Year: 2022

How AI and Enterprise Legal Management Find Hidden Legal Invoice Review Errors

Posted on January 13, 2022 by - Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Legal Management

Legal invoice review and validation is a significant pain point for most companies and legal departments. In a recent survey, legal operations professionals cited their top three challenges as:

  1. Business process improvements (59.7%)
  2. Cost containment and savings (49.3%)
  3. Staying abreast of law department technology (35.8%)

All three of these items apply to legal invoice review, where outdated processes and technologies, combined with increasing workloads, more often than not lead to lost time, compliance risks, reputational risks, possible fraud, unnecessary payments and more.

Then there are the invoice charges that manage to fly under the radar. These are ones that slip by preset e-billing rules and human review, leading to the approval of invoices with potential erroneous charges like nonworking travel, block billing, vague descriptions and work done by improper staff class.

How Corporate Legal Can “Right-Size” Legal Invoice Review

Billing tasks don’t have to take up more of your time than identifying and mitigating risks to your company. AI, combined with enterprise legal management and e-billing rules, helps companies more accurately and efficiently process invoices.

Now, we’re introducing a high-level guide titled “How to Find ‘Between the Rules’ Invoice Errors” that discusses how AI, combined with ELM and billing rules, is revolutionizing legal invoice review.

Here are just a few of the highlights you’ll find in the Quick Start Guide.

  • The Limitations of Billing Rules: With paper invoices, in-house counsel never had time to review every line item. eBilling relieved a lot of strain by applying billing rules, which scour the invoices for keywords and parameters that might conflict with billing guidelines. However, because these rules cannot represent all potential billing language, they open the door for “between the rules” errors.
  • How AI-Powered Invoice Review Software Fills the Gap: Unlike traditional e-billing tools, AI-enabled invoice review solutions are constantly learning, searching for discrepancies and improving invoice review via machine learning. For example, an unauthorized travel charge may make it through review because its description doesn’t match the exact parameters of the billing rules’ language. AI and machine learning can pick up on language that may not be explicitly called out in billing rules.
  • What to Look For in an AI-Enabled Invoice Review Solution: All AI-enabled invoice review solutions are not created equal. When choosing a solution, you should look for specific features, including historical analysis, ELM integration, continuous learning, advanced analytics and reporting, advanced bill review services and reduced bill review time. The Quick Start Guide explains each of these features and what to look for.

Just how much of a difference can AI-assisted invoice review make? One historical review of a Fortune 500’s outside counsel spend found an extra 11-20% in potential savings. For example, when AI reviewed an average of $45 million in invoices for one year, it detected $900K of non-attorney billing, $1M in block billing and $100K of travel-related fees during the height of COVID.

AI-assisted invoice review also helps catch common errors fast, helps companies meet their ROI objectives more quickly, helps boost productivity and better insulates companies from fraud. It does so by combining smart rules, keeping experts in the loop and employing powerful analytics.

To learn more about finding those between the rules invoice errors, download the Quick Start Guide here.

For more information on contract lifecycle management, contract AI and more, contact Onit today, or you can request a demonstration.

Onit Acquires SecureDocs, Extending Contract Management to New and Rapidly Growing Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 11, 2022 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

SecureDocs - ContractWorks - ReadySignA little over two years ago, Onit launched its contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, helping Fortune 500 companies streamline the complex processes of buy-side, sell-side and corporate contract administration. The solution quickly gained popularity with enterprises who found that they could shorten sales cycles, speed up revenue generation, improve risk mitigation and strengthen collaboration across departments.

Since the launch, Onit has continued on the path of innovation by introducing new CLM products, including:

  • ReviewAI, technology that uses AI to review and redline contracts in two minutes or less, resulting in a productivity increase of up to 52%.
  • Smart Checklists, which creates checklists made up of concrete, task-based actions that are generated from your company playbook.
  • ExtractAI, software that obtains usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts and turns it into actionable information.
  • Automate NDA, which removes manual work from high-volume and often low-value NDAs, resulting in faster agreement execution and a significant reduction in end-to-end processing time.

The Next Phase of CLM Expansion

Now, we’re excited to announce that we have expanded our CLM market reach with the acquisition of SecureDocs. SecureDocs augments Onit’s portfolio with a contract management solution ideally suited for companies that have new or rapidly scaling corporate legal departments.

SecureDocs, based in Santa Barbara, California, is a software company specializing in contract management software that can be set up in minutes (ContractWorks), a data room that streamlines the entire deal process (SecureDocs), and secure, legally binding electronic signatures (ReadySign). Its solutions have helped customers effectively manage more than 13 million contracts and documents across 96 countries.

Many midsize companies rely on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails to manage legal obligations. While these tools are readily available, they limit transparency and efficiency when it comes to contract management. ContractWorks from SecureDocs dramatically increases contract visibility, minimizes risk and ensures customers don’t miss renewal dates. Since it can be set up in minutes, it provides an effective and easy-to-deploy solution with a fast time-to-value.

SecureDocs and SimpleLegal

SecureDocs will integrate with SimpleLegal, Onit’s legal operations management software subsidiary.The companies share a similar approach to building simple, intuitive software. Together, they will provide solutions to streamline operations and offer greater efficiency for scaling legal departments.

As with all of Onit’s acquisitions, we are investing in SecureDocs, its employees and its products. We are excited to welcome the entire SecureDocs team to Onit and will continue to develop all of the company’s products.

Onit’s Growth and Expanded Market Reach

SecureDocs joins Onit at a time of exponential growth. In addition to SecureDocs, Onit has acquired four other companies in the past 15 months, including:

  • BusyLamp, a premier provider of legal spend and matter management software for European corporate legal departments.
  • Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking, and market intelligence company.
  • AXDRAFT, a document automation provider.
  • McCarthyFinch, a legal AI innovator.

These acquisitions follow Onit’s first acquisition, SimpleLegal, which closed in May 2019.

To learn more about our acquisitions and products, customers are invited to reach out to their account managers or customer success managers.

The State of Law Department Operations, According to the Professionals Who Run Them

Posted on January 4, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Running the legal department like a business is the norm now. One of the most interesting surveys exploring this concept is the Blickstein Group’s Annual Law Department Operations Survey. Its 14th annual edition showcases the evolution of law department operations and shares insights from the operations professionals themselves as they rank their challenges, effectiveness and technologies.

Not surprisingly, one of the most significant themes is doing more with less. Lean legal continues to be a top priority in many corporate legal departments, as they work to drive efficiencies and control costs.

Let’s explore some of the most intriguing takeaways.

Top Law Department Operations Challenges

Law department operations professionals identified their three top challenges, which include business process improvements (59.7%), cost containment and savings/managing the budget (49.3%) and staying abreast of law department technology/managing and handling IT issues (35.8%).

Considering how LDOs spend their time, business process improvements – powered by automation – can play a crucial role in improving what they can accomplish. According to the report, the average survey participant devotes more than a quarter of their time to three areas:

  1. Cost savings, cost efficiency, cost management
  2. Outside counsel management
  3. Vendor management

(FYI: You can read about how ADM conquered vendor management challenges with their App. It  addressed three problems hindering efficiency: standardizing vendor approval,  automating engagement letter creation and execution, and streamlining the RFP process.)

For outside counsel management, most of the participants said they directly handle tracking legal spend, managing billing/audits and negotiating discounts and alternative billing arrangements. These directly link to what respondents said was their top key performance indicator: Actual spend vs. the law department’s total budget.

What Law Departments Are Most Effective At, According to LDOs

While there are always challenges, LDOs indicated that law departments are doing well on the operations front. When asked to rate their law department’s effectiveness, several areas took the lead. Eighty percent said their overall law department operations were “very effective” or “somewhat effective.” Sixty-five percent said the same for financial management and business client engagement and strategic partnering, and more than 60% responded likewise for legal technology.

On the flip side, 60.8% said they were either very ineffective or somewhat ineffective at document management, 48% said the same for alternative fee arrangements and 41.5% agreed that they lacked effectiveness around contract management.

Legal Technology Purchases for 2022

What impact did the pandemic have on digital transformation? According to the LDOs who answered the survey, it accelerated it. Twenty-six percent said it sped up digital transformation substantially, and another 46% agreed that it sped it up marginally.

With that in mind, what legal technologies are LDOs interested in evaluating or implementing this year?

 

34.5% Pre-execution contract management
34.5% Post-execution contract management
32.8% Document/contract assembly
29.8% Workflow/business process automation tools
29.8% Legal service intake/work intake
29.3% Matter management
28.1% Legal spend management

Legal operations are all about optimizing the law department’s ability to help grow the company. This requires a higher level of operational excellence, as evidenced by the embracing and reliance on innovation, increasing demand for automation of repetitive tasks and a workflow-centric approach. For legal departments still in their early stage of tech implementation, Onit’s Senior VP of Strategy and Growth, Brad Rogers, wrote a great article (in the survey) that offers valuable tips on creating digital transformation. Included are his “top five ideas” for companies pursuing such change.

You can read all the LDO survey results here.

Other resources that might interest you include: