Category: Enterprise Legal Management

Want to move your law department beyond just cost cutting and operational efficiency into a role of strategic leadership in your business? Join us as we present a panel discussion at Legaltech West Coast about how new enterprise legal management technology can help your in-house team drive firm-wide innovation. Our panel is part of the emerging technology series at Legaltech West Coast in San Francisco on July 13 – 14^th. For the fifth year, Legaltech West Coast will bring together law firms, in-house counsel, and technology providers to discuss the pressing issues and challenges of the practice and business of law today. Over the two-day conference, attendees can learn trends and discuss strategies across five tracks: Corporate Legal Operations, Information Governance, Advanced IT, Cloud and Mobile Technology, and Disruptive Trends in eDiscovery.

Stasha Jain, In-house Counsel and Account Manager, Onit, Inc., and Kirsten Taitelbaum, Director, Finance and Operations at DaVita will discuss best practices for using technology to drive stronger collaboration between law departments and the business they support to produce better outcomes. Entitled, “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” the discussion is designed to give you a roadmap on how to use data to develop metrics in order to understand how work gets done and how to streamline that work from end-to-end in order to improve service overall. Learn tactics and best practices from leaders at the forefront of this important shift in thinking, from a focus on cost cutting and improving efficiency, towards using predictive and actionable analytics to drive future strategic initiatives.

Join us for “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” on Monday, July 13th at 10:15 am. Connect and continue the discussion with us in the conference exhibition hall at booth #409 to learn about our customizable enterprise legal management solutions.

To learn more about, and register for, Legaltech West Coast 2015 and view the full agenda, click here.

Find out how Onit can help your law department operations team innovate to meet today’s and tomorrow’s strategic challenges. Schedule a demo or contact us today!

Read more about Enterprise Legal Management on our blog:

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Put people at the center… not databases.

The relationship between technology and the workplace is a very dynamic thing, and technology is more important than ever to corporate legal department operations. As computer processing capabilities grow and programming languages evolve to allow for ever-increasing levels of complexity, businesses must be vigilant to read the trends and ensure that they are responsive to technological advancement and the market demands that those advancements birth. With the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud services, people in all kinds of businesses and industries must choose to pursue new ways of doing things or else find themselves in an unsustainable position as their current standard of practice becomes obsolete. This is especially true for legal departments facing the daunting challenge of managing the enterprise’s legal affairs.

Software as a Service:

Traditionally, software has been offered as a “product:” an instance of intellectual property licensed to an organization and deployed and supported internally. This model is based on the idea that software is a tool similar to hardware: a virtual property that a business can employ to achieve its ends.

This is, at first glance, a logically sound position—after all, it is the same structure we use when acquiring computer hardware. Why should software be any different? The short answer is that it doesn’t have to stop there. Operations can be much more efficient.

When the Internet appeared in the 1990s, some software vendors envisioned a different approach. Inspired in part by the mainframe computing of the 1950’s, they saw the potential for a system that not only provided a software product, but also treated the maintenance, hosting, and support of that product as a service.

By combining the idea of a software product that achieves a function with a support system that makes the use of that product inherently simple and trustworthy, they changed the nature of the industry, and slowly but surely turned “the cloud” into a buzzword. So… what have business gained from cloud services?

Industry Response

Some industries were more ready for to the change than others. Consumer offerings, such as YouTube and eBay, provided centralized access to video entertainment and a global marketplace respectively, and served as positive use cases for the applicability of this concept.

Other industries, especially those in the notoriously rigid B2B sector, were less prepared to adapt, instead continuing to offer independent instances and letting the purchaser handle the rest (support, service, troubleshooting, and all of the headaches that come along with it.) This structure forces organizations to foot the bill and even hire their own support staffs for the most complex and unwieldy software. Many of these offerings require organizations to license the product on a per-employee basis, rendering employee adoption and use an increasingly cost-prohibitive option. As efficiency needs grow and margins shrink, one-size-fits-all tools begin to appear to be very wasteful.

Lag Behind or Race Ahead: It’s Your Choice.

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for Enterprise Legal Management aim to directly address these issues for legal departments that desire more than the “old way” can offer. Whether they desire to fill the gaps between the tools they already use or to design a new workflow from the ground up, Onit’s App design philosophy makes it all possible.

Instead of cobbling together features into existing (and many times outdated) ebilling, matter management or enterprise legal management packages and interfaces, Onit seeks to answer the question: how does this legal department’s business work, and how can we help it work better?

Onit and other SaaS providers strive to facilitate success by being responsive to how app users actually use apps instead of treating the database as the center of all things and building out, as traditional all-things-to-all-people Enterprise Legal Management systems do. By approaching the problem of success in business and legal departments holistically, solutions can be designed as opposed to just applied.

The Way of the Future

Though it sounds trite, it’s unassailably true. Subscription-based models are becoming the norm. Netflix killed Blockbuster, just as SharePoint obsoletes FTP and email attachments. By moving Creative Suite to the cloud, Adobe both took steps to combat its long-term piracy problem and made its product exponentially more affordable. Nowadays, video rental shops are few and far between, business information can be easily accessed without having to navigate confusing file structures, and virtually anyone can have access the world’s most advanced design and digital arts suite.

So the question is: will your legal department adopt a smarter business process now, or will you wait until you have no other choice?

Enterprise Legal Management (ELM), or the integrated administration of legal matter and spend management systems, is quickly becoming the standard in the way that legal departments are managed. By unifying these historically independent areas, management strives to delegate more effectively and develop a holistic view of how resources are put to use to maximize departmental efficiency and make educated, informed business decisions.

As these silos combine, certain truths about how ELM works are becoming self-evident. These axioms can be used to guide your legal department’s transition to a more intelligent set of best practices for legal operations management.

1: Change is good for growth

The history of legal department management software stretches back four decades, and one thing has remained consistent: as software solutions mature and grow along with the legal departments they help manage, those departments must be able to change to keep up with evolving standards. Matter management solutions, which began to gain popularity in the early 1980s, grew in scope and functionality over the subsequent two decades, enabling legal departments to make better decisions about resource deployment. Likewise, the spend management systems of the 1990s introduced new features to enhance the efficiency of financial dispositions.

When these new features entered the market, legal departments were forced to acknowledge that, especially in light of the exponential rate of technological advancement, adaptability is an essential quality for a legal department that values efficiency. Legal should be set up in such a manner that is responsive to change, and to some degree anticipates the technological curve of the near future.

2: Communicate your successes to develop better best practices

Experimentation has always been key to innovation, and this logic holds true in ELM as well. But when success is met, much is also lost if the insight gained is not applied broadly. A policy change that shows success in IP should be considered for other areas if it is applicable. Inversely, if a policy change has unforeseen negative consequences after being applied to an area, there is no reason to sustain that effort simply because it works elsewhere.

The common key to this point is communication. Good ELM requires a constant dialogue so that management has a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. Without healthy, honest communication between sections of your legal department (and those outside it who interact with its policies,) any Enterprise Legal Management best practice guidelines that your business develops will be threatened.

3: Invest in technology to automate the minutiae and facilitate “smarter” work

In spite of these theoretical considerations, the amount of actionable changes that can be achieved are limited without a software solution that strives to take some of the drudgery and frivolous costs out of ELM. Paper invoices, human error in data entry, and misplaced information are constant hazards for legal, and by adopting a Enterprise Legal Management software solution, a business can drastically improve its overhead and efficiency. 

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for ELM, in contrast with typical, often bloated offerings, are uniquely designed to serve specialized business needs and promote adoption rates, sidestepping the pitfalls of steep learning curves and esoteric user interfaces that plague many other “comprehensive” solutions and limit actual ROIs.

4: Standardize pricing to develop a coherent billing framework

Deciding how best to bill clients can be a challenging question for legal. When precedents conflict and the facts of a business relationship are not stored centrally, ambiguities can present that can lead to lost profits. This will also take some pressure off where it comes to maintaining customer relationships by mitigating the risk of billing errors or inconsistencies.

In tandem with a software solution as discussed above, a clear, consistent guide that drives commodity pricing will go a long way towards increasing efficiency and predictability within legal.

Results

By accepting and internalizing these four truths, legal will provide itself with opportunities to increase value and efficiency while promoting collaboration and minimizing error. By choosing Onit Apps for Enterprise Legal Management, legal departments can achieve those ends to a greater degree while also saving money versus the established “all-in-one” solutions. With Onit Apps, a business can design a solution that perfectly fits with how its legal department is managed and how it interfaces with the rest of the business. 

To schedule a demonstration of Onit’s ELM Apps, email [email protected].

The End of the Silo: How to Organize your Enterprise to Be “Customer-Centric”

Did you know that acquiring a new customer is seven times more expensive than the cost of properly maintaining an existing relationship? (Kissmetrics) So why are sales organizations hyper-focused on new customer acquisition versus nurturing the customers they already have? Many businesses operate as loosely connected groups of silos; each focused on its own responsibilities. The silo-ed sales approach leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term ROI rather than long-term customer success. 

In order to change the focus from short-term ROI to long-term, you must build your organizational structure around the client, making sure that each step in the sales process serves the ultimate goal of customer success. This change in focus is what makes an organization “customer-centric.” Instead of forcing customers to interact with a process that does not serve their interests, you should organize your processes to be adaptable and responsive to your customers’ needs. One way to facilitate this is through automating the sales process.

Here are seven customer-centric benefits of sales automation:

1. It democratizes account management. Rather than reserving the highest standards of service for key accounts, automating parts of the process enables your sales organization to apply those same standards to every single account. 

2. It stops reps from gaming the system. How? With clear visibility into progress toward leading performance indicators, sales reps can compete amongst themselves to “win” the game instead of trying to beat the system. 

3. It limits variance within large sales organizations. A good control system with a high level of visibility for management will limit variation and help sculpt positive customer experiences by holding sales representatives directly responsible for how they carry out their duties.

4. It creates more time for human-intensive work. When you automate the low-skill, low-reward tasks you cut down on errors and unnecessary labor hours spent. Sales automation is estimated to save companies five hours of labor per employee per week. By eliminating the human element where it isn’t efficient, you free up time for reps to focus on responsibilities such as sales and support calls which require the human touch. 

5. It puts metrics at your fingertips. An automated system can be used to analyze account and representative success and intelligently determine the best KPIs. 

6. It turns account management into a product. Automated capabilities will allow your company to differentiate itself within your industry, offering a customer experience other organizations would be hard pressed to match. Account management can be your flagship product.

7. It gives you visibility into the entire customer relationship. With a clear image of the customer supplier-relationship, you can trust that your clients will notice the effort your organization puts into account management.

For more information, download our Whitepaper: Achieving Measurable Success in Account Management.

Clean up your CRM process with an Onit Account Management App. Contact us today!

The landscape of legal technology is all about Enterprise Legal Management (ELM). As a category of technology, ELM solutions are loosely identified as integrated matter and spend management systems, but their overall goal is to help an enterprise manage legal issues and risk consistently throughout the organization.

Legal departments are adopting integrated solutions in droves because they help in-house counsel streamline matter, contract, and e-billing processes. The result of this streamlining effect is that departments are better able to handle the increased risk and compliance burdens and reduce their overall legal spend. With more work moving in-house and departments tasked with doing more with tighter budgets, advanced legal operations management is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. Many legal departments have adopted enterprise systems to handle either matter or spend management or both.

Unfortunately, many enterprise management systems are not helping legal departments address the most critical issues facing their organization – mainly project visibility and risk-management.

The Limitations of Traditional Enterprise Legal Management Software

Enterprise legal management software does not effectively address process or collaboration.

Traditional enterprise legal management systems are mostly data and task-oriented systems that focus on maintaining large databases of information related to matters and spend. A traditional enterprise legal management solution is a system of record, so it will be less likely to track day-to-day activities within the legal department. Although some claim to address process and collaboration, the very nature of these large data-driven solutions prohibit them from doing so effectively. What results from a traditional enterprise system is a recording of the final data, such as a contract or document relating to a matter, without the context of the activities that surround it.

What these systems claim to do is enterprise legal “management,” when, what they actually do is provide a “database.” Traditional matter and spend management solutions do not address process or collaboration in a way that facilitates the implementation of consistent, repeatable processes for the variety of legal issues managed across a large enterprise. This lack of visibility into the context around these legal issues exposes companies to undue amounts of risk. And, the lack of process-driven workflow engines that work the way you work keeps adoption rates low and return on investment difficult to achieve.

One example of this is the process of reviewing and approving NDAs. For many organizations, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) lifecycle is an often-overlooked Achilles heel. Traditional enterprise legal management solutions may store the final document, but there are no productivity tools around its request, creation and execution. These critical documents protect intellectual property, but too often they are pulled together haphazardly, not countersigned, and left to languish in an email inbox. Work commences, and both parties forget about the NDA until a problem arises. While your existing enterprise legal management software may provide a database for the final NDA, how does it handle the process of actually requesting and managing the various approval stages? Moreover, once signed, do you know where to find the executed NDA if a problem arises? Read more: How Ad Hoc Turns NDAs into Nightmares.

Enterprise Legal Software is Not Designed to Evolve with Your Business.

The simple fact is that enterprise legal management software does not work for legal departments and the business users they support in the way IT and management wants to believe it will. For one, enterprise legal management systems take an incredible amount of resources – both time and money. The time it takes to develop and deploy one of these cumbersome systems can take months, even years. Moreover, once implemented, it can take a very long time for the business to see value from the software.

Secondly, changing the software to support new business initiatives is difficult. For as long as it took to create the original enterprise system, it can be just as expensive and time-consuming to bring in new functionality that meets changing business needs.

Facilitate True Enterprise Legal Management with Enterprise Apps

Enterprise Apps are about people and process first.

Innovative legal departments are changing and adapting to help the business they support grow and thrive. In order to do so, they recognize that matter management is not about the database, but rather, successfully managing a legal matter is about process. Implementing and enforcing consistent processes is critical to gaining visibility into how all the various business units may be exposing the company to risk.  That visibility leads to better business risk mitigation and more efficient handling of litigation when it does arise.

While a database to store final information is certainly needed, Enterprise Apps like those developed by Onit can fill the “process and collaboration gaps” left by these database-driven systems. For example, when turning out NDAs become a simple, repeatable process, leveraging the NDA App to add consistency and visibility, organizations can stay on top of their legal obligations and reduce their exposure to risk. An App will help you manage the NDA lifecycle from creation to execution, jump-starting what will be a productive working relationship in a fraction of the time and effort than an ad hoc “process.” Read more: Closing the Loop in the NDA Lifecycle.

Enterprise Apps are Designed to Evolve with Your Business.

Enterprise Apps are easy to deploy, support, learn and use. App building platforms like Onit enable non-developers to write SaaS web applications to solve human process problems for enterprise users. Enterprise Apps are hyper-focused on solving problems for your team, and have remarkably high success and adoption rates. Because they are designed to fill the process and collaboration gaps, Enterprise Apps can evolve quickly to meet your changing business needs at a fraction of the customization and administration costs associated with enterprise systems.

While your enterprise legal management software may have a long list of features, our Enterprise App clients measure success by user adoption, rather than feature checklists. Why spend big money on a complex legal management tool that does not address the visibility and the productivity of the human processes at the core of the task?

Ready to consider a new way to manage legal operations? Onit Apps for matter, contract, and spend management will help your legal department provide better service to your businesses and improve your operational efficiency. Contact us or schedule a demo today!

1. The landscape for in-house legal departments has fundamentally changed. General Counsel (GCs) must think outside of his/her department when it comes to managing the entire enterprise’s legal affairs. This shift has meant that visibility into risk and compliance issues handled across the company, and metrics around spending and productivity are essential to a GCs success. Enterprise Legal Management is a term that has evolved to define this greater need for aggregated information across disparate departments in order to make better company decisions. 

2.  Enterprise Legal Management is a class of technology that helps GCs navigate this new landscape. The aim of ELM technology is to organize and inform through data. This class of technology makes it easier for GCs to gain visibility into potential legal risk across the wider organization, moving away from the siloed approach of yesterday. This enables a more proactive approach to managing the enterprise’s legal affairs and mitigating risk wherever it exists. 

3.  Enterprise Apps are the nimble cousin of your existing Enterprise Legal Management system. While larger ELM systems can give you easier access to global data, these systems don’t necessarily address the collaboration required to harness and use that data to benefit the organization. Built from the ground-up, Enterprise Apps are simple-to-configure, and easy-to-deploy solutions that aim to address complex and everyday processes that require a high degree of collaboration between knowledge workers. 

4. Enterprise Apps can integrate with existing ELM systems. Although these Apps can replace larger systems of record, they are more often than not, a way to bridge the gap that exists in those larger systems. Do you have a gap in functionality in an existing enterprise system that requires collaborative workflow? An Enterprise App can be used to bridge that gap at a fraction of the cost, rather than having to reconfigure your existing system. 

5. Companies of any size can benefit from Enterprise Apps. In-house legal departments dealing with organizations of any size, from small businesses to multi-billion dollar global corporations, can benefit from Enterprise Apps.

6.  Enterprise Apps are a quick way to drive meaningful operational improvements. Unlike the development and implementation process for a large enterprise legal management system, which can take several months or years, the average time it takes our clients to implement an Onit App is 19 days. While the most complex implementations can take up to 90 days, this still beats the average for ELM systems by months. 

7.  Enterprise Apps can help your legal department transform the way it works. In one example, Onit partnered with a large Fortune 500 client to deploy an NDA App. The company’s in-house legal department dealt with over 10,000 NDAs annually, with the average time from start to finish taking over 16 days. Onit developed a prototype App to handle global submission, negotiation and electronic signature of NDAs. The result? The company processed over 1000 NDAs in the first month of deployment, with the completion time reduced to just 24 hours and 90% of the NDAs being processed without lawyer involvement. 

8.  Enterprise Apps are secure.  Like your larger Enterprise Legal Management system, your Enterprise App data is hosted in secure commercial data centers. In most cases, your data is more secure than if you hosted it in your environment. 

9.  Enterprise Apps require little or no IT involvement. In many cases, customers can configure, deploy, and support enterprise Apps with no corporate IT involvement. App developers, such as Onit, achieve a “low code” or no code development structure, which also speeds up the time to value for our clients.

10.  There is an Enterprise App for every need/process/workflow. Apps for very standard processes like contract review and approval, NDAs, alternative fee arrangements, and matter or legal spend management are available.. Alternatively, Apps can be created from scratch to meet a particular process or set of circumstances unique to your business.

When you are exploring enterprise legal management systems, it helps to have a technology partner who can walk you through the process of creating an effective solution that works for your department. Onit can help you determine your best course of action, and we’ll be there every step of the development process.

With a small investment of your time – typically 60 to 90 minutes – to help us understand your business process, we can configure an App. Contact us today!

The business climate around us has changed, and in many cases, not for the better, with undue value placed on eking out more productivity (not the good kind), while spending less. For legal departments, this means a triple whammy of smaller budgets, fewer resources, and increasing workloads being brought back in-house. Businesses that best adapt to their changing climate will not only survive, but thrive. In the words of Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” One way to ensure your business continues to thrive is by engaging in strategic process improvement.

In a recent article by George Dunn and Wendy Hufford, both experts in process improvement, the authors lay out a simple 3-step process improvement plan for legal departments. Process improvement can be an overwhelming project with many teams stalling just out of the gate because of the truly daunting nature of change. The article does a great job of distilling change down to a few exercises so that you can start putting pen to paper when it comes to a much-needed change.

According to the authors, step one is to get acquainted with the various process methodologies out there. Everyone may be talking about process, but there are many different ways to approach it. The five methodologies noted by the authors are Continuous Process Improvement, Business Process Management, Re-engineering, LEAN, and Six Sigma. Sometimes, it takes a combination of methods to find the right fit for your organization. At Onit, our solutions employ a combination of business process management (BPM), which focuses on “innovation and flexibility through combining process and technology changes,” and the continuous process improvement methodology, which focuses on making small changes over time rather than one big overall change.

Next, you should identify the areas within your department that could use improvement. Anyone who’s worked on an in-house legal team will be familiar with the common departmental vulnerabilities outlined by the article. Onit Smart Process Apps aim to create efficiency in common tasks that typically cause a lot of backlog and frustration. Processes such as contract management and administration, records retention and storage, and email communication are ripe with unnecessary frustration due to lack of visibility, the tracking down of documents, approval delays, and exposure to risk. So, how can you tell if a process is ripe for change? Look out for these five signs.

At Onit, we offer Smart Process Apps to tame common processes such as contract review and approval, NDAs or alternative fee arrangements. Need a custom solution? Our nimble App Builder platform allows you to create a customized solution that can adapt to grow with your business. Onit’s overarching philosophy across all of our technology solutions is to provide a new level of visibility and transparency into processes to help knowledge workers involved in the process be more productive, happier and more successful.

The third and last step is to create a process improvement plan for your department. The article lays out some specific items to think about, consider, and finalize, in order to put that plan into place. One important item is to start creating a culture of change within your organization. One way to do this is to build a coalition of like-minded individuals united around one inefficient process area. Check out our blog post: “3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative.”

Another big part of creating a plan is to prioritize potential process improvement initiatives and to audit current processes to find soft spots and opportunities. Need help conducting a process audit? We’ve put together four exercises that will help you deconstruct your process in order to figure out your baseline and lay out a plan for improvement. Finally, an important step as you engage in any process improvement initiative is to enlist the help of a third-party partner who can help you every step of the way.

Have some process improvement ideas for your legal department, but not sure where to start? Onit can help! Contact us or schedule a demo to learn more about our Smart Process Apps and App Builder platform.

Need more inspiration to start a change initiative? The Darwin quote above comes from an excellent list of quotes about change from Inc.com.

Enterprise software arose to answer specific needs within corporations — from processing bills to tracking legal matters or managing content. In its inception, it helped enable the mastery of what would be considered simple tasks on an individual level, but were immensely complicated challenges when multiplied to the corporate level. Gradually, this software became more sophisticated, facilitating terabytes or petabytes of information. 

However, enterprise software is like steel plumbing — expensive to lay, difficult to manipulate or move and often more expensive to replace.

Due to the increasing complexity of the business needs these solutions handle, it is often extremely difficult to modify workflows, user preferences, reporting and more without intervention from IT and potentially more bills from the software provider.

Companies are looking towards a new model of systems of engagement, which encompass not only management of tasks or processes but also the communications and collaboration preferences of its users on a whole. These systems — enabled by technologies we know and understand such as email — serves customers, partners and employees equally, removing the barriers that prevent out-of-department stakeholders from taking part in vital processes that impact their goals and productivity. A system of engagement is focused on in-the-moment tasks and decisions, leverages social and cloud technologies and includes short, rapid, iterative release cycles.

Rather than trying to compete with existing enterprise software installations, these systems of engagement are embracing an “App” approach that enables them to fill in the gaps of existing software infrastructure. Forrester Research has coined the term “Smart Process Apps” for this new software and predicts it will be a fast growing segment of business software.

Find out how you can get ahead of the curve by reading our whitepaper on the transition from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement.

Imagine seeing this title on your AmLaw 200 law firm bill: career associate. While a bit odd, it may be the latest way large firms are controlling costs and creating a lower threshold for billable hours.

The ABA Journal reports that law firms have been experimenting with different titles that can signify different career paths for outside counsel. For example, the above mentioned “career associate” references a lawyer at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe that works at lower rates and reduced hours and is excluded from the partnership track. The article reports similar trends at Greenberg Traurig and Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

But are these title changes semantics or substantive?

According to an expert interviewed for the article, the changes reflect the “economic challenges of the past five years” and “lawyers’ changing professional expectations and desires.”

Truth be told, law firms have been juggling titles for quite some time. While this may be just marketing machinations, the fact that some of these new titles charge a lower rate could translate into substantial savings for corporate law departments – who have, for years, pushed for an appropriate and applicable mix of billing levels on outside counsel bills. After all, basic work doesn’t need “drive by” billing from a senior partner. Now, with the advent of these new positions, there is the possibility to move basic work from associates to an even more budget-compliant level of attorney.

So if you happen to see career associate, legal resident or department attorney on your latest bill, give yourself a moment to smile as you (hopefully) savor the spend savings.