Tag: Apps

The Top Risk and Compliance Automation Tools Created by Legal Operations

Posted on September 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Managing risk and compliance are critical tasks for keeping companies safe, which is why corporate legal departments are turning to compliance automation tools.

Between an ever-changing regulatory landscape, an increased focus on data privacy, the need to monitor internal policies and guidelines and more, risk and compliance represent a challenging task. It spans multiple departments within an enterprise, requiring collaboration and management of often manual tasks. These elements increase the possibility of the proverbial dropped ball and, in turn, increase the likelihood of noncompliance with external or internal protocols or higher risks for companies.

Take, for example, data breach incident reporting for GDPR and other data privacy regulations. Organizations must take immediate action to report potential data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours. However, this can be a challenging timeline for large organizations relying on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails as tools for compliance.

What if legal operations could build their own compliance automation tools? It’s happening – and quite often. Here’s how.

The Power of Business Process Automation

As a general rule, the lower the number of tools needed to manage a process, the higher the overall efficiency. That’s where business process automation and compliance meet.

Corporate legal departments of all sizes across the globe are rethinking how they work. They are looking for ways to radically improve their process performance to optimize compliance activities. Technology is rapidly accommodating this need through the rise of no-code platforms and visual interfaces. These innovations have made it possible for almost anyone to build and deploy solutions and applications without writing a single line of code.

Let’s return to the example above of data breach incident reporting. Automation vastly streamlines this process. One team of legal operations experts, which included BT and Standard Chartered, built an App on a no-code business process automation platform to streamline the process. The resulting App reports, manages and tracks data breaches and notifies regulators. It collects data breach information, automatically sends a notice to the security and compliance team and offers a rules-based dashboard and a quick entry point to review records. It even generates ICO reports and submits them in addition to collecting feedback from the organization. (You can see the App in action in this video.)

Risk and Compliance Automation Tools and Apps

The Onit Nation – a group of Onit Fortune 500 corporate legal customers, partners and employees – has built an impressive range of Apps on our business process automation platform. These 5,500+ Apps cover a wide range of industries and practices, including accounting, finance and procurement, enterprise operations, general and administrative, human resources, IT, legal operations, marketing and IP and risk and compliance.

Here are some of the risk and compliance automation tools the Onit Nation has created:

  • Compliance Questionnaires: Creates, distributes and keeps track of responses to questionnaires for various compliance-tracking needs.
  • Directors’ Stock Election Unit Form: Assists with distributing, collecting and tracking annual Board of Director’s instructions for stock options.
  • Employee Incident: Provides a secure intake mechanism for employees to report incidents, both named and anonymous.
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations, collecting all ethics cases together for better oversight, collaboration and management.
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation for company-wide gift and business entertainment to improve compliance with relevant policies.
  • Internal Investigations: Traces internal allegations end to end and creates capture points for intake.
  • Power of Attorney Agreements: Handles the approval and management of power of attorney contracts used when a company needs to act on behalf of an employee.
  • Whistleblower: An anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought by employees that allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution.

These are just some of the tools that make risk and compliance tasks easier. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. You can also learn more about no-code platforms by reading this white paper – No-Code Platforms: How They Are Transforming Legal Operations and Their Enterprises.

To get started with building your own Apps, request a demonstration of Onit’s Apptitude platform or email [email protected].

Creating Custom Legal Software: The Apps and Solutions Legal Operations Pros Are Building Themselves

Posted on September 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To meet the needs of today’s modern corporate legal department, many legal operations professionals are creating their own custom legal software. And here’s what they’re building.

But first, let’s take a look at the past year and a half.

Corporate legal departments completed many nimble adjustments as they’ve faced new challenges and demands. Legal operations professionals play a vital role in this success, finding ways to make it easier for lawyers to work while bringing in more efficiency, cost savings and other benefits of operational excellence.

Technology undoubtedly plays a role in supporting these endeavors, bringing automation and AI to systems like enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. However, even the most customized solutions must have the flexibility to evolve with a corporate legal department’s needs – especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise.

Building Your Own Custom Legal Software

Custom-built software for legal traditionally seems like a luxury, requiring precise planning, contributors across multiple departments and a good piece of the budget. But now, with technology innovations, legal operations pros can create Apps (and combine Apps into solutions) quickly and efficiently. They do this with tools that simplify the process and offer no-code-needed interfaces.

Business automation platforms and App builders with drag-and-drop visual interfaces make the creation process more accessible for those unfamiliar with coding. Instead of relying on developers, they can use a platform and its simplified interface to program the software. The key is indeed the underlying business process automation platform, which acts as a blank canvas. While it supports large solutions for legal spend, contract management and matter management, it also supplies the flexibility to enhance those solutions with complementary Apps, create new Apps altogether and combine Apps into solutions to tackle more complex challenges.

A perfect example of this in action is Hack the House, our inaugural virtual hackathon. Five teams comprised of in-house legal professionals, consultants and business analysts identified business cases and built Apps to solve complex workflow challenges in less than three weeks. They created solutions for data breach incident reporting, career development, diversity and pro bono program management. The winning team took it a step further by creating multiple Apps and combining them into a solution to streamline trademark renewal decisions and track trade secrets.

As impressive as that sounds, we’ve seen custom legal software built even faster – with Apps up and running in as little as an hour.

What Legal Operations Is Building

To date, the Onit Nation – Onit’s master App builders, customers and strategic partners – have used the Apptitude platform to build more than 5,500 Apps to solve everyday business problems. Among them are several custom legal software solutions that are helping to automate and accelerate nearly all aspects of legal operations, and we’ve collected many of them in our new App Catalog.

Our corporate legal customers have been prolific in building Apps and solutions. In addition to the Apps mentioned for Hack the House, other Apps have been created to handle:

  • Board Kit Distribution: Centralizes board of director information and notifies board members of new or revised documents while giving them access to the most current information
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations and consolidates all ethics cases in one place for better oversight, collaboration and management
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation on gift and business entertainment requests company-wide to improve compliance with relevant policies
  • Settlement Authority Request and Approval: Provides a workflow for approving documents that detail settlement authority requests
  • Task Assignment: Handles task assignments made to non-departmental resources
  • Whistleblower: Provides anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought to you by employees and allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution

These are examples of just some of what our customers have created to automate processes and solve pressing issues. In fact, the Apps work across the enterprise, automating processes with HR, marketing, risk and compliance, accounting, finance, procurement and more. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration to revolutionize workflows and increase efficiency.

To get started with building custom legal software on Onit’s no-code business process automation platform Apptitude, schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].