Year: 2016

Both Legal Holds and Legal Services Requests are hot topics in the legal technology community right now. Just last month LegalTechNews.com had experts discuss legal hold processes and what to look for in a solution.

Legal Holds

TechTarget.com does an excellent job outlining and clarifying legal holds, citing:

“A company must preserve records when it learns of pending or imminent litigation, or when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Litigation hold prevents spoliation (destruction, alteration, or mutilation of evidence) which can have a catastrophic impact on the defense… 

…Implementing a litigation hold process can be challenging for storage administrators. All companies must establish a sound retention policy and apply that policy to their storage systems.”

Onit’s Legal Hold solution helps corporate legal departments: 

• Notify custodians of their duty to preserve information in a timely manner
• Automatically assign tasks to the appropriate in-house team member
• Gain real-time access to the status of collection requests
• Minimize company risk and increase defensibly
• Ensures all relevant data is properly collected and preserved. 

Lawsuits happen and though it’s not fun to think about it’s wise for your company to be prepared. Onit’s Legal Hold solution makes it easy to demonstrate that your company has exercised the proper care in preserving and collecting digital evidence.

Legal Service Requests 

Business partner requests for legal services are often tossed into the legal department sporadically by email, text, or informal conversations from various departments. Tracking and assigning these requests can be a major headache if there is no standard process in place.

Onit’s Legal Service Request solution simplifies the intake process by: 

• Giving business partners a simple portal to interact and engage with the legal department
• Providing the legal department with a comprehensive view of all legal service requests
• Automatically generating notifications to keep business partners updated
• Offering clients an easy way to keep track of the status and resolution of their legal service request

As legal technology advances, stay ahead of the curve. Let Onit’s Legal Hold and Legal Service Request solutions help automate your processes and save you time. Click here to schedule a demo and learn more about how Onit can help your legal department.

Swimming in hundreds of contracts but can’t manage to wade through them all? Is your manual contract management method slowing you down? It’s time to simplify your review and approval process with Onit’s ReviewAI & Approval App.

Check out the video below to learn more about how to streamline your contract management process:

Now that Onit’s ReviewAI & Approval App has all of your comments and revisions in one convenient place – what about the documents themselves? Are you still digging through files to locate years old contracts? Take the headache out of contract administration with an App that’s easily accessible at the click of button.

For more about how Onit’s Contract Administration App can help you get organized and put your contracts right at your fingertips – Check out the video below:

To learn more about improving your contract management and contract review processes, download our white paper – “Simple Contract Management: Apps That Improve Efficiency, Reduce Cycle Times and Help Legal Departments Run Like a Business” or schedule a demo.

Preparing Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) for the SaaS model

Over the last two decades, the software industry has rapidly evolved. Vendors across all industries have come to see the benefit of the Software as a Service (Saas) model, drastically changing the way individuals and companies interact with software.

A high level of end user support has become integral to almost every serious enterprise software solution, and user interfaces and UX design have received the serious attention they deserved. People have become accustomed to certain design philosophies that support usability and efficiency.

The same can’t be said for the majority of enterprise legal management vendors, though. Regardless, it is inevitable that the database-centric philosophy of ELM will be supplanted by intuitive, user-centric solutions that have already become the norm in many other business areas.

Indicators of the Future

Cloud-based solutions are coming to increasing dominate various marketplaces, but SaaS means more than the just taking an existing enterprise App and porting it to a cloud-based platform. Salesforce has revolutionized the CRM by thinking about CRM in a far different way than Siebel systems and others did. Companies such as Box and Dropbox provide convenient storage and sharing capabilities, making collaboration within organizations easier than ever believed possible. Amazon’s cloud web service provides on-demand content distribution with incredible scalability at a price point that was completely impossible a few decades ago.

And how did these companies do this? One common theme is that they abandoned the concept that the server, data, or document lies at the center of the process. They replaced them with the user.

Challengers Appear

In the ELM space, the challenge to the database-centric status quo comes in the form of enterprise solutions that, instead of boasting long feature lists and long implementation times, are simple to configure, easy to deploy, and address complex everyday problems.

Where the old market wants to “serve the data,” these new solutions learn from other new success stories in the enterprise software market and instead strive to make it easier for lawyers and other law department to successfully support business staff and get their work done.

Functionality, adaptability and adoptability supplant endless lists of out-of-touch features. Simple accessibility is made obsolete by tools that allow users to collaborate simply, easily and as part of their normal work streams.

Enterprise Apps can be built to serve both large and small companies, while the older ELM solutions are simply too complex and costly for law departments of all sizes — large and small. For this same reason, deployments can also be executed very quickly — typically in weeks (instead of up to or more than a year as is required of many traditional ELM systems).

A Different Architectural Philosophy

The biggest differences between traditional ELM systems reflect greater generational changes in how the discipline has evolved, as explored in the previous post. Some nice side effects of that are compatibility, labor savings, customizability, and quick deployment.

Compatibility

Many modern ELM solutions (such as those from Onit) are designed to be able to work alongside and together with systems that are already in place, allowing legal departments to both supplement the capabilities of what they have or to ease their transition to a more modern system.

Minimal IT Involvement

While traditional ELM systems require constant IT maintenance and attention, modern ELM solutions are lean and nimble and tend to work in a more straightforward manner. In many cases, users can configure, deploy, and support Onit solutions with no corporate IT involvement. This is because they are designed and built in an intuitive, “no code” environment that can be learned without even the need for a training session.

A Solution for Every Workflow

Solutions for standard processes like contract review and approval, NDAs, alternative fee arrangements, and matter or legal spend management are offered prebuilt. For more esoteric needs particular to a business, solutions can be created from scratch with minimal delay in deployment.

Drive Operational Improvements Easily

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 to implement an Onit solution is less than 20 days. While the most complex implementations can take up to 90 days, this still beats the average for ELM systems by months.

Learn more about what Onit brings to Enterprise Legal Management in our free white paper “A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management.”