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.

 

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

What is legal operations?

Posted on October 28, 2021 by - Uncategorized

In 2021, more than half of legal departments (54%) spent more internally than they spent on outside costs. Where did that budget go? Toward funding their legal operations.

Legal operations (also called “legal ops”) is the combination of all the business activities, processes, and people that empower an in-house legal team to serve a company’s legal needs using a strategic business approach.

Unlike the legal administration team in law firms, which focuses on admin tasks like answering calls, drafting documents, and conducting legal research, legal operations teams support in-house counsels with skills like planning, financial management, vendor management, matter management, technology management, and legal data analytics.

How legal ops has changed over the years

Before 1990, in-house legal departments were more focused on risk management than on maximizing resources. The goal was simple: Reduce outside counsel costs.

The ’90s through the mid-2000s saw the development of an official, more complex legal operations department that facilitated heavier use of outside counsel even though keeping costs low was still a goal.

The major transformation began in the mid-2000s and carried on to 2019.

Legal ops began to focus on not just reducing costs but also on the granular breakdown of those costs and the ROI they delivered. By embracing technology and automation, legal ops teams could break down spend by matter type and evaluate outside firms by their past performance.

Because of the strategic insights legal ops delivered, legal departments could now see the value in having a legal ops team. Whereas only larger legal departments could afford a formal legal operations team before 2000, a formal legal operations team has become more common now, even at smaller companies.

In our own customer base, we’ve seen formal legal operations manager job titles in legal departments with as few as five people. But some teams are even smaller. A 2022 Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) report found that 60% of legal departments have at least one legal operations professional on the team. (For comparison, in 2018, only 47% of departments had at least one legal ops professional employed.) On average, legal ops departments contain around four employees.

The 12 key functions of a legal ops team in 2022 and beyond

According to the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s (CLOC) “core 12” competencies list, these are the 12 key legal operations functions:

1. Business intelligence

Legal ops collects and analyzes business intelligence data based on important metrics to glean actionable insights for more strategic decision-making.

2. Financial management

Legal ops also plans legal spend, creates budgets, implements and monitors e-Billing for legal services, manages accruals, and forecasts expenses, among other things.

3. Firm and vendor management

Legal ops professionals choose the right firms by performing due diligence, uncovering opportunities, negotiating better rates, handling contract management, and, overall, onboarding new vendors quickly.

4. Information governance

With the goal of reducing corporate risk, legal ops is tasked with creating clear information governance policies, communicating those policies to employees, and managing data security and compliance.

5. Knowledge management

Legal ops also engages in knowledge management by facilitating knowledge hubs, creating templates, and preventing knowledge loss, e.g., from staff departure or role changes.

6. Organization optimization and health

Legal ops creates a hiring vision for cultural fit, encourages team members’ work/life balance, and maintains a good pipeline of talents — all in the interest of optimizing the health and productivity of their department.

7. Practice operations

Legal ops manages the practice by allocating tasks to the right skill level for better speed and efficiency.

8. Program and project management

The legal ops team comes up with ways to manage projects, workflows, and programs quickly (without compromising on quality).

9. Service delivery models

Legal ops defines and structures service provider relationships, breaks down larger projects into assignable tasks, and reduces reliance on more expensive law firms.

10. Strategic planning

Legal ops creates team goals that align with the priorities of internal and external stakeholders.

11. Legal Technology

Legal ops vets and leverages legal software to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks and to increase accuracy in data collection.

12. Training and development

Legal ops also creates training resources for new hires and facilitates career development for employees.

Ideally, a good legal ops department will be able to carry out most of these functions to improve logistics and processes and, overall, allow your law team to focus on being better lawyers for your organization.

How do you build a legal operations team?

Building the right legal ops team for your department involves understanding what you need, hiring the right person for each role, and equipping them to do their job.

Determine what your department is ready for

There are three levels of legal operations:

  • Admin
  • Optimize
  • Strategizer

They all have different responsibilities. The admin-level focuses on basic management activities, such as vendor management, payments, compliance, and reporting. The optimizer-level focuses on improving those processes, and the strategizer focuses on maximizing results. Understanding your legal department’s maturity level will help you pinpoint what position you need to be hiring for.

Choose what role to hire for based on your needs

It can be overwhelming to try to build a complete team from scratch, and the time investment can be a drain on your internal resources. If you are just starting out (at the admin level), you need a manager more than you need an analyst.

Empower your team with the right tech

Legal operations is not nearly as effective without technology, and it seems like key decision-makers have begun to take notice. According to Gartner, the shake-up felt during the beginning of the pandemic led many business leaders to reevaluate their legal department’s tech use, with an eye toward increasing departmental capabilities to make strategic, data-driven decisions.

Tech allows you to automate manual legal work, streamline document management, and simplify data collection and reporting, to name a few benefits. Your team will need dedicated legal ops software that features e-Billing, reporting and analytics, spend, matter, and vendor management to run efficiently.

Typical legal ops jobs

There are three main legal operations jobs within corporate legal departments: the legal operations manager, the legal operations specialist, and the legal operations analyst. There’s a fourth position — the director of legal operations — who would be the overall head of the legal ops department, but it’s common for the department to be led by the legal operations manager.

These positions work together to manage, improve, and analyze activities in the legal ops department.

Here’s a brief rundown of what each role does.

Legal operations manager

Also called the legal operations director, the legal operations manager manages and supports the team around tasks like vendor management, budgeting, and staffing. Where there’s no director of legal operations (the head of legal operations), the legal operations manager also reports directly to the general counsel and oversees tasks like resource allocation, change management, and decision-making.

Legal ops managers may spend their day-to-day directly overseeing other members of the legal team. For the rest of the organization, they are the go-to source for project status updates, budget questions, and productivity reports.

Legal operations specialist

If the legal ops manager oversees the department, the specialist is the expert who executes on departmental projects and goals. The legal ops specialist works with the legal operations manager to create and improve processes for an efficient and effective legal team, facilitate change, and control costs. Specialists tackle the hands-on work of legal ops and report on their work to their manager.

Specialists may handle a variety of tasks, including updating each individual matter. Or they might handle the outreach to stakeholders in other departments who are needed to complete each step of the process.

Legal operations analyst

If a legal ops team uses a tech suite to track and understand analytics, the legal ops analyst would be the expert on those tools.

The legal ops analyst regularly examines the legal team’s operations to identify room for change and helps implement those changes. The analyst may study changes in the team’s budget to identify areas where they could better allocate resources and save costs. They may also handle other departmental reporting on core key performance indicators (KPIs), like average time spent per matter.

Qualities of good legal ops leaders

Legal ops leaders also have an increasingly important role to play as strategic advisors within the C-suite of the organization. According to the ACC, 98% of chief legal officers (CLOs) are consulted on important business decisions that affect the entire organization — not just legal. 36% say they spend more than one-third of their time advising business leaders on strategic initiatives, and 77% say they “almost always” attend board meetings.

Good legal operations leaders tend to fit one of four distinct personas:

  • The uber-analyst who brings quantitative rigor to the legal department
  • The MBA who brings additional operational and financial discipline to the legal department and their vendors
  • The lawyer who has chosen a more business-focused career path
  • The highly analytical JD/MBA who is valued for their legal and business expertise

And while a JD or an MBA is a great addition, the people you require for these roles don’t need to have those degrees. What they need to have is:

  • A strong understanding of the core business
  • The ability to translate the needs of business departments into legal requirements
  • The ability to manage outside law firm performance
  • A commitment to using the internal legal department to grow the company

It’s clear that, from the top down, business leaders have begun to see the strategic value in giving legal ops a seat at the decision-making table.

If building your legal operations team is something you want to focus on, we have four legal ops job description templates you can look at to get you started.

It’s time to embrace legal operations for a value-driven legal department

Legal departments have a company-wide responsibility to protect and grow the business while also managing internal and outside counsel budgets. They face increasing pressure to do more with less. That’s where the legal operations role comes in: these professionals drive efficiency and create value not just for their team of in-house lawyers but for the entire organization.

But a legal operations team is only as effective as the technology available to them. In fact, CLOC lists technology as one of the core competencies for effective legal operations professionals.

Want to empower your legal ops team with software that makes it easier to get results? SimpleLegal helps modern legal teams better manage their spend, matters, vendors, and so much more for efficient legal operations. Schedule a demo of SimpleLegal to learn more about how dedicated legal operations technology can help your team 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!