Year: 2021

The Top Risk and Compliance Automation Tools Created by Legal Operations

Posted on September 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Managing risk and compliance are critical tasks for keeping companies safe, which is why corporate legal departments are turning to compliance automation tools.

Between an ever-changing regulatory landscape, an increased focus on data privacy, the need to monitor internal policies and guidelines and more, risk and compliance represent a challenging task. It spans multiple departments within an enterprise, requiring collaboration and management of often manual tasks. These elements increase the possibility of the proverbial dropped ball and, in turn, increase the likelihood of noncompliance with external or internal protocols or higher risks for companies.

Take, for example, data breach incident reporting for GDPR and other data privacy regulations. Organizations must take immediate action to report potential data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours. However, this can be a challenging timeline for large organizations relying on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails as tools for compliance.

What if legal operations could build their own compliance automation tools? It’s happening – and quite often. Here’s how.

The Power of Business Process Automation

As a general rule, the lower the number of tools needed to manage a process, the higher the overall efficiency. That’s where business process automation and compliance meet.

Corporate legal departments of all sizes across the globe are rethinking how they work. They are looking for ways to radically improve their process performance to optimize compliance activities. Technology is rapidly accommodating this need through the rise of no-code platforms and visual interfaces. These innovations have made it possible for almost anyone to build and deploy solutions and applications without writing a single line of code.

Let’s return to the example above of data breach incident reporting. Automation vastly streamlines this process. One team of legal operations experts, which included BT and Standard Chartered, built an App on a no-code business process automation platform to streamline the process. The resulting App reports, manages and tracks data breaches and notifies regulators. It collects data breach information, automatically sends a notice to the security and compliance team and offers a rules-based dashboard and a quick entry point to review records. It even generates ICO reports and submits them in addition to collecting feedback from the organization. (You can see the App in action in this video.)

Risk and Compliance Automation Tools and Apps

The Onit Nation – a group of Onit Fortune 500 corporate legal customers, partners and employees – has built an impressive range of Apps on our business process automation platform. These 5,500+ Apps cover a wide range of industries and practices, including accounting, finance and procurement, enterprise operations, general and administrative, human resources, IT, legal operations, marketing and IP and risk and compliance.

Here are some of the risk and compliance automation tools the Onit Nation has created:

  • Compliance Questionnaires: Creates, distributes and keeps track of responses to questionnaires for various compliance-tracking needs.
  • Directors’ Stock Election Unit Form: Assists with distributing, collecting and tracking annual Board of Director’s instructions for stock options.
  • Employee Incident: Provides a secure intake mechanism for employees to report incidents, both named and anonymous.
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations, collecting all ethics cases together for better oversight, collaboration and management.
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation for company-wide gift and business entertainment to improve compliance with relevant policies.
  • Internal Investigations: Traces internal allegations end to end and creates capture points for intake.
  • Power of Attorney Agreements: Handles the approval and management of power of attorney contracts used when a company needs to act on behalf of an employee.
  • Whistleblower: An anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought by employees that allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution.

These are just some of the tools that make risk and compliance tasks easier. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration for ways you can revolutionize your workflows and increase your efficiency. You can also learn more about no-code platforms by reading this white paper – No-Code Platforms: How They Are Transforming Legal Operations and Their Enterprises.

To get started with building your own Apps, request a demonstration of Onit’s Apptitude platform or email [email protected].

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

Posted on September 21, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Has your corporate legal department been struggling to figure out ways to cut down time spent on contracts, reduce the average sales cycle and find a better way to manage buy-side, sell-side and corporate contracts? Contract management platforms offer the ideal technology to help on all counts.

You may be at the stage where you’re considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to help you reach these goals, but are unsure about how to proceed. You’ve likely already heard and read about all the benefits of using a premier CLM solution. After all, it’s a technology many corporate legal departments have prioritized, and you’ve probably already reviewed resources or spoken with vendors. We’d like to take a different angle here and tell you about four common mistakes to avoid when evaluating a CLM solution.

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

  1. Believing That A Cutting-Edge CLM Solution Is Not Worth The Cost Of Investment.

For several years, the new paradigm has been to do more with less money and fewer resources. Technology has increasingly played a prominent role as legal operations focus on achieving objectives with “less.”

Driving efficiencies and controlling costs in the legal department are being borne, to a significant degree, by well-chosen technology solutions and legal operations managers who understand this are taking action. For example, Onit’s contract management platform streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk in the process and enables departments to save an average of 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce by 20% the average hours spent on contracts.

  1. Assuming That Staff Reduction Will Be Possible With Your CLM Implementation

It’s true that a good CLM offering streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk and enabling departments to save valuable time. The ideal contract management platform also makes quick work of many processes, relieving staff of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Having said that, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can save even more money with staff reductions. It’s a better strategy to remember that while you’re automating many processes and some staff functions may change or even be eliminated, staff reductions are usually not the best option in many cases.

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

Many legal departments already know how well CLM products empower legal and business teams with an enhanced contract management process. Some key benefits are conditional contract generation, MS Word integration, document management, secure collaboration and eSignature integrations.

With all that, what could be missing? Integrated artificial intelligence.

For example, in the pre-signature contract phase, the AI engine provides a first-pass review of the contract and annotates it based on your company’s checklist, playbook and information learned from AI models. By allowing a lawyer to focus on the medium- to high-risk areas, your legal team can reduce contract lead times, automate guidance and proactively address common pain points in the legal workflow.

In the post-signature contract phase, AI-driven data extraction allows you to complete projects at scale and at a fraction of the time manual processes take. Additionally, you can gain powerful insight from your contracts in real-time when coupled with a contract lifecycle management solution.

  1. Implementing a CLM Solution That Doesn’t Have All The Bells And Whistles

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process and are ready to implement your new CLM technology. It’s zero hour, and one of the staff asks you if the solution provides for automated risk mitigation – which somehow didn’t come up during the selection process. You learn that this system doesn’t have that feature, and now you’re wondering what other vital elements may be missing. Depending on your specific needs, here are five other features that are must-haves:

  • Conditional Contract Generation: Automatically generate a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Routing and Approval Workflow: The ability to design and build simple to complex workflows to generate and route your contracts.
  • Obligation Management: Give your users the power to manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance.
  • Clause/Template Library: Manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in a centralized and secure cloud-based location.
  • Partner and Client Self-Service: Provide partners and clients an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts.

It can undoubtedly be overwhelming trying to determine the best route to take in your digital transformation project. There are contract management platforms out there for practically every budget – meaning there is no longer a good reason not to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Still, the best advice is to go into your implementation with realistic expectations, a good understanding of exactly what your department needs and a plan to avoid common mistakes.

If you’d like to learn more about contract lifecycle management, here are some additional resources:

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

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

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

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

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

How Legal Department Operations Can Drive Transformation

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

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

Listen to the On-Demand CLOC Session

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

Additional Legal Operations Resources

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

The Latest Advancement For AI in Spend Analytics: Finding Legal Invoice Errors “Between the Rules” with InvoiceAI

Posted on September 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Legal Management

Legal invoice review is rarely a top-ten task for corporate legal departments, meaning it’s the ideal process for AI in spend analytics to improve. That’s why Onit has announced the general availability of its AI-enabled invoice review offering – InvoiceAI.

Onit’s InvoiceAI analyzes historical and real-time legal invoices to find errors “between the billing rules.” It uses AI and machine learning to support outside counsel guidelines, looking into common invoice areas of note such as non-working travel, block billing, vague descriptions and work done by improper staff class.

How InvoiceAI Works

Before the rise of e-billing and legal spend management, paper ruled the invoice process. Law firms sent substantial bills – think hundreds of pages – to their corporate clients. In-house counsel, in return, rarely had the time, tools or resources to scrutinize line items.

The transition to e-billing opened the door for more technologies to improve bill review – namely, billing rules. Billing rules rely on specific descriptions and context provided (or not provided) by in-house legal professionals to evaluate line items. However, descriptions for line items can vary based on the biller and service. Invoices without the exact language or terms outlined in billing guidelines may evade review and be approved for payment. There is simply no way to code billing rules to cover every possible permutation of language that might populate future invoices.

This is where AI in spend analytics enters the picture.

InvoiceAI has been trained on millions of legal invoice charges. It fully integrates with Onit’s enterprise legal management system and works with billing rules to look for areas where overpayment is common. When these issues are flagged, InvoiceAI can automatically adjust an invoice to comply with guidelines or bring the item to reviewers’ attention.

Essentially, InvoiceAI allows machine learning to do what it does best, looking for discrepancies and continually learning and improving its invoice review. It also allows Onit’s existing e-billing rules to continue doing what they do best – focusing on compliance with outside counsel guidelines and flagging issues for additional expert review. Finally, it allows legal operations teams to do what they do best: reviewing trends for compliance, managing vendor relationships and implementing best practices across outside counsel guidelines.

As a result, corporate legal departments benefit from:

  • A reduction in invoice review time due to better recommendations and less manual work
  • The ability to review past invoices and have AI identify errors and unnecessary payments
  • Insight into legal spend trends and vendor performance
  • Access to Onit’s partner Sterling Analytics, the leader in third-party invoice review.

How to Learn More About AI in Spend Analytics

To learn more about InvoiceAI, hear Matt DenOuden, Senior Vice President of Sales, and Mary Fuzat, Vice President of Product Management, discuss how AI in spend analytics boosts efficiency and saves money in this podcast.

InvoiceAI is now available to all Onit customers. Reach out to us today at [email protected] to learn more about InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system. You can also schedule a demo here.

Creating Custom Legal Software: The Apps and Solutions Legal Operations Pros Are Building Themselves

Posted on September 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To meet the needs of today’s modern corporate legal department, many legal operations professionals are creating their own custom legal software. And here’s what they’re building.

But first, let’s take a look at the past year and a half.

Corporate legal departments completed many nimble adjustments as they’ve faced new challenges and demands. Legal operations professionals play a vital role in this success, finding ways to make it easier for lawyers to work while bringing in more efficiency, cost savings and other benefits of operational excellence.

Technology undoubtedly plays a role in supporting these endeavors, bringing automation and AI to systems like enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. However, even the most customized solutions must have the flexibility to evolve with a corporate legal department’s needs – especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise.

Building Your Own Custom Legal Software

Custom-built software for legal traditionally seems like a luxury, requiring precise planning, contributors across multiple departments and a good piece of the budget. But now, with technology innovations, legal operations pros can create Apps (and combine Apps into solutions) quickly and efficiently. They do this with tools that simplify the process and offer no-code-needed interfaces.

Business automation platforms and App builders with drag-and-drop visual interfaces make the creation process more accessible for those unfamiliar with coding. Instead of relying on developers, they can use a platform and its simplified interface to program the software. The key is indeed the underlying business process automation platform, which acts as a blank canvas. While it supports large solutions for legal spend, contract management and matter management, it also supplies the flexibility to enhance those solutions with complementary Apps, create new Apps altogether and combine Apps into solutions to tackle more complex challenges.

A perfect example of this in action is Hack the House, our inaugural virtual hackathon. Five teams comprised of in-house legal professionals, consultants and business analysts identified business cases and built Apps to solve complex workflow challenges in less than three weeks. They created solutions for data breach incident reporting, career development, diversity and pro bono program management. The winning team took it a step further by creating multiple Apps and combining them into a solution to streamline trademark renewal decisions and track trade secrets.

As impressive as that sounds, we’ve seen custom legal software built even faster – with Apps up and running in as little as an hour.

What Legal Operations Is Building

To date, the Onit Nation – Onit’s master App builders, customers and strategic partners – have used the Apptitude platform to build more than 5,500 Apps to solve everyday business problems. Among them are several custom legal software solutions that are helping to automate and accelerate nearly all aspects of legal operations, and we’ve collected many of them in our new App Catalog.

Our corporate legal customers have been prolific in building Apps and solutions. In addition to the Apps mentioned for Hack the House, other Apps have been created to handle:

  • Board Kit Distribution: Centralizes board of director information and notifies board members of new or revised documents while giving them access to the most current information
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations and consolidates all ethics cases in one place for better oversight, collaboration and management
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation on gift and business entertainment requests company-wide to improve compliance with relevant policies
  • Settlement Authority Request and Approval: Provides a workflow for approving documents that detail settlement authority requests
  • Task Assignment: Handles task assignments made to non-departmental resources
  • Whistleblower: Provides anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought to you by employees and allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution

These are examples of just some of what our customers have created to automate processes and solve pressing issues. In fact, the Apps work across the enterprise, automating processes with HR, marketing, risk and compliance, accounting, finance, procurement and more. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration to revolutionize workflows and increase efficiency.

To get started with building custom legal software on Onit’s no-code business process automation platform Apptitude, schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.

Bodhala is now part of the Onit Family!

Posted on September 1, 2021 by - Legal Operations

The startup journey is tumultuous, full of highs and lows, sometimes scary – but always exciting. From raising our A round in April 2020 to growing over 400% in a matter of months, the last 18 months have been quite a ride. 

But today, I have the honor of announcing our most exciting news yet: Bodhala has been acquired by Onit, a long-time friend of the company and true innovator in legal technology. We are now an independent subsidiary of the market leader in legal technology. 

Like Bodhala, Onit is committed to innovation and disruption. They share our vision for the business of legal – where data, machine learning, and actionable intelligence drive better strategic decisions and create a transparent market for legal services. 

From day one we believed that legal business data – from rates to hours to outcomes – would be the key driver of decisions in the future. It will not only allow legal leaders to operate their departments like a business, but it will also level the playing field and force innovation. 

Onit is the indisputable market leader in enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation solutions. Bodhala’s analytics and legal business intelligence solutions not only complement their products, together we create the most complete solution for corporate legal business needs, ushering in a new exciting phase of legaltech: the era of legal business intelligence. 

I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has helped us along the way. So to our investors, families, and every member of the Bodhala team: We didn’t do this alone. Your support, advice, and hard work is what got us here today. You made this possible. 

So, what’s next? From new teammates to new features – Bodhala’s journey is just beginning. We couldn’t be more excited to create the future of legaltech with Onit. 

Below is some additional information about the acquisition, Onit, as well as top FAQs.

Sincerely,

Raj Goyle, CEO & Co-Founder

Onit Acquires Bodhala, the Leading Provider of Legal Spend Analytics, Benchmarking, and Market Intelligence

Posted on September 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

At Onit, we always look for ways to innovate for our customers. An essential part of this priority has been strategically combining with other disruptive companies that are changing the way the world does business. To that end, Onit is proud to announce its fourth strategic acquisition since 2019: Bodhala, the leading provider of  legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence.

The combination of Onit’s and Bodhala’s capabilities creates the most complete enterprise legal management solution on the market, allowing corporate legal departments to evolve legal spend data into actionable intelligence.

Hear Onit CEO Eric M. Elfman and Bodhala CEO Raj Goyle discuss the acquisition and how actionable intelligence is the next wave of business transformation.

Actionable Intelligence for Legal Spend Management

A revolution of data and intelligence has been hitting every sector in recent years, and the legal industry is no exception. Running legal departments on actionable data is the future of digital transformation.

Bodhala helps corporate counsel understand what they should be paying outside counsel, making it easier to source law firms at competitive and market-driven rates. With its data and actionable intelligence, corporate legal departments can identify whether they should be paying the amounts they’re paying, whether they’re paying market price, if they’re properly allocating their work among their various law firms and more.

How does this translate to success? Here’s one example.

The general counsel of one of the largest private equity firms wanted to address annual rate increases from outside counsel. Their rates had been rising well above inflation every year. With Bodhala, the company conducted a competitive analysis of its law firms, compared rates to other firms in the market based on the type of law and complexity of work and gathered internal benchmarking across its panels.

After this analysis, the PE firm had the quantitative, actionable intelligence needed to negotiate a decrease in proposed annual outside counsel rates by 17% and save $27 million.

The Most Complete Enterprise Legal Management Solution on the Market

The combination of Onit and Bodhala creates the most complete, full-lifecycle enterprise legal management solution on the market.

Onit customers already have access to industry-leading enterprise legal management, AI-enabled invoice review and AI-based business intelligence and business process automation platforms. Now, with Bodhala, they can leverage legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence for a quantum leap in the value and savings they can produce for their businesses.

Bodhala will operate as an independent subsidiary of Onit. It is the third acquisition for Onit in less than a year. In November 2020, Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch and then document automation leader AXDRAFT 30 days later. Onit also acquired SimpleLegal, a modern legal operations software provider, in May 2019.

If you are an Onit or Bodhala customer, reach out to your account managers for more information or you can email Onit at [email protected].

To hear the CEOs of Onit and Bodhala discuss the acquisition, the strategy behind it and what it means for Onit and Bodhala customers, tune in to this podcast.

Why Savings Isn’t Always About Money: How to Reinvest Your Bodhala ROI

Posted on August 30, 2021 by - Legal Operations

When procuring new technology, one of the first things prospective buyers want to know is — “What kind of ROI can I expect?”

Bodhala’s market intelligence has helped corporate legal departments around the world save hundreds of millions of dollars on their outside counsel spend by identifying inefficiencies and opportunities to save. But one of our key learnings along the way has been that for many GCs and legal ops leaders, ROI isn’t just about dollars and cents. Sometimes streamlining operations to save time or resources is the number one goal or reallocating spend for an important (and expensive) matter. Ultimately, it’s about each department’s goals, which can run the gamut from financial to operational — and everything in between.

Here are the top four benefits of a quality legal spend management system (beyond just banking the savings): 

1. Operational Efficiency

Ever find yourself wishing there were more than 24 hours in the day? Manual reporting and analysis – digging through spreadsheets – can be extremely time–consuming when it comes to legal data. From aligning data to consolidating various file formats, it wastes incredibly precious time and resources.

Sophisticated legal spend management systems allow in-house teams to run reports and analyses with ease. The best ones (ahem, Bodhala) also clean and structure the data as it enters the system, ensuring you get the most accurate data and best analytics possible. 

The right software can streamline your department’s internal reporting – everything from QBRs to panel analysis – saving your team hundreds of hours (or more). 

Crunching numbers doesn’t have to take all day — you just need the right tools.  

2. Investing in Key Players

Without data, in-house teams have long struggled to effectively allocate work and make the appropriate staffing decisions, like whether to hire internally or use outside counsel. 

But data is changing this narrative.

A smart, sophisticated legal spend management solution will illuminate the granularities of your outside counsel spend, enabling you to dig into the key metrics that influence budget allocation.

Armed with these insights, you can analyze key metrics, such as average practice area spend or average partner rate, to identify areas where you’re spending a significant amount of your budget. As a result, you can determine if it’s a more financially sound decision in the long run to make an internal hire in the relevant domain rather than continue outsourcing work.

Digging into other key metrics, like top lead partner or average partner hours per matter, can highlight your top performers. Knowledge of who’s billing hours on the most pivotal portions of your matters will enable you to identify partners who are highly specialized and critical to your success – and who should be compensated accordingly. Yes, that’s right — you should actually pay your “Lebrons” more. But you will want to know where to get those extra dollars – and the data can tell you that. 

3. Investing in New Technology

It’s no secret that the legal industry has long shied away from technology. And even when there is a need or desire to onboard a new tool, there’s no technology budget — it’s a lament in-house teams share far too often.

That’s why actively and effectively managing your outside counsel spend is critical. In-house teams are throwing precious dollars out the window each year by assuming they have zero leverage in pricing negotiations with law firms. But that couldn’t be further from the truth when you have data on your side!

Data gleaned from a sophisticated legal spend management solution will highlight areas where your spend can be reined in. For example, are you paying above-market rates for the partners or associates handling your matters? Did an esteemed partner log hours on a task that really should have been handled by a first-year associate? Did you unnecessarily blow budget dollars on a matter that should have cost you far less?

Armed with these insights, you can make strategic and data-driven decisions that will not only yield savings but also enable you to invest in the technology you need. 

Of course, you’ll want to understand the ROI you can expect from the next solution you onboard, but in the case of a legal spend management software investment, it will be a catalyst for savings and long-term benefits.

4. Rainy Day Fund

Although savings isn’t always about money, having some extra cash set aside never hurts. You never know when the economy might take a turn for the worse, or when you’ll get hit with an unexpected expensive lawsuit.

It’s a smart, strategic move to set aside some of the ROI realized from your legal spend management technology towards a “rainy day fund”. Having some cash set aside can provide you with peace of mind when the unexpected gets thrown your way.

Going Beyond the Dollars

Data should play a critical role in your budgeting and forecasting processes. Although data cannot account for everything, the ROI realized from data-driven spend management should provide you with a safety blanket of savings. 

A good legal spend management solution will save you money. But a great legal spend management solution will allow you to identify opportunities to streamline processes, improve law firm relationships, invest in new tools, and save you money.

With data and a smart, sophisticated legal spend management solution on your side, you can run your legal department like a business and meet your management goals — whatever they may be.

How Legal Hold Software Supports Litigation Peace of Mind

Posted on August 26, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Legal hold software plays a vital role in the litigation process, helping companies preserve forms and relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Companies have a duty to demonstrate the proper care to preserve digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk.  This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is considered possible, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Simply put, companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercise the proper care to preserve and collect electronically stored information (ESI).

The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization. Potential consequences include penalties, evidentiary sanctions, adverse rulings or fines.

The History of Legal Holds

In the case of Marsulex Envt’l. Tech v. Selip S.P.A., we see an example of the repercussions of failure to implement a legal hold (also known as a litigation hold). The plaintiff Marsulex sued the defendant for a defective product. After the plaintiff requested that the defendant produce certain documents, the defendant resisted providing particular vital records. The plaintiff maintained that the defendant had not put in place a formal legal hold, and thus did not preserve pertinent evidence. Ultimately, the court found that the defendant’s CEO failed to implement a legal hold. The court then granted the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions and ordered a forensic investigation of the defendant’s computers.

Some of the lessons learned from this case include:

  • Companies must quickly take all necessary steps to adequately implement a legal hold as soon as litigation or a subpoena is reasonably anticipated.
  • Robust legal hold software must be in place so the company is prepared for the threat of legal holds.

Interestingly, even if a company issues a legal hold in a timely manner, other things can go wrong if something gets missed along the way. For example, if the issued legal hold was not broad enough in scope, some employees failed to comply with the order or the company’s legal hold software was simply “broken,” severe court sanctions and financial penalties may result.

The Role of Legal Hold Software

Fortunately, help is readily available. A robust legal hold software solution offers a quick and highly cost-effective way to reduce the ever-present risk of costly court sanctions. The best solutions will feature real-time dashboards, automated workflows, real-time status tracking, custodian record repositories and advanced audit capability. With just the right solution, you can streamline the legal hold process, easily create new holds, gather information from custodians and have the peace of mind of ensured compliance, swift deployment ability, enhanced visibility and maximized performance.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Software

If you would like to learn more about legal holds and legal hold software, here are three resources. They discuss the significance of legal holds in today’s corporate environment, why you need gold-standard legal hold automation software and strategies to fuel your company’s path toward a robust legal hold process.