiration from the Best

The Quick Start Guide offers insight from some of the most successful digital transformation stories in the legal market – Onit customers BT, ADM and VMware. In their stories, we hope you’ll find inspiration for your own intentionally designed change.

  • BT’s Award-Winning Digital Transformation: BT, one of the largest global communications service providers, needed to reconceptualize their processes to optimize the delivery of legal services. Technology served as the backbone for its transformation vision. The company, which is the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider and a leading provider of global communications services and solutions, adopted a platform to fuel their transformation – one that won the prestigious Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and has been recognized by both the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and the Legal Procurement Awards.
  • ADM’s Self-Built Vendor Management App: Fortune 100 company ADM, a global leader in nutrition and agricultural origination and processing, turned to technology to streamline a common challenge – vendor management. A major issue, the company had no standardized processes around selecting the right vendor for any particular matter or project. They built their own solution to streamline the vendor management process on a no-code platform.
  • VMware’s Data-Centric Transformation Journey: Every company’s digital transformation stems from different priorities. For VMware, a leading provider of multi-cloud services, the goal was to transform and scale legal services to accelerate the company’s growth and simplify the customer experience. That could only happen if they could find a way to harness the power of the huge volumes of data they had in their possession and access benchmarking information. With careful planning, vision and technology, they accomplished just that.

Tips for Implementing Successful Legal Digital Transformation

In addition to these specific success stories, the Quick Start Guide outlines some top pieces of advice for how corporate legal departments can drive transformation at their organizations. From budgeting considerations to hiring the right talent, the guide draws on a recent CLOC panel of experts that offered best practices for scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization.

The Quick Start Guide also offers some valuable transformation advice from Brad Rogers, Onit’s own vice president of strategy and growth and former chief operations officer and chief of staff for advocacy and oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company.

As Brad explains, digital transformation in the legal industry requires a longer-term rethinking of the way you work and should be aimed at leveraging modern capabilities and business processes to change the way your company operates. He also lays out the three goals to keep in mind when building world-class legal operations from scratch.

You can find these successful examples of digital transformation and read more advice here.

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.