Year: 2021

How Digital Transformation and a Contract System Future-Proof Surges in Contract Activity   

Posted on November 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Creating a contract system that handles legal work is challenging, as the ebbs and flows of legal work can be highly unpredictable. Inevitably, you’ll face periods where you see sudden surges of contract activity, whether due to regulatory changes, significant deals or something else. Are you prepared to handle the waves of work when they arise?

Four experts gathered to discuss just this challenge recently during a World Commerce and Contracting event. They included Marcelo Peviani, Senior Director of Global Legal Services at VMware, Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence and Matt DenOuden, Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Onit. Together, they discussed how companies can best prepare for sudden workload surges by planning ahead and implementing a contract system and technologies.

Starting at Base Camp for Your Digital Transformation

When it comes to digital transformation and preparing for work surges, the panel likened the journey to climbing a mountain. You can think of your preparation stage as the base camp for your climb, while a full technology implementation is the summit.

They advised legal professionals to start by building a technology roadmap that considers the value you want the corporate legal department to deliver to the business and where you want to be in a year or two. Regardless of whether or not you have a specific current need or if you see yourself implementing a contract lifecycle management software in the future, it’s critical to start the conversation today.

Too many companies try to implement legal contract AI and other technologies as a reaction to events that happen. Unfortunately, though, this is rarely successful. Implementation takes time and digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. You need time for experimentation and getting your champions on board before you can roll your contract system out across the enterprise. Even if you’re not looking to roll out right away, you want to start setting the posture for an easy transition to automation as soon as possible and start engaging your stakeholders now.

The base camp for your digital journey is where your climb is organized. Your team members should all meet and you should start building a culture of success. When you’re implementing digital transformation from scratch, you need to start by standardizing processes and technology across all your players. Determine your goals and the pain points you want to relieve, and then map out the roles that will be responsible for or involved in getting your company there.

Future-Proofing Surges with a Contract System

In terms of addressing future contract surges, you should consider the types of contracts that are integral to your business and the contract system infrastructure, processes and resources that support and drive that kind of contractual work. Legal departments are increasingly playing a pivotal role in company governance and setting standards for the transactions the company engages in. The planning stage for your digital transformation is your opportunity to translate those standards into playbooks and actual processes that will be implemented across the organization.

Once you know your goals, you can choose the contract system and technologies that will help you meet them. These solutions will play a key role in delivering contract and other legal services to the business, either via self-service or with document automation tools. It’s essential to build that into the company mindset at the outset.

Scale the Peak with Steady Progress

Much like climbing a mountain, digital transformation involves steady progress. You should constantly be evaluating whether what you’re doing is working, if you should continue with your current solutions or if you should recalibrate your contract system to achieve different results. Any technology rollout should involve a process of experimentation. Your first try won’t be perfect, but it’ll set you on the road to creating a better contract system.

That’s why the first implementation is always the hardest. Once you’ve created a culture that’s open to digital change, you can start finding more opportunities to drive value for the business. You’ll also be in a better position to know how to weather the storms on your way up the mountain.

For more valuable insights for handling contract surges and contract systems, as well as making digital transformation a success (including examples from VMware’s own transformation journey), you can listen to the entire webinar here.

If you’d like to learn about how Onit can help your company’s digital transformation, schedule a demonstration of our contract lifecycle management or enterprise legal management today.

5 Ways Smart Legal Ops Teams Use QBRs

Posted on November 18, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Managing outside counsel can sometimes feel like herding cats. There, we said it. Phew. Glad that one’s out in the open.

Maybe you believe one firm is overcharging you on rates, while another is going to town on block billing, and another is staffing partners on tasks a first-year should definitely be doing. You know these things are happening, but do you have hard evidence? Figuring out how to drive meaningful change with your firms can be tough — even simply knowing where to begin is a challenge. 

Smart legal ops teams use, you guessed it, data (!) to manage their outside counsel — and their first stop on the road to crushing department priorities is quarterly business reviews, better known as QBRs. 

QBR meetings give them a platform to discuss performance and rate trends, successes, as well as opportunities for improvement. While it’s of course critical to meet about the meat of your matters, setting aside time to review your business relationship sets you up for success both with your firms, as well as with your internal stakeholders (budget season is coming, amirite?). 

So, what can you expect to get out of a well-prepared QBR? Here are five ways innovative legal ops teams are using their QBRs: 

1. Rate Review

Rate review shouldn’t be a once-a-year task — especially with the sly pricing tricks law firms are known to deploy to rack up their billings. Regular analysis of your law firm’s activity and rates by timekeeper level can ensure that you don’t overpay unnecessarily. 

By surfacing critical data across practice areas and analyzing rates on a quarterly basis, QBRs unearth important trends that can eliminate increases — sometimes even leading to reductions or discounts. QBRs provide the venue to negotiate fair market rates and manage your discounts, regardless of if they’re practice area-specific, volume-related, or otherwise. 

With clear and objective insights under your belt, you can easily open up a data-driven dialogue with your law firms to address any concerns, then start — and win — rate negotiations.

2. Panel Review

Without data on your side, value can be in the eye of the beholder. Consider what you’re paying your firms. Now think about what they’ve done for you in the past year. Are they congruent? Did you truly get what you paid for? How did they stack up against other firms you use in the same practice areas?

We’re guessing you might be feeling a slight wave of regret washing over you. Shake that right off. QBRs are a great fix.

By taking key metrics into account like total outside counsel spend, average hours per matter, and percentage of time block billed, QBRs surface insights on the value your firms deliver and opportunities for value to be maximized. By lining up those metrics against other firms working across the same practice areas — or the same panel — you can begin to see trends that may impact how you allocated work in the future, or even prompt you to change the panel composition.

3. Performance Management 

If you’re like most corporate legal departments we work with, you’re probably paying a partner for something a first-year associate should be doing. We emphasize “probably” because it’s nearly ubiquitous — Bodhala sees this behavior across nearly every firm. We like to call it “partner hoarding”. Some firms are more egregious than others, but it truly impacts your budget when it’s happening on a regular basis. 

With cost-cutting a constant priority for corporate legal departments, QBRs are a great way to easily help correct this problem.

Digging into activity across your practice areas can highlight key metrics, such as average partner hours, average associate hours, and your partner to associate ratio. By clearly highlighting key trends, such as partners logging significant hours on routine work or firms exceeding their associate ratio, you can determine where exactly you need to course-correct and rein in the unnecessary dollars being spent.

4. Reporting to Internal Stakeholders

Many legal departments are feeling the heat from the C-suite to cut costs and run their departments more like a ‘business’. We all know that reporting to internal stakeholders can become a real pain in the…you know what. For many corporate legal departments, reporting capabilities are stuck in the 1990s, leaving them to conduct manual analysis and pore over spreadsheets.

QBRs place all the data that in-house teams need at their fingertips — often in a format that they can pass along to internal stakeholders without any edits or changes. 

Your QBRs should deliver in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations – which can be tough without appropriate software or a robust legal ops team. Setting yourself up with a top-tier legal analytics platform (cough, cough…Bodhala…!) can be the difference between easy-breezy and hours of work. That said, the work is worth the impact and the ability to pass a nice, neat package to the finance department. 

5. Gut-Checking Large Matters

Law firms often claim forecasting a budget for upcoming matters is an impossible feat, citing a lack of precedent or the “unique nature” of every matter. Sure, not every matter is cookie-cutter, but there are absolutely trends. Just like you can dig into historical legal precedent, you can also dig into historical cost precedent. 

A great QBR will drill into top matters from the past quarter and highlight key metrics that you should watch in the future. Even without a sophisticated legal billing analytics engine, keeping a record of such historical analysis can be incredibly helpful in projecting costs — everything from setting expectations around hours and tasks to rates.  

Having this information on hand helps in-house teams gut-check future matters of similar volume and complexity. Not only that, but great QBRs should offer the opportunity to make the appropriate changes needed to rein in extraneous expenses and keep your budget in check, such as revisiting how work is allocated, renegotiating your practice area discount, or updating your outside counsel guidelines to eliminate unreasonable billings. 

Sophisticated Reporting + White Glove Service = Better Business Outcomes

Data-driven conversations are foundational to the success of not only your law firm relationships but your entire legal department. 

QBRs are a great opportunity for in-house teams to get their feet wet in legal data analytics and see how transparency — and even just incremental change – can drastically reduce your legal spend and eliminate budget overages. Transparency itself can often be a major catalyst. Ever notice that when someone knows you’re watching, they start acting differently? QBRs can produce that same effect, known as the Sentinel Effect — let them know big brother is in the building, and they’ll clean up their act. We wrote a whole piece about it — check it out.

If you’re resource-constrained or you don’t have a legal ops team, don’t worry. We got you. You don’t have to be a data scientist for QBRs to transform your legal department — that’s our job :). 

Ready to learn more? Get in touch with our team to discuss our QBR Program and the savings that await!

Introducing A New Source for the Latest Developments in Legal Ops, AI and Ideation

Posted on November 18, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Corporate legal departments and the enterprises they serve are increasingly on a mission to adopt best practices and transform them into smarter workflows, better processes and operational efficiencies.

Legal operations professionals are crucial in creating this digital transformation, something reflected in a recent CLOC survey. It outlined top-ranked priorities for legal operations, including automating legal processes, implementing new technologies and right sourcing legal work.

Over the past several months, experts and pioneers in digital transformation and legal technology have gathered to discuss some of the biggest challenges and opportunities for general counsel, in-house counsel and law departments. Their insight, covering areas such as NDA challenges and constructing world-class legal operations, is now available as podcasts on this LinkedIn page.

Some of the podcast highlights include:

  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how technology, AI and automation, including Automate NDA from Onit, is transforming the NDA process. Nick has extensive experience in leading digital transformation at large organizations, and he knows how important a quick win is to making those transformations successful.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy and Growth, shares his insights into what goes into the creation of industry-leading legal ops. While budget is an important factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Are legal and contract AI technologies giving lawyers what they truly need? Lawyer Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, discusses this question and practical uses of technology in law.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is yet another popular topic in legal tech today. Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get past the hype to CLM payoff and the ultimate ROI opportunity.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here.

The Onit Advantage

Onit is home to some of the best minds in legal technology. Our executives created this industry and ground-breaking technology including enterprise legal management more than 20 years ago – all while working hand-in-hand with corporate legal departments to make it easier to handle the business of law.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal operations, contact Onit today.

Bodhala Named Winner in 2021 LegalTech Breakthrough Awards for Second Consecutive Year

Posted on November 17, 2021 by - Legal Operations

The annual awards program recognizes Bodhala as Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year

Bodhala, the leading provider of AI-powered legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence, today announced the company has been named winner of the “Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year” award in the second annual LegalTech Breakthrough Awards.

Bodhala is at the forefront of creating better technology services to improve the legal market. Bodhala’s platform optimizes buy-side legal spend while also creating the transparency necessary to drive competition and foster innovation across the legal industry.  

With over $20 billion dollars worth of invoice data as well as publicly available and proprietary third-party data, Bodhala’s machine learning engine delivers actionable insights informed by the market. Bodhala’s solutions give corporate legal departments an unparalleled grasp on the legal work being performed so they can determine the value their law firms provide for the rate they’re being paid.

General counsels and their legal ops teams, spanning from mid-cap to Fortune 500s, can tap into digestible data and benchmarks to accurately compare and contrast their outside legal work while also evaluating work within individual firms and across panels.

“We founded Bodhala with the belief that great legal talent should come at market-driven prices, and we’re incredibly proud to have built the most powerful solution on the market for legal spend analytics. This award from LegalTech Breakthrough reinforces our role in tackling the longstanding, unchallenged and one-sided marketplace,”  said Raj Goyle, CEO and co-founder of Bodhala.


The mission of the annual LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program is to conduct the industry’s most comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the standout technology companies, solutions and products in the legal technology industry today. This year’s program attracted more than 1,300 nominations from over 12 different countries throughout the world. In 2020, Bodhala was recognized by the awards program as “Legal Spend Management Innovation of the Year.”

“The legal industry’s lack of transparency has been a huge elephant in the room. Legal teams need deeper insights that allow them to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend at competitive and market-driven rates,” said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director of LegalTech Breakthrough Awards. “Bodhala is the first tech company to apply machine learning and AI to legal billing data to bring clarity to the billable hour and real economics to the market. 

Bodhala recently announced that it has been acquired by Onit, the leading provider of enterprise workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and solutions. By joining forces, the businesses create the most complete enterprise legal management solutions on the market, allowing corporate legal departments to evolve analytics into actionable intelligence to optimize outside counsel spend.

About Bodhala

Bodhala, the leading legal spend analytics and management platform, provides corporate legal departments with in-depth analytics and spend optimization solutions based on real-time market intelligence. Powered by machine learning and AI, Bodhala transforms messy data into actionable, high-impact insights to help companies save up to 20% on their outside counsel spend. The company, an independent subsidiary of Onit since 2021, serves clients across the Fortune 500 and critical services economy industries. Bodhala was named a LegalTech Breakthrough Award Winner for Legal Spend Management Innovation in 2020 and 2021, and One to Watch in Legal Technology by the Financial Times. For more information, visit bodhala.com.

About LegalTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in legal technologies, services, companies and products. The LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of LegalTech companies and solutions in categories including Case Management, Client Relations, Data and Analytics, Documentation, Legal Education, Practice Management, eDiscovery and more. For more information visit LegalTechBreakthrough.com

New Podcast: Hear Onit and BusyLamp Leaders Discuss ELM Software for European Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on November 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

In late September, Onit proudly announced the acquisition of BusyLamp, a premier provider of ELM software – including legal spend management and matter management – for European corporate legal departments. The combined forces of Onit, BusyLamp and Onit’s subsidiaries SimpleLegal and Bodhala create one of the world’s largest enterprise legal management providers, with over 600 implementations completed worldwide.

We sat down with Eric Elfman, co-founder and CEO of Onit, and Dr. Michael Tal and Dr. Manuel Meder, CEOs and co-founders of BusyLamp, to discuss the acquisition and how it will benefit the corporate legal community.

The Most Complete ELM Software Offering On The Market

As they say in the podcast, Onit and BusyLamp were a match made in heaven.

The addition of Frankfurt, Germany-based BusyLamp to the Onit family of companies creates one of the most complete enterprise legal management offerings on the market. It adds to Onit’s existing global presence by bringing on board some of the brightest minds in legal operations and technology who understand European customers’ unique needs.

BusyLamp, co-founded by Michael, Manuel and CTO Konstantin Tadrowski, is designed to handle the most critical considerations for European companies, including VAT, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regional tax policies and more. It serves many of Europe’s largest enterprises with its top ELM software offerings eBilling.Space, an award-winning legal spend management solution, and Matter.Space, a matter management solution that allows corporate legal professionals to manage all legal matters, service requests, documents and knowledge within one connected system. The company is operating as an independent subsidiary of Onit.

Joining Onit allows BusyLamp to continue its rapid growth and focus on its customers’ success. Onit’s AI expertise and impressive suite of technical solutions will enable BusyLamp to bring even more convenience to its customers. Together, the companies are building a solid roadmap for future success.

Going forward, Onit will continue to sell its highly customizable products worldwide while always looking for strategic ways to grow and improve our offerings.

Onit Acquisitions

The acquisition of BusyLamp marks our fourth acquisition in less than 12 months. In late 2020, we acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch (now the Onit AI Center of Excellence) and launched three AI offerings for contract lifecycle management (ReviewAI, ExtractAI and business intelligence platform Precedent).

Thirty days later, we announced the acquisition of document automation provider AXDRAFT.

On September 1, Onit announced yet another acquisition – this time of legal spend analytics, benchmarking, and market intelligence company Bodhala.

These four acquisitions follow Onit’s first acquisition of modern legal operations software provider SimpleLegal in May 2019.

You can listen to the Onit Podcast featuring Eric, Michael and Manuel, on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

Posted on November 11, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The legal industry has been undergoing a technological revolution in the past decade, and few technologies have been having a more significant impact than artificial intelligence. Lawyers everywhere are curious to know how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law.

Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of ExcellenceNick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, recently sat down with Jared Correia, host of Above the Law’s Non-Eventcast podcast (available on Apple and Spotify), to discuss how AI impacts the legal world. Spoiler alert: it’s not Terminator time just yet.

The conversation started with an icebreaker about the latest Pixar movie, Lightyear, which proved to be an ideal segue into the topic of AI. Pixar is a prime example of how you can find success by using computers to do things differently.

Nick and Jared then discussed lawyers’ current attitudes toward AI and the lack of understanding about what AI truly is. To many, AI is an amorphous concept, made up of technical terms like “algorithms” and “machine learning” that aren’t always easily understood. Nick provides some handy definitions to clarify the terms.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

AI can have a tremendous amount of value for corporate legal departments and law firms. Consider areas of routine work that involve a lot of data. AI brings efficiency to many traditionally time-consuming tasks, like due diligence, document preparation, eDiscovery, transcription, contract lifecycle management, and billing. With the time saved, lawyers can focus on more complex and meaningful tasks than administrative or manual work.

According to Nick, the reality is that most lawyers are likely already using AI even if they don’t realize it. The emerging technologies will continue to reshape the legal landscape. Technologies like chatbots and robotic process automation are rapidly changing the way lawyers practice law. AI is helping lawyers understand what clients want and assisting with the work that meets those needs. Whether it’s drafting contracts, answering billing queries, automating administrative work or something else, AI is making it an exciting time to be a lawyer. The time to start experimenting and capitalizing on AI is now, so lawyers can gain a competitive advantage going forward.

When you discuss how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, it’s helpful to understand what will happen in the near future. What can we expect from AI in the future? As Nick explains, we’ll see AI increasingly used for contract management, matter management and billing. For in-house teams, AI will be applied more often to managing assets. At law firms, it will be harnessed more and more for determining proper fees, billing, data management and back-office productivity.

You can find the entire Non-Eventcast podcast on Apple and Spotify to hear Nick and Jared’s entire discussion of all things legal AI.

To learn more about how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, we recommend the following resources.

Contact Onit today for more information about how AI powers contract lifecycle management, enterprise legal management and more offerings for corporate legal.

 

What Are CLM Tools and How Do They Help Sales, Procurement, and Legal?

Posted on November 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Sales, procurement, and legal departments are increasingly turning to AI, automation, and other technologies to ease the burden of routine tasks, increase efficiencies, and better collaborate with other departments. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools can be a cornerstone of this technological revolution. 

Why Companies Need Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Tools

Contract management challenges vary by department and role. However, many contract stakeholders desire a quick review process and visibility into contract activity.  

Sales departments know that contract delays mean delays in revenue-generating opportunities. They want to avoid “black box syndrome” when sending contracts for legal review; this makes options such as self-service and AI-assisted first pass review especially attractive.  

Procurement must effectively enable spend owners to maximize suppliers’ value and meet their objectives. For example, with contracts, they want to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders, manage contracts centrally, decrease risk, and reconcile spending against the budget. 

Legal has several concerns, including lack of oversight on current contracts, balancing speed and review, and losing revenue when add-ons, upgrades, and renewals are missed. 

Contract attorneys need to be able to consistently and efficiently compare third-party contracts to company contract standards and extract key provisions from large amounts of contracts to manage their company’s risks. They also need to quickly track critical dates and locate contracts in a searchable repository. 

Legal operations professionals face similar but often more practical contract management challenges that speak to their specialization. These challenges include accelerating turnaround time, reducing costs, and providing attorneys with tools to help them manage contracts, internal legal requests, and overall risks. 

What Are CLM Tools?

CLM tools streamline the contracting process from start to finish, bringing benefits to both the pre-signature and post-signature phases of contracting and creating self-service opportunities for stakeholders. As a result, CLM tools can reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and lower the average hours spent on contracts by 20%. 

They use technologies such as AI and automation to accelerate the review process and manage contracts from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management. This end-to-end solution improves consistency, saves time, and surfaces critical insights allowing proactive, informed decision-making. For example, automation, AI, and CLM can reduce end-to-end NDA processing time by 70%.  

A typical contract lifecycle process. When handled manually, it can lead to delays, errors, high costs and increased risk.

A typical manual contract lifecycle can lead to delays, errors, high costs, and increased risk. 

How do CLM tools accomplish this? Here are some examples of how they work.

How do CLM tools accomplish this? An ideal CLM tool provides: 

  • A central repository serves as a single source for all contracts and associated documentation, eliminating the need to search for information. 
  • Partner and client self-service, providing an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts. You can see an example of one here for NDA automation. 
  • Microsoft Word integration meeting people “where they work” so they can draft, pre-screen, edit, and review in their preferred word processing tool while maintaining a seamless and secure link to CLM. 
  • Conditional contract generation that automatically generates a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata. 
  • The ability to securely manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in the cloud from a centralized location. 
  • Automatic version control and easy-to-use check-in, and check-out functionality. 
  • Obligation management allows for controlling and measuring tasks or milestones related to compliance. 
  • Automated risk mitigation identifies clauses and terms that add risk to your agreement to support negotiations and re-negotiations. 
  • Routing and approval automation that can be quickly built, deployed and updated as needed. 
  • Proactive alerts such as notifications or reminders sent by the technology as the contract progresses through its lifecycle. 

What Are CLM Tools Powered by AI?

In addition to the features mentioned above, the most effective CLM tools harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes a combination of AI techniques such as natural language processing, deep learning and proprietary algorithms that build and release fully-formed AI models. Here’s how AI supercharges contract management:

  • Pretrained AI – A CLM tool should come pre-trained on datasets that allow you to analyze NDAs, master service agreements, purchase agreements, third-party contract reviews, and more straight out of the box. The pre-trained AI will continue to learn to identify and enforce your organization’s unique contracting preferences over time. 
  • First-pass review and redlining – AI handles first-pass review quickly and accurately, analyzing the document, comparing it to the corporate playbook, and providing redlines for suggested changes. For example, if AI finds an indemnity clause or waiver that shouldn’t be in an NDA, it can redline that section. Or, if it doesn’t see a standard clause used in an NDA, the AI can automatically add it. So how do you start this process? It’s as easy as emailing the contract or submitting it through a user-friendly intake form. 
  • Smart checklists – AI goes beyond alerts with configurable checklists to create dynamic lists of concrete, task-based actions generated from your company playbook. 
  • Repapering – AI amends and redlines contract details and critical terms to comply with regulatory changes or M&A activities. 
  • Contract abstraction – AI identifies critical legal clauses, terms, and details in documents for easy analysis and syncing with your CLM. 
  • Audit compliance – CLM and AI automate large-scale legal contract reviews when regulatory changes occur and export relevant details in notes and reports. 
  • Due diligence – Automating batch review contracts for routine legal, due diligence frees up valuable resources. 
  • Legacy contract migration – AI analyzes and extracts legacy contract metadata, including critical dates, terms, and clauses, to assist in importing. 

How to Learn More about CLM Tools

Here are some more resources that answer the question, “What are CLM tools?”

Schedule a demonstration with us today to learn more about how CLM from Onit can benefit your legal department and other departments across your organization.

The Latest in Corporate Legal Department Trends and Resources (November 2021 Edition)

Posted on November 4, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Welcome to the November digest of the latest in corporate legal department trends and helpful resources. In this edition, you’ll find information on AI’s effect on practicing law, stringent steps to increase law firm diversity, the importance of a business perspective, how to benchmark legal technology investments and the latest in tech spending for UK law firms.

1.    AI vs. Lawyers: How Does AI Affect the Practice of Law?

There’s always the question: Will AI replace lawyers? The answer is no. But it will reduce congestion and manual work resulting from back-office administrative tasks that lawyers face every day.

In the latest episode of the Non-Eventcast podcast, host Jared Correia of Red Cave Consulting speaks with Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Together, they discuss fundamental components of AI, how it improves processes in the legal world, how it gives lawyers a valuable competitive edge and the future of AI in the next five years.

Source: Non-Eventcast podcast (Apple or Spotify)

2. Corporate Legal Departments Want Diversity, and They’re Using Money to Motivate Outside Counsel

One of the most prevalent legal department trends is diversity – and leaders are turning to the most significant penalty of all to push for compliance. They’re docking law firm fees. This can mean relocating work or reducing fees. It can also mean rewards for successful efforts.

This article from Bloomberg Businessweek discusses how Facebook, HP, Novartis and more have embraced fee-based strategies to motivate racial and gender diversity within outside counsel. Others, such as BT, reward successful diversity efforts with a chance to join their law office advisory panel.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek + Equality

3.    The Link Between In-House Tech Adoption and Legal Department Business Acumen

The concept of running the legal department like a business surfaced decades ago. It’s still one of the legal department trends zealously endorsed by many GCs, in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals. New opportunities made possible by legal technology mean there are even more opportunities to evolve this discipline.

In-house panelists gathered at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual meeting to discuss the skills sets that amplify legal technology ROI. Not surprisingly, they pinpoint the importance of a business perspective. You can read the article here.

Source: Legaltech News

4.    How to Benchmark Legal Technology Investments: One Company’s Journey

Speaking of legal technology ROI, let’s shift to benchmarking. Every legal department’s journey varies depending on priorities. In this on-demand webinar, legal ops executives from a global provider of multi-cloud services for apps discuss their mission to transform and scale legal services to accelerate its growth and simplify the customer experience. They’re joined by an expert from HBR Consulting, who breaks down legal department trends and how data plays a critical role in a successful legal tech transformation journey.

Source: Onit

5.    UK Legal Department Trends Alert: Increased Tech Spending, But Not for All of the UK 100

Here’s good news for corporate legal departments aiming to work more efficiently with their UK law firms. A recent survey, analyzed by Artificial Lawyer in this article, finds that 60% of UK 100 law firms bumped up their tech spending in 2021. Further, more law firms indicated that improving the use of technology is a top priority in the next year, with standardizing and centralizing processes not far behind. The one drawback: The publication notes that “… for a significant slice of the market that sits between 11th and 50th place by revenue, tech spending shrank a little relative to revenue.”

Source: Artificial Lawyer

Bonus Resource: How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

CLOC recently gathered a panel of experts to discuss one of the most interesting legal department trends happening now: digital transformation. Large and small companies alike have increasingly turned their attention to legal digital transformation to increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track. These CLOC experts offered valuable advice for implementing legal transformation projects, including the top-five considerations. You can read more about it and hear the recording of the presentation here.

What to Look for in a Legal Operations Management Platform

Posted on October 29, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Legal operations management platforms technologies have been revolutionizing the way corporate legal departments and legal operations have been doing business in recent years. More and more legal professionals are abandoning their stand-alone software and solutions in favor of a platform approach to technology that better allows legal to streamline business processes, implement tailored solutions and collaborate with other departments across the enterprise.

While stand-alone solutions exist to serve a single purpose or handle a discrete task, such as e-billing or document management, platforms are robust environments where you can host all the tools you need to address whatever scenarios arise. The right platform will even allow you to build additional solutions yourself as needed, tailored to the needs of your individual organization.

Not all platforms are created equal, however. If you’re looking to upgrade your technology, there are specific considerations to keep in mind when evaluating a legal operations management platform.

Top Considerations When Choosing a Legal Operations Management Platform

Making the switch to a platform approach is a major step toward a better-operating legal function. To make sure you choose the best possible legal operations management platform, however, you should look for the following features.

  • No-code configuration: Your platform shouldn’t require you to be a coding expert or even overly tech-savvy. No-code platforms bridge the gap between business and technical users, allowing even users with no technical background to simply create new workflows and build necessary solutions.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Not all platforms are powered by AI. Those that are can learn, anticipate, reason and improve – in other words, they can function like lawyers. An AI platform automates and improves processes, allowing users to get more work done faster. Allowing for unlimited users, these platforms are critical to scaling your resources and controlling your spend as your needs change.
  • Enterprise considerations: Your legal operations management platform should be useful beyond legal. You need to be able to create the solutions needed for day-to-day operations across all departments in your organization, and even allow business users to engage in new levels of self-service for routine tasks.
  • Agility and speed: You need a platform that’s capable of adjusting and evolving as your needs change, and can start creating value as soon as possible once you implement those changes. Look for a platform that allows you to quickly build solutions right on the platform and continually release updates when they’re available.
  • Integrations and partnerships: While building your own solutions is important, you also want your platform to be able to seamlessly integrate with the third-party tools you rely on every day for your organization to function. You also want your platform provider to have strategic partnerships with the best talent and resources in the industry to maximize your investment.
  • Business intelligence and analytics: Legal operations professionals today have access to more data than ever before. Your platform should integrate robust business intelligence tools and analytics capabilities that allow you to gain important insights from that data and make more informed business decisions.

Onit’s Platforms

Onit is the only two-platform company in the market, offering legal operations professionals and legal departments the most flexibility to build the workflows and solutions they need. Apptitude is Onit’s business process workflow platform, which empowers organizations to easily create, modify and deploy limitless workflow solutions in a no-code environment. Precedent is an artificial intelligence platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes across organizations, allowing users to get more work done faster with the power of AI.

Schedule a demo or contact us today to learn more about how Onit’s platforms can help transform your legal operations function

Introducing Bodhala’s QBR Program

Posted on October 19, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Data-driven conversations are pivotal to successful law firm management and relationships — and for many smart legal departments, it all starts with quarterly business reviews (or QBRs).

That’s why we are launching the Bodhala QBR Program: to simplify the process for those already doing it and jumpstart a critical best-practice activity for those who aren’t. 

Using data to make better, more strategic decisions on key management issues, like rate review and panel review, has become table stakes for many corporate legal departments — and the trend is growing. Bodhala’s QBR Program will turn a cumbersome, seemingly never-ending task into a piece of cake, from start to finish. 

And the best part? It’s a completely white-glove service. By leveraging our advanced machine learning and AI, coupled with detailed analysis from our team of data scientists and legal industry experts, Bodhala QBRs deliver deep analysis and actionable recommendations, giving you the tools you need to effectively manage your objectives. 

So what do you get with Bodhala QBRs? We’re glad you asked.

1. Full Transparency & Trend Spotting 

By surfacing critical data and analyzing it across practice areas and firms on a quarterly basis, QBRs unearth important trends across important metrics like partner and associate rates, work allocation, and block billing. Detailed insights provide detailed insights on your law firms’ performance over time, highlighting areas you need to keep an eye on. 

2. Actionable Insights & Improved Reporting

Our QBR Program surfaces critical insights and provides you with clear recommendations for how to improve your desired outcome – whether it be negotiating a better rate, improving task-to-talent alignment, and everything in between. 

3. ROI Projections

Specific ROI estimates accompany each QBR recommendation. Designed to be easy to execute, with a clear associated value, you have a direct line of sight to the impact of your actions. 

You can be confident in the results – and the knowledge that you will be able to manage your budget more strategically. 

As pressure for accountability and proactive budget management continues to trickle down from the C-suite, data is no longer a nice-to-have but a need-to-have for corporate legal departments. Regular, data-driven conversations with your key stakeholders and law firms will not only set the foundation for stronger partnerships but will be a catalyst for better results. 

The Bodhala QBR Program will give you the tools you need to not only save time, money, and improve your outside counsel management. You will also be completely prepared to “wow” the internal stakeholders demanding visibility into your spend. 

So what are you waiting for? 

Book a demo with our team of legal experts to get started!