Happy 10th “Onitversary” to Us! Celebrating a Decade of Growth, Expansion and Investment in Legal Tech

What a decade it’s been for Onit and legal tech. We’re celebrating our 10th anniversary with several significant milestones over a decade of groundbreaking achievements in legal technology.

Onit was co-founded in 2011 by CEO Eric M. Elfman, COO Eric Smith, Vice President of Marketing Jill Black and Vice President of Products John Gilman. Their goal: to create legal tech that makes it easier for in-house counsel to practice law.

Today, Onit has more than 400 employees worldwide and 10,550 corporate legal and law firm customers and offers workflow automation, enterprise legal management, AI, contract lifecycle management and more. Going forward, we plan to continue our strategic growth and expand our offerings to give corporate legal departments even more of the legal tech tools they need to do their best work.

Reinventing Legal Tech

Onit was originally co-founded in 2011 with a focus on legal project management. However, the focus shifted when Elfman and his co-founders brainstormed ideas and made a discovery: Despite half a trillion dollars spent every year in enterprise software, very little of it moved the needle in terms of productivity for end-users. Instead, most workers managed their day through email, which didn’t always work for complex organizations and projects.

Onit’s first platform, Apptitude, solved 95% of the workflow challenges presented by the email-based environment. The company started by creating legal tech on Apptitude for the same solution that Elfman’s first company Datacert addressed – enterprise legal management (ELM), an area that was ripe for disruption.

From Startup to Scale-Up

Onit has gone from two employees and $25,000 in revenue when co-founded to a company with more than 400 employees in 2021. We have helped transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar legal departments drive operational improvements, processing over $5 billion in legal invoices in the past year alone.

The company’s leadership sees Onit as a scale-up now, a company that will continue to grow in reach and revenue while still committed to the disruption and innovation of its startup roots.

Despite the pandemic, we continue to be one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the Houston area. While others resorted to layoffs, we increased our headcount by 22% and grew revenue by 36% in 2020.

Onit and our customers have used our platforms and products to build over 5,600 Apps and solutions that automate critical enterprise-wide processes such as marketing, sales, HR and compliance. We also launched three new AI-based products in the last year (Precedent, ReviewAI and ExtractAI) and acquired three companies since May 2019 – legal operations software provider SimpleLegal, legal tech AI provider McCarthyFinch and AXDRAFT, a document generation and automation platform.

Looking Ahead for Onit and Legal Tech

As we enter the next decade in the legal tech market, we will continue to grow and innovate. And we will keep disrupting the market. As our CEO says, “We’re not slowing down.”

Contact Onit today to learn more about how our workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and solutions can help you transform your business.