Tag: CLOC

Generative AI in Legal: What Are the Opportunities?

Posted on June 9, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Note: originally published on the CLOC.org blog. 

The rapid growth of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to fuel seismic changes throughout every aspect of the business world. A quick glance at recent headlines gives a good sense of just how the expanding power of AI-spawned text, images, and media is reverberating:

  • Google added the power of Generative AI to its search engine, allowing users to receive AI-generated summaries to select queries.
  • IBM is launching a new “WatsonX” studio for organizations to create their own generative AI workflows.
  • A Goldman Sachs survey forecast “significant disruption” to labor worldwide from Generative AI — potentially affecting up to 300 million jobs.

The legal industry will be in the middle of the Generative AI revolution. But what will that transformation look like for the legal world — and how can the industry best take advantage of its promises and potential?

Three areas of transformation

These three legal areas will see meaningful opportunities for value from generative AI:

  • SPEND MANAGEMENT. Generated AI can also boost departments’ ability to make sense of their tens of thousands of lines of invoice data by delivering insights into value, helping departments understand exactly what they are paying for. These quick, accessible insights are a powerful way to stop the attorney habit of “rubber-stamping” invoices and address capacity concerns for busy departments. It also increases the quality and speed of invoice review, flagging patterns that can violate billing guidelines (especially for lengthy, complex invoices).

Additionally, generative AI can assist with vendor management — particularly tough conversations around rate, value and performance. When backed by detailed, insightful data, it is easier to have productive, emotion-free, and surprise-free conversations.

EXAMPLE: Invoice summarization. Onit integration with ChatGPT provides a quick, insightful summary of a contract’s tasks to analyze overall value – allowing users to glimpse into the hours spent per task, the work done by specific timekeepers, and much more.

  • CONTRACTING. With Generative AI’s ability to generate content such as summaries and redlines, Contracting is a natural place where the technology will have significant impact. In fact, contracting is one area where we see more mainstream adoption of AI — for example, most of Onit’s CLM customers use AI in contracting. Fueling this growth? The improvement in legal comprehension by Generative AI; for example, GPT4 passed the bar exam, scoring in the top 90th percentile on one 2023 tryout. These advancements mean the industry can use AI as a co-pilot to run contract playbooks. AI serves as a powerful tool to help reduce some of the repetitive manual work plaguing this part of the process and improve consistency.

What about post-signature? In an era of constant mergers and acquisitions, regulation and compliance demands, companies often find themselves with questions about the contracts in their repository. AI-driven analysis gives a valuable look into these contracts and their clause libraries, allowing the new company to quickly identify risks and remediate them.

EXAMPLE: Contract analysis. Onit’s AI Co-Pilot sits alongside you as you review your contract. You can ask it to spot issues, suggest redlining, compare against your template language and flag deviations from your standards.

  • LEGAL REQUESTS. This impact is one our CLOC panel and audience were extremely excited about; sometimes, the most beneficial use of AI is to remove manual work (like form filling), remove friction and encourage the adoption of our tools and processes. AI technology can help to kick off the workflow with minimal user intervention, automating legal request creation, determining routing priorities, and establishing tracking — removing significant administrative tasks for attorneys. It can also assist as the “first response,” automating common business requests before they go to Legal.

EXAMPLE: Creating a legal request. Onit’s AI integration can read an email chain and automatically generate a legal request.

This is what our audience at CLOC 2023 said when we asked them about the impact of Generative AI. Do you agree with their thoughts?

Word cloud of Generative AI's impact on Legal
CLOC Session word cloud

As Legal takes its next steps into the AI world, it’s a good idea to have these general principles in mind:

  • Be future-minded. Seek out vendors with a clear, future-proofed vision and plan for generative AI in their product. Additionally, look to partner with organizations prioritizing privacy and security with AI; they should offer commercial licenses that protect privacy. Once partnerships and processes are in place, layer the technology on top of that solid foundation to ensure successful rollout and implementation.
  • Keep on top of technology. Designate some time for yourself or ask a team to keep up with the possibilities and enhancements of Generative AI. In a world where rapid advancements happen weekly (if not daily), education and knowledge are king.
  • Address the fear of the unknown. The disruptive effects of new technology can be intimidating for many. Don’t rush or push anyone into this new world; encourage them to learn and engage with the space, focus on opportunities and use carefully tested and validated tools.

Learn more about how Onit’s AI-enabled products digitally transform the contract lifecycle.

How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

Posted on October 19, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Companies both large and small have increasingly been turning their attention to legal digital transformation, with an eye toward implementing new initiatives and pursuing innovation that will help increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track.

Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy & Growth, headed up a CLOC Ask the Experts panel that offered some valuable advice for companies looking to implement legal transformation projects. Here are the top five considerations to keep in mind as you pursue legal transformation at your organization.

1.   Remember that legal digital transformation is a journey.

No matter how prepared or dedicated you are, the transformation won’t happen overnight. You need to think of it as a journey – and one that’s disruptive and often messy. You might not be able to plan precisely where you’re going, but you should know where you want to get goal-wise. Just be prepared for the path there to zig and zag along the way. Too many people think of legal digital transformation like building a skyscraper with square corners where you can count all the nuts and bolts you’ll need to get the job done. In reality, transformation is more like building a city, where many people are involved, and some neighborhoods will go faster or slower than others.

2.   Know the primary goals of your GC.

It’s essential to keep your GC’s primary goals in mind as you implement legal digital transformation and align your strategy with those goals. Most GCs have the same priorities, namely to protect the company, have a team of highly engaged, top talent, and boost efficiency to be a world-class legal department. Keeping these goals in mind at all times will keep your GC engaged in your transformation efforts and lead to a better outcome.

3.   Know the primary reasons why you’re transforming in the first place.

No transformation initiative will be successful without a concrete plan. It’s not only important to have a plan, though – you also need to be able to articulate it. Successful digital transformation requires buy-in from all the stakeholders in your organization. If you want to secure that buy-in, you need to be able to adequately explain the reasons behind your transformation in your company’s town hall, in team meetings or even in the elevator.

4.   Understand why data is important for legal digital transformation.

Data plays into legal transformation in a number of ways. First, a data-driven staffing model is the only way to fully understand how many and what type of resources you’ll need to make your transformation initiative succeed. Second, you need to present data on matters, risks, legal spend and more to help your GC and your company’s leadership team understand your organization’s legal exposure. Finally, you need to give your leadership and your lawyers data on the legal function to help them manage the business better.

5.   Foster a process-based mindset.

It’s not always easy to get your lawyers to think about processes. The way you think and speak about legal digital transformation may not line up with the way your lawyers think. To overcome the gap, you should start with a high-level process map that your lawyers can follow. It shouldn’t be overly detailed, but simply create clarity around roles and responsibilities. Another helpful tool is a dashboard that provides key operational metrics that break down the process in a way that’s easily understood.

You can listen to the entire panel here for more insight into best practices for pursuing legal digital transformation.

Onit is helping businesses of all sizes with their legal ops transformation journey. Contact us at [email protected] or schedule a demo to learn more.

CLOC Panel: Legal Department Operations Experts Weigh in on Transformation Best Practices

Posted on September 16, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Today’s legal department operations teams significantly impact how corporate legal functions daily, spurring transformation through innovation. A CLOC Ask the Experts panel (you can view the session here) gathered recently to discuss this phenomenon and best practices for legal digital transformation. Presenters included:

  • Danielle Antil, Director of Legal Operations at Barings LLC
  • Tony Curzio, Program Manager Legal Technology & Projects at MassMutual
  • Sarah Mintz, Legal Operations Analyst at Barings LLC
  • Brad Rogers, SVP of Strategy & Growth at Onit

The presenters drew from their extensive experience to offer listeners advice for successfully scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization. Whether companies are just starting with transformation or are well into the process, the panelists offered up best practices, lessons and learned perspectives to help with success.

How Legal Department Operations Can Drive Transformation

The following is a summary of some of the biggest takeaways from the panel.

  • Include legal operations projects in the regular corporate budget and the roadmap of transformation programs. Start by establishing a high-level strategy and roadmap that articulates your business case for funding the transformation initiatives. Then, make that business case clear to the people who need to hear it.
  • Help your team develop a process-based mindset. It’s important to realize that lawyers may not be fluent in the language of process. When you implement training to support your transformation efforts, you want to make sure it speaks to the specific audience you’re trying to reach. In addition, after you start to implement change, you should have support materials available and offer yourself as a support resource for the department and the organization as a whole.
  • Start transformation from scratch. If you’re starting your transformation journey from nothing, an excellent first step is to inventory the current state of your infrastructure. Look at technology from the perspective of what isn’t compatible with your plans going forward. Also, evaluate its usability and whether it will lead to adoption. Before you can move forward, it’s essential to understand what your current processes are.
  • Ensure you have the right talent available when you need to quickly scale. You should always be networking to build a collection of internal and external resources to tap into. Consider bringing in consultants and subject matter experts that can help you prepare the groundwork or pitch in when you need additional help on short notice.

Listen to the On-Demand CLOC Session

These are just some of the insights the legal department operations panelists shared. To hear more, including discussions on what best-in-class legal operations support looks like, how to decrease your staff’s workload without increasing outside spend and more, you can listen to the entire presentation: CLOC Ask the Experts – Legal Transformation Projects and How to Scale Up or Down to Your Needs

Additional Legal Operations Resources

Brad, who served as Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company before joining Onit, has executed more than 10 significant transformations at five different Fortune 100 companies. You can hear more digital transformation advice from him by listening to his Onit podcasts:

Ahead of the 2020 CLOC Global Institute, Here Are Our Favorite CLOC Resources

Posted on November 4, 2020 by - Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

The annual Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute is just around the corner, meaning hundreds – if not thousands – of innovative professionals devoted to legal ops will (virtually) gather to talk trends, benchmarks, structures and best practices. Attendees will hear from significant changemakers like EY, Harvard and VMWare as well as general counsels from Coca-Cola, Easy Jet and Microsoft.

The goal of the CLOC Institute is to disseminate actionable steps that can be taken to drive specific changes – things many can get excited about, get involved in and make happen, rather than talking about a tipping point and change. With educational sessions provided by practicing industry leaders, the 2002 CLOC Global Institute offers unrivaled opportunities to stay on the cutting edge of today’s legal operations trends and technologies.

Top-Three CLOC Resources

Onit is proud to be a sponsor of the event because what CLOC does is genuinely empowering.  CLOC unites a global community of experts focused on redefining the business of law. By helping legal operations professionals and industry players collaborate, including law firms, technology providers, and law schools, CLOC works to set industry standards and practices for the profession. As part of this process, it also provides legal ops professionals with tools and insight.

If you haven’t had a chance to explore their website or join, we highly recommend both. As a start, we’ve highlighted some of our favorite CLOC resources.

  1. The 2020 CLOC State of the Industry Survey – How does your corporate legal department compare to others? Take a deep dive into this annual report to discover average staffing, preferred technologies, law firm review criteria and priorities for the year. For example, did you know that 61 cents of every dollar spent on legal costs goes to external legal costs? You can read our analysis of the report’s most interesting points here.
  2. What is Legal Ops? – Successful legal operations professionals master numerous skill sets. As one legal industry expert described it, “Not only are they juggling 20 balls, all the balls are different sizes.” Their work sows operational excellence across disciplines such as financial management, firm and vendor management, service delivery models and strategic planning. CLOC created this one-stop guide to dive into precisely what legal operations does and why – as well as results – in this document.
  3. Legal Ops Tech Roadmap – Whether your corporate legal department is two or 200, this how-to guide proves useful. IT contains pointers on everything from defining key value propositions to developing a budget and presenting to stakeholders. For those corporate legal departments transitioning to more modern operations, it is a blueprint. For larger ones, it serves as a reminder of valuable basics to keep your legal ops tech roadmap on target.

Visit Onit at CLOC 

We will have some big news to share very soon. Visit us in the exhibit hall and you’ll find out how to be the first to know. Plus, if you sign up for a demo or schedule one, you’ll get lunch on us in the form of a DoorDash gift card.

See you at the CLOC Global Institute.