Author: Onit

New for Onit Clients: Enhanced Global Scalability with Amazon Web Services  

Posted on July 14, 2020 by - Company News and Events

New for Onit clients: Enhanced Global Scalability with Amazon Web Services  

Onit is pleased to announce that we’ve added Amazon Web Services (AWS) to our infrastructure. The new architecture will easily align with our clients’ business needs worldwide, regardless of size or capacity. Clients will have the industry’s best reliability, with AWS designed with fault tolerance and high availability as the core objectives.

Chris Fields, chief technology officer at Onit, talked more in-depth about the project on a recent podcast. He explained that 100% of the company’s clients are now on AWS and shared an example of how this positively impacts them:

“One of the most common aspects of the enterprise legal management space is that corporate legal departments need more capacity at their quarters’ ends. When those times come, we can quickly spin up capacity within minutes to support their needs and then back it off automatically.”  

 Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world. Among its many features are agility, flexibility and security. The elastic computing AWS architecture allows Onit and its clients to scale effortlessly, globally and on-demand.

“A large number of our clients are familiar with Amazon Web Services themselves and they’re reaching out to explore how we can leverage the technology together. Many clients also have seen our fast growth and appreciate that we are investing in infrastructure,” he said.

The transition resulted in zero downtime, thanks to a sizeable Onit team devoted to the project. As Chris joked, “We go ‘all hands on deck’ for big projects here at Onit. There were so many people to thank I had to make a video with Star Wars credits.”

Listen to Chris’s interview below to hear more about Onit, Amazon Web Services and other technology projects in progress. You can also learn more by reading the company’s press release covering this news.

 

5 Must-Have Features to Supercharge Enterprise Legal Management

Posted on July 9, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Enterprise legal management (ELM) has come a long way since its introduction years ago. Before ELM, paper ruled almost every aspect of legal operations – from matter intake to bill submissions. As a result, the processes that powered critical legal operations workflows often lacked visibility and efficiency.

Now, with the cloud and other advances in technology, ELM solutions give corporate legal departments the ability to drive meaningful business improvements and cost savings.

How can you improve and drive even more ROI from enterprise legal management?

Concentrate on creating better workflows.

The very best ELM solutions represent a new paradigm changing the legal operations landscape. They drastically improve the delivery of legal services, allowing the exploration and definition of critical legal business processes.

By streamlining and automating essential workflows, an ELM solution also offers a true system of engagement. Users can immediately see the benefits, encouraging them to adopt it in higher numbers. With these supercharged workflows, the efficiencies will multiply from there.

With this in mind, here are five features critical to workflows that will take your ELM results to the next level.

  1. Workflow capabilities that match business requirements and are simple to change, alter or adjust. Different work types, such as matters related to employment, litigation, or mergers, have unique workflows that an ELM solution should accommodate.
  2. Comprehensive visibility into invoices at every stage, including submission, review and approval
  3. A single, secure platform for collaboration that captures notes, documents, attachments and email communications
  4. Reporting and dashboard views that make it easy to analyze invoices, evaluate performance against budget and see trends across your matter portfolio
  5. The ability to be highly configurable for a legal department’s needs, offering seamless integrations with important systems such as accounts payable, document management, IP management and other back-end systems

If you’re interested in hearing how corporate legal departments have supercharged their legal operations, consider joining the Onit Lean into LegalOps program for the U.S. or Europe. The online learning initiative offers educational presentations and virtual discussions from innovators and industry thought leaders.

Two examples of Lean into LegalOps events include:

Onit Contributes to Crisis Effort by Powering the Evergreen Donation Emergency Network

Posted on July 8, 2020 by - Company News and Events

What do you get when uniting innovative legal professionals, software developers, designers, and business people? Meaningful solutions during a challenging time.

FT Innovative Lawyers, supported by Global Legal Hackathon, Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), and the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), launched an initiative earlier this year to solve complex COVID-19 problems. Within less than a month, legal innovators had to identify challenges, build teams, and launch solutions to support communities, governments, and organizations.

Thousands around the world responded to the call to action, including Onit.

Together with Consilio and Adobe, Onit technologists tackled the task of quickly rerouting excess food supply to food banks. COVID-19 has exacerbated the complications of food logistics, hindering markets and food banks from supporting those suffering from hunger insecurity – especially during a surge in demand.

The result: EDEN.

The Evergreen Donation Emergency Network, built on the Onit platform Apptitude, connects donors with excess supplies to organizations in need. Although created with the idea of tackling food supply challenges, the team expanded its capabilities to include all types of potential donations including medical supplies, clothing, and even volunteers. Using EDEN, event coordinators, suppliers, and transporters connect to plan and execute donations. This project also highlights how Onit’s Apptitude platform can create real change in the world, even in the worst of times. You can view the EDEN demo here.

Congratulations to the Onit, Consilio, and Adobe teams!

How the Cloud Impacts Corporate Legal Operations

Posted on July 2, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

When it comes to the cloud, efficiency, and automation, companies may not have to look far for corporate legal operations inspiration. According to Jed Cawthorne, director of security and governance solutions at NetDocuments, legal knowledge management teams and IT offer examples that corporate legal can reference.

As he explained in this recorded Onit webinar presentation, legal knowledge management has over a decade of experience with leveraging collaboration technology, electronic form libraries, intranets, and search applications. IT has made great strides in operations as well. Many IT departments have adopted cloud-based workflow management platforms for submitting requests, assigning jobs, and tracking progress – all to automate tasks and create efficient working environments.

Jed draws from a wealth of experience when it comes to the cloud and legal operations. He has 20 years of experience in information and knowledge management, including document management systems, intranets, and collaboration. He also spent almost five years as director of knowledge management in the legal, corporate, and compliance group at the Bank of Montreal. NetDocuments, an Onit Strategic Alliances Partner, has more than 2,750 enterprise customers worldwide and offers a cloud-based content services and productivity platform that includes document management, email management, and collaboration technology.

In the recording of the webinar, titled “The Impact of Cloud on Legal Operations,” Jed discussed:

  • Questions concerning high-quality service delivery at lower costs using the cloud
  • How efficiency impacts a corporate legal department, including individual attorneys and the department on a whole
  • Examples of how the cloud drives ROI in a corporate legal department

The webinar is part of Onit’s Lean into LegalOps, an online learning initiative that connects legal operations innovators and industry thought leaders. The program recently featured a virtual discussion with BT and Buying Legal Council on optimizing resources inside and outside the legal department and a discussion lead by Pearson, Onit, and Morae on transforming legal services delivery and enabling self-service.

We hope you’ll take some time to view the NetDocuments webinar and discover more about Onit by clicking on the resources below.

8 Crucial Items for Your Procurement ReviewAI Checklist

Posted on July 1, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

No matter what company you work for or which industry you’re part of, procurement contract review is likely part of your daily life as a member of the legal team. Whether it’s ordering basic office supplies to keep your workplace running or more complicated like buying raw materials in bulk for multiple products, you should have a procurement process in place to make the purchasing process move smoothly.

Procurement is an important element of a company’s overall corporate strategy as it directly relates to the bottom line. Given the required collaboration between multiple departments, it’s important to have a procurement contract review checklist available to make sure the legal document’s terms are in line with corporate standards, helping avoid any delays or rejection of procurement.

Here are the top 8 things you should look for when redlining a procurement contract.

  1. Determine the level of delegated authority. Nail down who is responsible in your organization for routine purchases, who controls the acquisition of all the company’s requirements, etc.
  2. Define cost restraints. Establish the types of commitment and pre-set financial limits that staff are permitted to enter into so it’s clear for the legal team reviewing.
  3. Doublecheck the basics. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of the contract, but don’t forget about the nuts and bolts: parties’ names, price and dates/deadlines.
  4. Look for automatic renewals. Get familiar with the steps your company will need to take if you do not want the procurement contract to renew, and any associated penalties. If you do make the call to let the contract auto-renew, verify that the terms are favorable for your organization and are fair to both parties.
  5. Put safety and quality first. Part of your job is to ensure that only reputable suppliers are used. Make sure to include contractual obligations such as compliance with local health and safety laws and require updates regarding safety information for substances and industrial products directly in purchasing documents.
  6. Search for how changes will be processed. Requiring advance written notice for processing changes in purchase orders to the organization is always advisable.
  7. Verify the duration of the contract. Determining your corporate standards for the duration of contract is an important legal detail. Whether it be 12 months or 36 months, make sure the entire legal team is aware and on the lookout for the duration clause during the legal contract review process.
  8. Implementing a procurement contract checklist in your contract review workflow can help avoid costly mistakes. However, the best way to ensure that no stone (or legal clause) is left unturned is to supplement the human lawyer’s efforts with legal automation technology.

There are many types of contracts that are related to the procurement and supply chain world. ReviewAI now supports the following:

  • Purchase and Supply Review: Quickly check for common key issues when reviewing purchase and supply agreements such as payment terms, warranties and termination rights.
  • Statement of Work: Save time reviewing statements of work by being alerted to common issues, such as termination, liability and dispute resolution procedures.
  • Letters of Engagement: Use this review to quickly check for key issues in engagement letters, including scope of service, payment terms and warranties. In addition, the new procurement skillset automatically takes you to the key issues when engaging in procurement-focused contracts and helps you understand your contractual obligations. You can use this skillset to build reviews to evaluate your supply chain, risk exposure and contract management lifecycle.

As you start defining your internal contract review process, be sure to arm yourself with the best legal technology and knowledge to improve efficiency, decrease risk and promote effective procurement. Learn how ReviewAI can help.

Introducing a New Resource for the Europe In-House Legal Community

Posted on June 30, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Onit is excited to announce that it has extended its Lean into LegalOps virtual learning program to the Europe in-house legal community. Members of Lean into LegalOps Europe will have access to exclusive Europe-focused educational materials. They will also receive invitations to virtual legal operations discussions featuring Onit customers and partners and be included in a bi-weekly, peer-to-peer discussion group for European members only.

We sat down with Robert Johnson, managing director of Onit’s London office, to talk to him about the program and the state of legal operations in Europe.

Q:  What are some of the challenges that the Europe in-house legal community face?

A: In-house counsel in Europe encounter legal operations challenges that drastically differ from their U.S. colleagues. First, compliance with data and privacy laws is exceptionally complicated and varies by country. You also have EU-wide laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that corporations must address. If a corporation does not meet these compliance levels, they may face steep fines or government investigations.

Second, in the last five to 10 years, large organisations in Europe have been growing rapidly and often by acquisition. As a result, they may have multiple duplicative systems in legal as well as other departments like accounting or HR. They’re shifting their focus from “how to get by” to best practices and overcoming the challenges of, for example, 10 different systems that come with worries about integrations, silos, and more.

Q: What’s important when it comes to EU legal operations management?

A: Since Europe is not as litigious as the U.S., European companies generally don’t place a high priority on cost savings for legal operations as the U.S. does. Instead, the focus is on leveraging and understanding data and creating efficiencies to reduce the time spent on lower-value work. Legal departments are also bringing in new types of job roles, such as analytic specialists who can code and work with large data sets.

Q: How does Lean into LegalOps support the Europe in-house legal community?

A: Lean into LegalOps taps into the ingenuity shown by legal professionals in Europe. People are always intrigued by what other people are accomplishing. The program allows them to connect, share stories and best practices, and demonstrate how they’ve used Onit technology to address formidable challenges. The educational resources will vary from informal Q&As, customer demos of how they’ve used Onit technology like Apptitude or contract lifecycle management, and examples of working across departments such as HR, marketing, and more to efficiently address business functions and build transparency.

About Lean into LegalOps Europe

Onit began the virtual learning and networking program in response to the global pandemic.

This online learning initiative highlights programming from the Onit and SimpleLegal customer base, industry thought leaders, and innovators in the space. The masterclasses cover topics such as how to use workflow tools to manage a distributed workforce, how to implement technology strategies that deliver immediate cost savings and ROI, and how to quantify and defend the value in the legal department. There is no cost to join. If interested, please sign up here.

Legal Operations Growth: How is Data at the Core of Financial Services and Insurance Legal Departments?

Posted on June 26, 2020 by - Legal Operations

This afternoon, Bodhala participated in Consero’s virtual conference – Legal Operations for Financial Services and Insurance: What’s Next for Legal Ops?

Bodhala CEO, Raj Goyle, led legal operations leaders from financial services and insurance companies through conversations on how our clients have leveraged our platform’s data throughout the COVID crisis, where gaps may lie in their current analytics tools, and how peer departments across industries are utilizing data to drive decisions and change.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the sessions:

Data drives action.

  • As echoed throughout the conference, legal operations professionals depend on data to drive conversation and action within their legal departments. Several attendees noted issues with the “dirty data” other systems produce. One attendee, a Director of Legal, noted that a lack of clean data has left his legal department unaware of what actions to take when it comes to spend and outside counsel relationships. As a result, his team approves all rate cards submitted by law firms without even giving it a second thought. Without context behind data and true apples-to-apples comparisons, in-house legal departments are left to play guessing games when it comes to outside counsel rates.

Let lawyers focus on lawyering.

  • The COVID crisis has led companies to evaluate every single line item in their budget with heightened scrutiny. As corporate legal departments look to contain costs, many attendees noted that managing relationships with outside counsel is critical. Throughout the conversation, attendees cited the various “key players” they bring in to handle the financial relationships with their outside counsel, including general counsels, legal operations, and procurement. This has allowed their in-house attorneys to focus on mission-critical work rather than handling law firm negotiations. Attendees have turned to data to evaluate their law firm relationships to determine the value these firms are providing for the rates that are being paid. One Legal Operations Manager shared that she has started to pry her in-house team with the following question, “If a firm cannot adhere to the outside counsel guidelines, are you prepared to break the relationship?” Another attendee, a COO, added that he recently downsized his company’s number of law firms from 300 to 30 over 18 months to optimize spend.

Sophisticated technology delivers real results.

  • As the maturity of each legal department varies, so does the sophistication of the technology they use. Other tools, such as e-billers and Tableau, can only go so far when delivering data and analyses. A Managing Director and Deputy COO shared that e-billers are limited by a lack of financial acumen which makes rate management a difficult task. Another attendee, a Head of Global Operations, noted that e-billers are only as good as the data you put into them, adding that they are “flat-files” that do not operate on sophisticated algorithms, as Bodhala does.

Bodhala’s Insights

Bodhala is reimagining the legal services market place by providing legal market intelligence, insights, and guidance to corporations to optimize their legal operations. 

From top timekeepers to average hourly rates, and everything in between, all you need to know about your outside counsel spend and law firm staffing is housed in your data. 

We arm you with the data needed to hire the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.

Here’s how our client’s legal operations teams have leveraged our Bodhala’s data and guidance recently:

Client A

Challenge: An insurance carrier was utilizing thousands of firms, but didn’t have a sustainable way to provide meaningful feedback on firm cost and quality on a regular cadence.

Action Taken: Bodhala instructed their corporate legal department to use Bodhala scorecards to score their most used firms, creating true apples-to-apples comparisons that could be shared with the law firms.

Client B

Challenge: A financial institution’s law firm rates were consistently increasing above inflation. The company’s legal team did not have the capacity to negotiate rates while collaborating on mission-critical work.

Action Taken: Initiated the handoff of rate card negotiations to finance and procurement, joining a number of leading companies that allow their legal departments to focus on being lawyers.

Hercules, “the god of analytics” is Bodhala’s trailblazing proprietary database that operates as a single source of truth for legal data, and provides our clients with a 360° view of the legal market.

Running on Hercules, the Bodhala platform has an intuitive dashboard that analyzes:

  • Rates
  • Observed discount percentages at relationship and practice area/work type level (anonymized)
  • Matter types
  • Factors that create peer sets, providing accurate apples-to-apples comparisons of cost and staffing

Our platform’s insights have enabled clients to initiate data-driven conversations both internally and externally. With Bodhala, corporate legal departments have the power to justify their objections, negotiations, and decisions as they relate to legal spend and law firm selection.

Bodhala’s Resources

We’re here to help you find efficiencies in your company’s legal spend – speak with a Bodhala legal expert about legal spend management tactics. Our team will provide advice on how to communicate with law firms, how to renegotiate, and what to look for in your law firms. Sign up for your complimentary consultation.

Spend Reduction in COVID: How Contract Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Legal Management Solutions Contain Costs

Posted on June 25, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

 In the first blog post of this three-part series on process efficiency and collaboration during COVID-19, we addressed the types of tools and tactics that legal departments are considering when building their solutions. In the second blog post, we explored how automation supports remote working and efficiencies. In this final blog post of the series, we focus on ROIs for tools such as enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management.   

Cost containment is urgently becoming a top priority for many companies during these challenging times. The technology that enables it will transform the ever-evolving business landscape and provide a lasting impact. General counsel, in-house counsel and other corporate legal professionals have a viable path to support their companies through the strategic adoption of technology.

An essential component of containing costs is addressing efficiency. An IDC survey found that businesses can lose 20-30 percent of revenue each year based on inefficiencies such as redundant processes, outdated or siloed technologies and bottlenecks. Addressing that deficiency alone will streamline operations for a corporate legal department and curb expenses.

The legal department can contribute to containing costs for their corporations through the adoption of technologies that offer automation and process efficiency.

Operational Efficiencies with Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

ELM solutions provide valuable automation to corporate legal departments looking to examine their spend. A McKinsey research report cited that business automation can save up to 60% of occupations almost one-third of their time – allowing employees to focus on more impactful contributions in support of their company.

ELM solutions offer wide-spread control of all the facets of a legal function through process streamlining and accessible metrics. They’re exceptionally agile and cover a wide range of tasks that often fall under corporate counsel’s purview including contract management, NDA creation and distribution, legal holds and legal service requests. In terms of hard cost reduction, ELM solutions have multi-year savings potential meaning your legal team can perpetually maintain lower spend.

ELM savings: The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) estimates that ELM can deliver 5-12% in savings each year. Onit customers have said they save between 10-50% on legal spend alone.

Agreement Automation with Contract Lifecycle Management  

Contract review and assembly can chip away at your day – primarily if it relies on ineffective technologies or processes. CLM solutions provide the basis for standardized processes that allow legal departments to capture and analyze related data, as well as a centralized location for all documents and files. They offer an intuitive dashboard that allows counsel to easily create or review contracts and mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions.

CLM savings: Onit clients report that CLM solutions have helped their legal departments reduce their time spent in the contracting process by nearly 20%. Likewise, IACCM reports that CLM systems can save more than 9% annually.

Data-Driven Departments Set Themselves Up for Success

Lawyers everywhere know spend is tricky regardless of how the economy is doing. However, more than ever, legal departments must drive efficiencies with their spend data.  For corporate counsel and legal ops professionals trying their best to exert more control over their departmental spend, we think you’ll find our whitepaper titled Driving Savings, Process Efficiency and Collaboration in the Legal Department in a Post-COVID-19 Environment quite helpful.

Determine your Potential Savings

 Ready to explore your ELM and CLM ROI potential? Onit offers a suite of savings calculators built to help justify technology spend amid the recent market uncertainty from the global crisis. They use a combination of metrics and industry data to give insight into what these solutions can do for your business, including quantifying potential benefits and analyzing long-term effects of potential investments.

You can request a savings analysis here.

How to Automate ReviewAI for Increased Legal Team Efficiency

Posted on June 24, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

It’s no secret that legal teams are notoriously slow in adopting new technologies like contract automation. The work is far from digitalized — most lawyers print, read and annotate hard copies of legal documents (hence the origins of the phrase “redlining contracts”) — and make their final edits within Microsoft Word as the only electronic step in the process.

Without effective contract management tools, the contract review process remains slow, requires enormous attention to detail and is prone to costly errors.

Consider the case of a junior professional reviewing a contract that requires more than a few changes.

While reviewing modifications that seem reasonable, but do not fit the corporate standards, the contract professional needs to send the revised agreement to a more senior lawyer for legal review and approval. While this is happening, the line of business manager is emailing the contract team, asking for a status update. Countless emails are sent back and forth while multiple business days are lost.

This bottleneck directly impacts a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes, and ultimately impacts the bottom line.

Many new positions within legal departments are created to handle contracts and legal compliance, yet most legal departments still confront a persistent headcount shortage. Instead of continuing to hire more and more lawyers, legal departments need a new AI solution that delivers significant productivity gains, allowing lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives.

Enter a Word Add-in and legal document automation software that allows lawyers to dramatically streamline many activities typical of legal work, such as redlining contracts, comparing clauses to corporate standards, and ensuring that fine details comply with corporate policy.

In a comprehensive study, Onit examined the impact of its legal AI assistant, ReviewAI, on the productivity of in-house lawyers during routine contract review and compliance activities.

The study required lawyers to review contracts across three contract types – supply, service and confidentiality – and perform five tasks – summary, analysis, comparison, repapering and drafting. Together, these tasks reflect the day-to-day activities of compliance checking, standard reviews and contract drafting, all of which are typical of the contract management role.

For each contract, participants had to validate 285 items against corporate standards as accurately and quickly as possible. The participants performed the exercise manually for half of the study, referring to the company clause bank precedents as needed. For the other half of the study, participants were required to install, learn and use ReviewAI to enable contract automation.

The impact of legal AI on the contract management lifecycle included:

  • Lawyers who were new users were 51.5% more productive when using ReviewAI than when working manually, and that productivity increased the more proficient they became with the contract management tool.
  • It took 34% less time for lawyers to perform their day-to-day work. That translates to a team of 19 lawyers being able to do the work of 28, reducing cost to process each contract from $592 to $395.50 on average.
  • The manager of the contracts team, a senior lawyer with significant legal and business experience, was able to reallocate 15% of his time to higher-value activities.

For a typical legal department, utilizing ReviewAI enables lower costs, increased knowledge retention and improved contract quality, delivering an estimated 45x multiple on the cost of the ReviewAI investment.

To see ReviewAI in action and learn more about the return on investment it can bring to your legal team, book a demo and we’ll show you the ropes.

You can also read the full-length whitepaper for more info on our study.

BT Implements Onit Workflow Platform Apptitude

Posted on June 23, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re excited to announce that BT plc has gone live with Onit matter management. The rollout represents the first in a series of planned implementations that include Onit legal spend management and legal service request, all built on the company’s business process automation platform Apptitude.

Using Apptitude, BT’s legal department will link all its best-of-breed applications such as document and vendor management, enabling comprehensive reporting and visibility across the department. The platform will enable BT to define, build and deploy new custom solutions to automate processes related to legal operations and compliance and better collaborate with business users outside of legal.

As a bonus, BT will share its vision for creating the ultimate lean legal department in a virtual discussion on June 25, 2020, at 9 a.m. ET/2 p.m. BST. In the webinar, European managing director Robert Johnson will discuss with David Griffin from BT and Silvia Hodges-Silverstein of Buying Legal Council how to use automated legal service requests and reporting tools to optimize resources inside and outside the legal department. Members of corporate legal departments are welcome to register here.

Read the press release.

Register for the webinar.

Learn more about Onit Apptitude.