Year: 2021

3 Common Legal Billing Headaches and How to Avoid Them

Posted on March 23, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Aspirin can’t fix these, but data can!

It’s no secret that legal bills are notoriously opaque and hard to understand. They can be incredibly frustrating, often subjecting in-house teams to countless hours of interpretation as they seek to clarify everything from inaccurate tagging to misapplied or missing discounts.

Here are the three most common legal billing headaches and tips for how to avoid them:

1. Inconsistent Discount Application

When it comes to invoicing, law firms don’t make it easy to understand if you’re actually paying the rates you agreed to during rate card negotiation. Discounts are often at the heart of the issue. Frequently applied inconsistently, discounts can make it a real challenge to identify the difference between gross rates versus net rates versus write-offs. 

While one firm might apply line item discounts, another might apply a bulk discount to the entire invoice. Clients are often left in the dark in terms of understanding when – or even why – these discounts are applied. Compound that with the fact that most in-house teams don’t have a real-time view into their actual rates with each firm – so forget visibility on the agreed discounts by practice area for each firm! 

Pro Tip: Require street rates, relationship discounts, practice area discounts, and write-offs to be broken out in each line item. This will prevent inconsistencies and the fuzzy math that might make a partner at a cheaper firm more expensive due to discounts being applied at the invoice level. Additionally, line item discounts will help you clarify your effective rates by allowing you to calculate the impact on a more granular basis, say by practice area or timekeeper level. 

Example:

While Hamlin Hamlin & McGill and Matlock & Matlock have the same rates documented in their rate cards, only Matlock & Matlock incorporates line item discounts into their invoices. Because Matlock & Matlock includes line item discounts on their invoices, you can easily tell that they are effectively cheaper. This allows us to more easily calculate the effective rate and show that on a per-hour basis, they are much less expensive.

2. Unstructured Data & Inaccurate Tagging 

Taxonomy, or how things are organized into categories and hierarchies (or in this case, not organized!), is foundational to any kind of data analysis. For example, whether a cardiologist conducts a heart catheterization in Phoenix or Seattle, it’s coded and organized the same way for any insurance carrier. 

Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted taxonomy for legal matters, and legal departments and firms can vary widely in how they organize matters. This concept is often referred to as “garbage in, garbage out”.

This is often the reason for the huge discrepancies between rates from firm to firm in what appears in legal spend reporting to be the same practice area. Aside from being just plain confusing, the resulting communication gap has created a systemic issue that makes it very difficult to confidently compare one firm to another — even when the data is telling you that the matters are similar. 

Pro Tip: Create a framework that accommodates the majority of your legal matters. Make it simple and try to apply it to every invoice you receive. A standardized matter taxonomy, coupled with accurate tagging, enables the critical apples-to-apples comparisons you need to confidently analyze everything from your rates to staffing. Plus, this will lay the groundwork you need to prove how valuable the data can be in everything from rate negotiation to invoice review automation. 

3. Missing Data & Absent Tagging

Another consequence of not having a standard taxonomy is how easily things can be missed. For example, let’s say you want to find out the effective rate by firm for all of your complex litigation matters from last year. If all your matters aren’t tagged properly as complex litigation, you might end up with effective rates much higher or lower than you actually paid. 

That kind of error can lead to pretty big consequences when it comes to setting a benchmark for rate negotiation. An inflated rate due to missing data might trick you into normalizing a rate increase. 

Missing data keeps corporate legal departments from formulating meaningful quantitative conclusions ultimately leading to uninformed decisions that can be detrimental. 

Pro Tip: Bodhala can help corporate legal departments define and collect this information and apply such criteria to historical bills to build a standard taxonomy. Equipped with this information, in-house teams can measure the variance across practice areas to determine the complexity of the matter as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the timekeepers.

Savvy in-house teams are demanding more transparency in an effort to eliminate these billing headaches and break through the status quo. 

But do you have the data needed to lead this charge?

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Get in touch with our team of legal billing and data experts to find out how Bodhala can transform your legal department.

An AI Checklist for All Stages of Contract Lifecycle Management

Posted on March 18, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Since contracts are the primary source of risk and obligations that corporate legal teams need to manage, all stages of contract lifecycle management should be managed properly. Failure to do so can lead to complications such as failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, regulatory breaches, inadequate delivery to customers, time lost, revenue leakage and inflated costs.

Many legal departments are struggling to find effective solutions for handling contracts for all stages of contract lifecycle management, with 71% of in-house lawyers reporting that they are stuck doing manual work which should be automated. Another 86% say that they need to modernize the way they deliver legal services. The industry is seeing legal departments making moves to adopt comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions to standardize processes and obtain a single source of truth for all their contracts.

However, not all CLM technologies are created equal. Many require time-consuming manual entry and maintenance, putting further burden on already stretched teams. AI-powered CLM systems abstract away much of this manual work, giving corporate legal departments the ability to control their contracts from start to finish and free up lawyers to focus on higher-level tasks that will help grow the business.

But what exactly should the combination of AI and CLM look like? It should intelligently augment, assist and automate manual activities throughout the entire contract lifecycle, improve consistency, save time and surface insights that allow the legal team to become much more proactive.

As legal teams incorporate this new technology, there are several functions they should expect when it comes to pre-signature contract management and post-signature contract management.

AI for the Pre-Signature Contract Management Stage

Pre-Trained

AI contract management solutions should come pre-trained, meaning you aren’t doing the “heavy-lifting” on the implementation side. To learn a task, AI often needs large data sets to analyze, which is a highly specialized and technical process. Modern legal AI providers should handle this training, giving lawyers out-of-the-box functionality to use it within days – not weeks or months.

The real value of AI is that it is always learning and improving. Pre-training will have it ready to use quickly, giving you a faster return on your investment. As you use it more, it should identify and enforce preferences unique to your corporate legal department. This pre-learning also gives the legal team the space needed to improve the overall CLM process.

First-Pass Review

For the pre-signature contract management stage, AI should function as a human lawyer for the first-pass review. It should scour Microsoft Word or PDF contracts like NDAs, MSAs and purchase agreements, flag key contract issues, apply contract review templates, suggest edits and provide an overall risk profile.

The AI should also work where your people work, ensuring that the intelligence you’ve invested in slots into your existing processes, be it from email, Microsoft Word, Web portals or third-party systems. This ultimately maximizes the benefits and impact of AI.

Self-Service

AI should also enable self-service for non-legal business professionals during this stage. For example, business users should get an AI-assisted contract review in minutes through email or a self-service portal. The AI runs the contracts by the company’s playbook, helping to enforce corporate standards.

AI for the Post-Signature Contract Management Stage

The contract process doesn’t end once you’ve signed. Contracts offer a wealth of usable data that you can, and indeed should, harness to save time, reduce risk and make more informed business decisions. Proper management of contracts in this stage also ensures that the terms of the agreement are fulfilled and helps to assess if the company is meeting expected business results. For most teams, this work is currently done manually or not done at all.

When added to contract lifecycle management after execution, AI dramatically increases the efficiency and scope of data extraction. It quickly and securely extracts valuable, high-quality data from all the contracts in your CLM system and turns it into actionable information in several ways, including:

  • Batch review, by extracting data from multiple legal documents at once
  • Repapering, by amending or redlining contract details and critical terms to comply with regulatory changes or M&A activities
  • Contract abstraction, by identifying critical legal clauses, terms and details in documents for easy analysis and syncing with your CLM.
  • Audit compliance by automating large-scale legal contract review when regulatory changes occur and exporting relevant details in notes and reports
  • Due diligence through the automation of batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, freeing up resources
  • Legacy contract migration by rapidly analyzing and extracting legacy contract metadata, including critical dates, terms, and clauses, to assist in importing

AI tools empower you to simplify contract data extraction and get your hands on the valuable intelligence you need to make the best-informed decisions for your company.

How quickly does it accomplish this?

Imagine the highly manual process of data extraction from contracts. Now, imagine AI technology that can review thousands of contracts at once, view hundreds of contract data points and export relevant data in seconds.

The Benefits of Contract AI

Using AI in all stages of contract lifecycle management provides sizeable benefits. For example, legal professionals reported in this study that AI increased productivity by more than 51.5% and led to cost reductions of 33% related to contract processing. During the post-signature contract management stage, you should be looking to reduce manual entry in CLM by upwards of 80%.

The legal profession is continually evolving, getting faster and more complex as demand increases and resources decrease. AI can help you meet those demands without adding resources – especially when it comes to contract lifecycle management.

The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo

If you’d like to learn more about AI for CLM, access the replay of “The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo.” Legal operations executives from Lenovo shared their strategy for a global rollout of contract lifecycle management technology and why artificial intelligence is considered a key part of the services delivery model of the future.

Onit Joins the 2021 Forbes List of America’s Best Startup Employers

Posted on March 17, 2021 by - Company News and Events

We are excited to announce that Onit ranked #160 on the second-annual Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers. Forbes evaluated more than 2,500 companies before paring the list down to 500 total.

Being included is a rewarding recognition of our company’s commitment to creating an engaging work experience for its employees. Our commitment to employees played a sizable role in getting us on the list. At Onit, success is about more than just financial health.  When faced with the “new normal” forced by the pandemic, we kept employees’ well-being front and center with honest communications, fun virtual events, gift cards, care packages and additional time off to ensure mental and physical health.

According to our CEO and co-founder Eric M. Elfman, “The pandemic presented multiple challenges that led us to reevaluate how we do business. But no matter what, we prioritized our employees, protected jobs and continued to hire. We hired more employees in 2020 than in 2019, and we will hire even more this year as we continue to grow.”

About the 2021 Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers Awards

The Forbes award, researched with partner Statista and based on over 7 million data points in relation to 2,5000 companies, recognizes companies based on three criteria:

  • Employer reputation – Statista reviewed articles, blogs and social media posts to get a sense of the corporate culture diversity and employee engagement at each company considered for the rankings.
  • Employee satisfaction – Statista also looked at online reviews and other evidence of company growth, including website traffic and headcount over two years.
  • Location and age – Companies had to be headquartered in the U.S., have at least 50 employees and be founded between 2011 and 2018.

Additional Onit Awards

The Forbes recognition is just the latest in a series of honors and rewards for Onit. Awards in 2020 included:

  • The Houston Chronicle Top Workplaces named Onit as #30 on the list and gave the company the program’s only Communications Award.
  • The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ranked Onit as #190.
  • Growjo listed Onit as #52 for growth in the technology services category, #20 for Texas and #648 on its overall Growjo 10K.
  • Magazine and the Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families included Onit on their Vet100, a list of the 100 fastest-growing veteran-owned businesses.
  • The Houston Business Journal ranked Onit #9 on its Fast 100 and #3 on the inaugural Middle Market 50.

The press release about the 2021 Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers is listed here.

Visit the Forbes website to see a complete list of winners.

Interested in a Career at Onit?

Apply to join Onit! You can see current openings on our Onit Careers page. We believe in transparency with our candidates from the start here at Onit, so we encourage you to check out Glassdoor and LinkedIn to find more information about us.

If you’d like to hear more about Onit’s culture, tune in to this podcast episode featuring Angela Mulligan, director of organizational health, Carlos De Leon, senior recruiter and Nash Gates, our Onit podcast host and demand generation manager.

How to Prepare Your Team for an Enterprise Legal Management Software Implementation

Posted on March 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

An enterprise legal management software implementation brings all-new operational efficiency levels to corporate legal departments. By combining e-billing, legal spend management, matter management and legal service request intake into a single, streamlined platform, corporate legal departments can gain visibility into legal operations, cut costs and automate manual processes. In fact, some estimate that enterprise legal management (ELM) helps save up to 10% on outside counsel spend.

While it’s critical to focus on the technologies and processes involved in the implementation, often the people component lacks the same level of attention and planning. We asked ELM implementation experts from Onit about best practices to manage the people side of implementation and here are the four actions they recommend.

1.   Get the right hands on deck for your enterprise legal management implementation.

To start, you want to establish internal governance over your ELM implementation. You should determine crucial involvement from the beginning, such as who will have a vote on decisions, who will have input into decisions, who will be involved in reviewing implementation progress and how often, and more.

At many corporate legal departments, this involves creating an internal steering committee responsible for overseeing the implementation and an internal project sponsor who is usually the business unit leader who’s receiving the implementation. You might also involve the PMO and someone from finance who can monitor whether you’re getting what you expect out of your investment. The software provider should also provide a steering committee on their side, but your essential players should still be involved in your internal governance.

Because you’re likely making a pretty significant investment in your ELM solution, you’ll want to establish a consistent cadence for reviewing the implementation progress. For example, set a weekly or monthly schedule for monitoring whether you’re on track to hit milestones and whether progress is dependent on anything else within your organization that needs to be addressed.

2.    Get your internal business partners on board.

Implementation will look different for every legal department depending on who is spearheading the effort. If your legal team is contracting with a provider, have you lined up the support of IT or other departments in your company? Many departments try to move forward without any internal consultation. Because implementing ELM will require integrations with other systems and migration of data from your old system, you’ll need to get all your internal partners on board and determine what agreements and resources need to be set up before your implementation.

You’ll also want to assess the impact of your implementation on the rest of the business. Who do you need to inform? Will you need to notify an internal change in the control board that your company’s data will be hosted in another system? Will your internal audit team or information security need to check project documents before going live?

To get the engagement you need, you should start working within your internal channels as early in the process as possible. That groundwork needs to be paved by your team before implementation starts.

3.    Get your users ready and excited for the enterprise legal management software implementation.

As with any change, it’s important to prepare your users. The more you can get buy-in across the organization, the more successful the implementation will be.

Determine who needs to know when the solution is going live and how you’re going to tell them. Getting them excited about the change will be easier if you can proactively address any concerns they might have about new processes or systems. Whether it’s a company-wide email, a newsletter, a town hall meeting, or something else, you want to generate buzz about your new enterprise legal management software implementation.

Also critical to overall implementation success is a well-defined user training program. The proper training will allow end-users to be comfortable with both the system and your change management efforts. The means they feel empowered and confident to complete their daily tasks with minimal interruption after the ELM system becomes part of their workflows. You can tailor the training program to be as formal or casual as you need. There are endless options to deliver the right information in the right way for your end-users.

4.   Help your ELM provider deliver the system you need.

Preparation and testing are key components that your department can provide to help your ELM provider deliver the best implementation possible. Invest some time analyzing your department’s current state before implementation kicks off, documenting your processes end to end. Process maps and use cases are valuable for requirements and design and can save a lot of time and minimize distraction during the ELM design phase.

After all, you know your business better than anyone. As you work with your provider to design your system, think about how you’ll test the system via User Acceptance Testing before it goes live.

If you take the proper steps in advance, you can make sure you’ll get the best enterprise legal management software implementation for your corporate legal department and the business units that work with you.

Contact Onit today to learn more about how Onit offerings can help you provide better service to your business while improving operational efficiency.

How Contract Automation Tools with Legal AI Reduce Processing Time by 60-70%

Posted on March 10, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

By some estimates, contract processing time can take up to 70% or more of an in-house counsel’s work hours. The often manual and collaborative process – if not properly managed – can lead to complications such as failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, regulatory breaches, inadequate delivery to customers, revenue leakage and more if not properly managed.

That’s where Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) comes in. Contract automation tools with legal AI can streamline all phases of the contract lifecycle from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management, often resulting in an average of 9% average cost savings and reducing the average sales cycle by 24%. It also offers a single source of truth for all contracts, whether buy-side, sell-side or corporate contracts.

Now, Onit is pleased to announce that contract processing times are shrinking even more, thanks to our enhanced integration between Contract Lifecycle Management and ReviewAI, which uses legal AI on legal contracts to review and redline documents in two minutes or less. The integration combines the power of contract automation and AI-based contract management into one tool that accelerates contracts at management phases. Plus, it ensures that corporate legal departments have everything in one CLM workflow.

Legal AI for Contract Automation and Lifecycle Management

With the newly enhanced, seamless integration, business users can submit contracts to corporate legal via an online intake form. ReviewAI handles the first-pass review, noting recommendations and offering a contract risk assessment – freeing corporate counsel from a highly manual process. In fact, when paired with Onit Contract Lifecycle Management, legal AI from Review AI increases productivity by 50% or more.

Onit’s Ongoing Commitment to AI

The robust integration of Onit CLM and ReviewAI is one of many AI product innovations. In November, we launched our AI Center of Excellence, the AI-powered business intelligence platform Precedent and ReviewAI. In May, we’ll release InvoiceAI, an AI-assisted invoice review for legal spend and enterprise legal management. Between now and then, you can also expect more AI and product announcements.

Reduce Contract Processing Time Now. Here’s How.

Deploy contract automation tools and leverage the power of legal AI to improve your contract lifecycle management. Free up legal counsel from a manual, time-intensive legal contract management process. Find out how you can use automated contract analysis tools and risk assessments with legal AI contract automation tools.

To learn more about contract lifecycle management, ReviewAI and Precedent, reach out to your account manager or schedule a demonstration here.

 

Platforms for Corporate Legal Departments: What They Are and How They Expand Influence

Posted on March 9, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Platforms for corporate legal departments have proven critical to digital transformation in the past year, as companies have worked hard to figure out how to meet the uncertainties and challenges stemming from the pandemic.

The right platforms will empower your corporate legal department to better manage the day-to-day aspects of any legal matter while also gaining better insight into operations and improving collaboration by offering real-time visibility into tasks and processes. Making the switch to a platform approach starts with understanding:

  1. What is a platform?
  2. How can platform technologies benefit a legal department?

What is a Platform?

At its core, a platform is an environment in which other pieces of software function and are executed. The term “platform,” however, is both overused and underrepresented by technology providers. In a market saturated with many different types of technology products, people all too often use terms like platform and solution interchangeably, even though they function very differently and serve different purposes.

Here’s the difference:

With the right platform, a corporate legal department can build any solution it needs for either internal use or cross-collaboration with other departments in the organization. Platforms allow you to take advantage of preexisting solutions that have already been built on the platform or build additional solutions as new needs arise.

For legal departments, platforms serve as the foundation for enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management solutions, intake forms and self-help portals, among other things. Basically, a platform is the best of both worlds in the solutions vs. platforms discussion.

Some platforms incorporate artificial intelligence for corporate legal departments. AI platforms help automate routine tasks and boost efficiency. In other words, they help legal departments meet the constantly mounting pressure to do more and do better with fewer resources and a shrinking budget.

How Platform for Corporate Legal Departments Enhance Efficiency and Collaboration

Adopting a platform approach to technology offers a wide range of benefits for today’s corporate legal departments. Some of the biggest include:

  • Limitless building opportunities – Platforms give you the greatest possible ability to support your department’s vision by building solutions to address nearly any need, from accounting to compliance to HR concerns and more.
  • Unlimited scalability – Platforms allow you to right-size your technology as needed because they can grow along with your company and adapt to meet whatever changes arise.
  • Customization – When you build solutions on a platform, you can customize them to work exactly how your corporate legal department needs them to work and continually adjust those customizations over time.
  • Flexibility – Legal departments learned the value of innovation this past year, and platforms offer the flexibility required to keep innovating in the future as needs continue to change.

Better yet, you get all these platform benefits regardless of your level of technical proficiency. While platforms were once the exclusive province of IT experts who knew how to code, things have evolved significantly with the rise of no-code platforms. Today, even those with little or no technical training can master platforms and use them to create new solutions. These no-code platforms allow corporate legal departments to engage in levels of technological self-service that were previously unheard of.

For further reading on how platforms benefit corporate legal departments, you can download The Power of a Platform: Building Corporate Legal Influence Across the Enterprise.

Onit’s Apptitude and Precedent platforms have helped countless businesses enhance efficiency with automation and AI. Contact us today to learn more about how a platform approach can benefit your corporate legal department.

Will AI Replace Lawyers & Other Myths: Legal AI Mythbusters

Posted on March 5, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

AI is a hot buzzword right now, but with buzz always comes a whole host of misconceptions about a technology’s capabilities. There’s considerable confusion about what artificial intelligence can do and widespread misinformation about how it works, particularly in the area of managing legal contracts and if AI will replace lawyers.

Onit recently hosted a webinar to debunk these common myths. Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, and Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, dispelled common misconceptions about everything from will AI replace lawyers to who can benefit from AI.

The goal is to help legal professionals decipher marketing-speak to determine what’s genuinely AI and what’s just software.

Here’s an overview of some of the common legal AI myths Nick and Jean debunked.

Myth 1: Will AI replace lawyers? No.

Lawyers being replaced by AI is the classic fear and, fortunately, it’s unfounded. Rather than replacing lawyers, AI will automate certain aspects of lawyers’ jobs, typically the most routine ones. As a result, lawyers will have more time to focus on other tasks and accomplishments. This means that lawyers’ jobs will continue to evolve and change as more AI capabilities are introduced, but those jobs will never be eliminated.

That’s not to say that lawyers should ignore legal AI. Yes, AI won’t replace them. However, lawyers using legal AI will replace those that don’t, thanks to increased productivity and efficiency provided by the transformative technology.

Myth 2: Is AI hard to implement? No.

AI learns, but to accomplish that it needs training. Typically, that is a monumental task that requires large pools of data, time and specialized technical skills.

The industry has matured now. Much of that work is done in advance by the vendor, meaning the technology is largely ready to implement and use right out of the box. For example, this AI for contract review comes loaded with a library of legal knowledge and can be up and running in a matter of days.

Myth 3: AI and machine learning can be used interchangeably. No.

Many people use the terms AI and machine learning interchangeably, but that’s not entirely accurate. AI is a technology that enables computers to learn and mimic human intelligence and it covers a wide range of techniques. Among those techniques are machine learning, natural language processing and more. The terms are used interchangeably, even though that’s incorrect, because machine learning is one of the AI techniques that we encounter most often in our day-to-day lives. Machine learning is integral to AI tools that make automated legal contract review possible.

Myth 4: AI is only for large legal departments. Not True.

While there may have been some barriers to entry in the early days of AI, we’re now at a point where AI solutions can be affordable for everyone – especially if your AI provider offers solutions capable of scaling to meet your needs for the size of your organization. The right AI solution will work just as well for the smallest legal department as it will for the largest global corporation.

Myth 5: AI will require too much training. No, AI will create less work, not more.

Many people worry that implementing AI will create more work for their department because they’ll frequently have to fix the technology or invest too much time learning how to use it.

Thankfully, we haven’t seen those fears play out.

Studies show that, on average, users are 51% more productive when they use AI for contract review. The more experienced they become with AI, the more their productivity improves. Additionally, as AI has become more mainstream, AI solutions require far less training, need far fewer corrections, and are much easier to use without extensive training.

But Wait – There are More Legal AI Myths to Expose

These are just some of the AI misunderstandings we dispel in the webinar. Our panel also talks about crucial issues like data security, retaining control over reviews and negotiations, why pre-built AI solutions are less effective, and why every team can benefit from AI. You can listen to the entire webinar here.

Free Yourself from Legal Invoice Review with InvoiceAI

Posted on March 3, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

What’s the best part of the day for in-house counsel? Probably not legal invoice review.

While it’s often necessary to ensure adherence to outside counsel billing guidelines, it still consumes valuable time on highly manual work.

That’s why we are introducing InvoiceAI to our enterprise legal management – to free in-house lawyers from the manual labor of tedious legal invoice review.

Onit announced this next significant phase of innovation at Legalweek(year) with our first InvoiceAI video. Launching in May for both Onit and SimpleLegal, InvoiceAI harnesses AI’s power to increase the efficiency of the invoice review process. It handles the first-pass review of incoming bills and sets up a framework that will continuously learn as invoice corrections are refined in the system. The result: General counsel and in-house counsel can transfer rediscovered bandwidth and energy to higher-value work for their companies.

This second InvoiceAI video shares more about the InvoiceAI.

To learn more about InvoiceAI from Onit and how AI can streamline your legal invoice review, contact your Onit account manager today or email [email protected].

Legal Invoice AI Joins Our Contract AI

AI-enabled invoice review from InvoiceAI modernizes the legal operations function and automates the review of law firm billing for corporations. It perfectly illustrates our founding principle: To help lawyers more effectively practice law.

When InvoiceAI launches in May, it will join an impressive roster of AI solutions already on offer from Onit, including:

  • Precedent, Onit’s AI-powered business intelligence platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals and procurement teams.
  • ReviewAI, contract AI for pre-signature contract review that reviews, redlines and edits all types of contracts in minutes, increasing contract review speed by 60-70%.
  • ExtractAI, contract AI for post-signature contract management that extracts usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

You can schedule a demonstration of any of Onit’s AI solutions here.

A Legal AI Refresher

The field of AI is continually evolving, and it’s essential for today’s legal professionals to stay ahead of the curve. If you’re looking to bone up on AI, here are some great places to start:

Remember: AI won’t replace lawyers. But lawyers using AI will replace those that don’t.

Thanks for your time and stay tuned to our blog. We’ll have more InvoiceAI and contract AI announcements coming soon.

Six Features of the Best Matter Management Software

Posted on February 25, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

Matter management software puts critical matter, financial and performance data at the fingertips of corporate counsel and legal operations. But what features should a corporate legal department prioritize to gain the best return on investment? In the first blog post on this series, we explored essential legal spend management technology features for enterprise legal management. Now, we follow up with an exploration of the critical components of matter management.

According to Deloitte’s 2020 Legal Operations Survey, 74% of the corporate legal professionals surveyed felt they did not have clear or accurate metrics on work performed internally or externally. Additionally, 71% said that manual tasks take up a “significant amount” of their teams’ time.

Yet, technology – specifically matter management software – is designed to address challenges such as these.

Catherine Moynihan, associate vice president of legal management services with the Association of Corporate Counsel, told Legaltech News that GCs have seen growing interest from corporate leadership for technology investments. As she explains:

“While budget restraints have constrained the implementation of technology, I think we’re now approaching a tipping point where it’s budget challenges that will help make the case to make that short-term investment because the ROI is there.”

Fortunately, there are advanced enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions available, including matter management tools specifically designed to address issues such as the ones mentioned above.

What to Look For in Matter Management Software

From a high-level perspective, corporate legal departments need data that can show how their internal or external resources are leveraged. This is where matter management technology comes in. With this technology, corporate legal departments gain visibility into an overall matter portfolio and real-time data and dashboards to monitor and track all matters throughout their lifecycle. Legal team members should have immediate access to critical matter metrics, including performance data, through simple information collection, management and workflow.

Here are six features you should look for in a matter management solution:

  1. Custom Intake and Matter Forms

Most businesses require some custom forms for matter management, including custom intake and data forms for multiple matter types such as litigation, employment, intellectual property and claims.

  1. Flexible Workflow

Organization is mandatory, especially when dealing with matters that can substantially impact a business. Corporate legal professionals need configurable workflows relative to the matter type, dollar amount or specific business rules. No-code workflow and business process automation platforms powering ELM, matter management and legal spend management tools enable legal professionals of all technical proficiencies to create, automate and edit necessary workflows easily. To learn more about a platform approach, view this CLOC presentation by Colgate-Palmolive and Baker & McKenzie.

  1. Data Management and Robust Search

One of the necessary conveniences of matter management is that you can easily find the data you need at all times. A solution with full-text search capabilities for all information—including documents, transaction details, emails and notes – makes that happen. This benefit is further enhanced by searching capabilities that put critical matter information, including tasks, documents and notes, in front of you in a click.

  1. Outlook Integration

Those who proclaimed the death of email need to retract their statements. In 2020, more than 306 billion emails were sent and received. Email remains a critical component of communications and information exchange for businesses and many companies use Microsoft Outlook. If Outlook isn’t syncing with a matter management solution, a corporate legal team will ultimately face more manual processes and the potential for inaccurate or missing data.

  1. Email Notifications

To easily share information with corporate legal team members involved with matters, matter management technology should provide automated notifications that replace manual processes. This includes matter-unique emails within the system that keep team members up-to-date on matters.

  1. Reporting and Analytics

As mentioned above, metrics and analytics help legal professionals better understand their matters’ statuses, finances and performance. A matter management solution should have the ability to create dashboards to manage matters by type, location or geography as an essential part of reporting and analytics.

For more enterprise legal management and matter management inspiration, we invite you to check out the following resources:

  • Learn more about InvoiceAI, an AI-enabled legal invoice review offering for enterprise legal management.
  • Access this webinar replay for “Legal Operations Reporting Done Right,” where the global healthcare company Viatris (formerly Mylan) discusses its approach to identifying and collecting the right data and creating reports that are meaningful to different audiences across the organization.
  • Hear how McDonald’s formulated a cohesive, long-term strategy to achieve the right balance of people, process and technology here.

Five Legal Tech Trends That Will Emerge From the Pandemic

Posted on February 23, 2021 by - Enterprise Legal Management

The COVID era has been exceedingly difficult and distressing for people worldwide. We needed to quickly adapt to a new way of living and working that has mostly deprived us of the comfort and familiarity we took for granted. Almost overnight, we had a “new normal” thrust upon us, and we had no choice but to embrace it to save lives.

Our way of life has never been such a rapid global shift. One of the most striking changes has been in how we work. Long commutes and distracting office work are now distant memories. We are now a remote-first workforce. Research has shown that we quite like our new working arrangement, with more than half of workers saying they want to continue working from home after the pandemic has eventually eased.

COVID-19 has not only led to people working from home, but it has also led to them working at different times and in different locations. With schools and support provisions shut, many people needed help to juggle work and home-schooling, caring for family members, volunteering, or other commitments. This led to an unavoidable rearranging of the working day, starting earlier or working in the evenings and weekends to keep up. But with this flexibility came an advantage to work to patterns that maximize individuals’ productivity, rather than being forced to work traditional business hours. When not in lockdown, workers are also choosing to work elsewhere. Between lockdowns, we have had colleagues working remotely from Cornwall, Poland, and Dubai. This all means much of the workforce is working on a different time, different place basis.

This new work-from-home revolution will have enormous impacts on many industries, but what does it mean for legal, and more specifically, how will technology play a role? We are not clairvoyant, but here are five legal tech trends we think we will see over the coming months and years because of the pandemic.

1) ASYNCHRONOUS WORKING

Lawyers must embrace asynchronous collaboration and communication tools to facilitate productive working across teams. While many lawyers have quickly adopted synchronous tools to support remote working in lockdown (e.g., video calls and instant messaging), many have not yet adopted asynchronous platforms for genuine project management. We will see more lawyers experimenting with team collaboration tools like Confluence or Notion and project management tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, and Monday. We may even see lawyers adopting Agile ceremonies like sprint planning and daily stand-ups.

This trend will also accelerate the creation of next-generation matter management tools, evolving from systems of record to full systems of engagement and collaboration. It will not just be productivity tools; there will also be a rise in the use of asynchronous learning platforms to ensure remote workers have access to learning and development at a time that best suits their working pattern.

2) KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, SHARING AND ACCESS

Quick and timely access to legal know-how is critical to a remote team’s mutual knowledge and everyone’s performance. Remote workers can no longer walk across the office to ask a colleague for help and guidance. Calls and instant messaging do not necessarily help since people are already fighting digital distractions and may not be online when guidance is required. Asynchronous collaboration tools help by enabling know-how to be captured and shared – but we will see greater adoption of knowledge management solutions that allow team members to easily access knowledge whenever and wherever they are.

This is where we see AI tools developed to simplify knowledge discovery, connect, and structure know-how from different sources, keep knowledge up-to-date, and deliver it in context within workflows. Search functionality (not always seen as that exciting) will also become one of the most important tools in a remote worker’s arsenal. For this reason, we will also see the growth of solutions that help to centralize data to streamline and optimize the search experience. However, while the search returns results, it only sometimes delivers specific answers. We are also likely to see the maturing and broader adoption of chatbots and decision automation tools that help provide direct answers alongside the underlying sources.

3) LEGAL GIG ECONOMY

Flexible resourcing isn’t necessarily new in legal – LOD (Lawyers on Demand), Axiom, Peerpoint, and Vario have been doing it for some time. However, large numbers of employees “going remote” during the pandemic have given organizations a better idea of what a remote workforce can achieve.

Surveys have consistently shown employee productivity is high during the pandemic. Organizations are therefore accelerating their move towards a leaner operating model, bringing in temporary, freelance resources for specific legal tasks or projects as and when needed. This delivers a much more cost-efficient approach and enables businesses to tap into a dispersed talent pool. While demand will grow, so will supply as lawyers and paralegals look to capitalize on the flexibility of remote working to build portfolio careers or find a better work-life balance.

We will see significant growth in online flexible resourcing platforms that help connect organizations to an army of remote lawyers and paralegals looking to take advantage of the new normal. These platforms will either be “catch-all” – covering all legal resources – or niche, focusing on connecting businesses with legal experts in particular fields.

4) EMPLOYEE MONITORING TO SUPPORT LEGAL OPERATIONS

One benefit of office work is that managers can see what their teams are doing, how they are working, and whether team members are struggling. This is more difficult when managing remote teams. Therefore, organizations need to find ways to measure employees’ productivity and working patterns and highlight any potential issues.

However, it is about ensuring performance meets standards and providing employee well-being. “Technostress” has been highlighted as a significant problem for many people working remotely, and managers must look for the warning signs. They will also need to ensure they are still identifying training and support needs and calling out inappropriate behavior (bullying, discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.), which can increase in remote environments.

While many lawyers are familiar with recording and accounting for their time, not having to do this is one of the main reasons they enjoy working in-house over private practice! Nevertheless, we expect to see more law firms and corporate legal teams invest in digital, online employee-monitoring systems to help maintain productivity, ensure well-being, and increase transparency, essential metrics for effective legal operations. We may also see existing legal tech platforms add employee-monitoring tools as an option so that employers can track team behavior, e.g., tracking active/inactive status, monitoring page activity within the tool, etc. One way to avoid replicating law firm time recording or overly authoritarian monitoring is to track behavior for limited periods at intervals rather than an “always-on” approach.

We may also see a different kind of monitoring, one focused less on the output and more on outcomes. As teams shift to project management software, they will likely begin to track performance against OKRs and KPIs. This is a good way of ensuring performance without being too overbearing. Ultimately, we’ll see organizations and teams adopt a mixture of tools to help them maintain performance and deliver desired outcomes when working remotely.

5) FROM LEGAL PLATFORM TO ENTERPRISE INTEROPERABILITY

The most striking workplace effect of the pandemic is the accelerated and standardized adoption of digital productivity and collaboration tools. While many in-house legal teams and their firms were using video conferencing and instant messaging tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, many were still in the stone age regarding remote collaboration and communication tools. But that all changed when COVID-19 struck. Microsoft Teams saw its active users skyrocket 160% from 44 million in March 2020 to 115 million in November of the same year. Slack and Zoom have seen similar explosions in adoption. These tools have become the common language of remote working.

Legal technology vendors of all sizes will need to re-evaluate their strategy and move away from trying to drive users to their unique platforms and ecosystems. Instead, they will need to find ways to offer value in the systems where users prefer to work. This means a greater focus on plug-ins, integrations, and open APIs. It may even mean deconstructing existing products to embed functionality and extend tools such as Microsoft Teams.

HAS LEGAL TRANSFORMATION FINALLY ARRIVED?

The obvious theme that ties all the above is that technology will be essential to facilitate workers and their organizations transitioning to the new remote, distributed model (both inside and outside the legal domain). Technology is pushing at an open door for once – employees and employers cannot adopt digital productivity, collaboration, and communication tools quickly enough.

We are still in the infancy of the remote working tech revolution, so only time will tell whether the above predictions happen. Whatever happens, COVID-19 has changed the game for remote working. Remote-first will be the trend of the 2020s, and legal technology vendors should be making this a core component of their product and customer success strategies if they do not want to be left behind.

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