Author: Onit

Your Guide to Seamless Legal Tech Implementation: Part 3 — Change Management

Posted on April 4, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Part three of a three-part “Guide to Seamless Legal Tech Implementation” Parts one and two are below.

Part 1 – Scoping the project before buying or building the technology
Part 2 – Ensuring the internal and external project stakeholders are on-board

Change management is essential for successful legal tech implementation. It is often understated or not fully appreciated, sometimes seen as an “add-on” to the project’s more technical aspects. Those who underestimate the importance of change management during implementation often fail to achieve the desired business outcomes.

Routine tasks will change, and with that comes an inevitable learning curve. For example, with e-billing, manual invoice checks and approvals are replaced by automated rules-based processing. Change also brings more exposure to and interaction with business processes and data. Humans are wired to resist change, with numerous studies showing a strong preference for items and processes that have been around longer, even when maintaining the status quo is irrational. Changing takes conscious effort to learn something new, so communication is vital when presenting changes and benefits. Often the “why” and the “how” are not communicated company wide. Why has the organization decided to do this, and how will it benefit the organization and those that work there?

Unless everyone has a clear vision and understanding of the potential benefits, it can be difficult to institute change management. Change management includes guiding, educating, encouraging, and supporting the organization through this transition period. Complexity and scope define change management strategy for a software project. Let’s break this down into six key sections.

Sponsorship

Active sponsorship for change at a senior executive level is vital to success. This sponsorship must be active and visible to the project team and all stakeholders. In many cases, the sponsor will set the project’s strategic direction and drive the program forward. They will judge any conflicts that may arise and act as an “honest broker” in issue resolution to move the legal tech implementation forward. The sponsor will also be the primary source of high-level project communications and be the figurehead of any key announcements to the broader user population.

Stakeholder Buy-In

As we identified in the previous blog, it is essential to identify the key project stakeholders and stakeholder groups affected directly or indirectly. Some of these groups or individuals may be fully on board with the program and may require little management in expectations. If using a phased approach, start with this group and use them as a case study to communicate their achievements because of the change. It’s also better that any issues happen with a keen sub-group than the whole company.

Some likely key stakeholders may have other priorities or may be resistant to the change that a major project will bring about. Managing this resistance is very important if the project is to succeed, and you can use many tools and techniques to overcome it. This can range from the obvious, such as education and communication strategies, to the more extreme measures, including negotiation and bargaining. A last resort – coercion – will likely be counter-productive in the long term.

Involvement

Legal tech implementation and changing key processes will inevitably result in role and responsibility changes for some of the organization’s employees. The likely impact will depend on the business process level and operational change undertaken. As part of the planning phase, it is vital to engage and involve team members whose day-to-day tasks will change and capture the key business processes, both current and new, including reasons for change. These are likely the same users who provided requirements for the scoping document. This will help to ensure only necessary changes are made, not change for change’s sake. Also, capture their perceived negatives and positives, as you are unlikely to have considered everything; this helps with the implementation of legal tech and communication later. This analysis exercise will provide valuable information to the project team and the basis for discussions on potentially sensitive job reassignments undertaken as part of the implementation. With e-billing, most changes involve freeing legal teams of administrative burden to focus on high-value work, so the organization should positively receive these changes.

Impact

It may seem obvious, but it’s not always the case that identifying and measuring the benefits to be achieved is an essential stage in any legal project implementation. The structures and processes need successful implementation to help realize those benefits. The organization may not identify these benefits before implementing change but capturing them is essential. Benefits realization will extend beyond the implementation timescale, as benefits are often not realized until well after the go-live date.

Communication

On most projects, the first communication task undertaken by the legal change management team is the project launch announcement. Even though this may seem to have come from the project sponsor, the actual drafting will likely be by the project team itself. At the project launch, the team should inform the broader company about the project, its objectives, the expected benefits, key milestones, and members of the project team. There are many ways to transmit communications through an organization, which will often depend on the culture within the company. For example, it could be that the company’s intranet is a repository for updates and general project news, as well as other means – newsletters, departmental meetings, workshops, e-mail, etc.

It is essential to have a communication plan within the wider project plan, identifying formal information-related events as the project unfolds. As well as progress updates, inform employees of new process designs and changes. The more widely you communicate potential changes, the more likely people will understand, rationalize the benefits, and be open and accepting. It will also help with identifying possible project early adopters, who will prove invaluable when it comes to reinforcing the changes among their peers.

Readiness

Training is often left to the end of the project plan but is critical in preparing the company for a change. The project team should identify essential elements such as the approach to training, the delivery styles to be deployed, the level and nature of end-user help documentation, and how the team will measure the training program’s success. Training courses and documentation development must fully incorporate the business process information alongside the change messages and reasons for change. Courses and documents must match the depth of knowledge different groups of individuals need, from overviews to power-user level.

The organization will need help desk services, hand-holding and intensive one-to-one assistance, particularly in the immediate post-go-live period. Some software vendors provide this, but you may need to arrange it yourself, and your law firms will need support too. This investment will not only support the go-live process but will also serve as a knowledge base for new joiner training programs and possible future phases of implementation.

Related to training is the usability of the software you purchase or build. Do users need to learn a new interface? Is there another login to remember? How easy to understand is it? Many projects fail because users cannot get to grips with the system and find it easier to stick with the old process.

Change, in its broadest sense, is constant in organizations today and can be driven by many different forces, including customers, markets, and technology. Yet research shows that many change initiatives fail to accomplish their intended outcomes and may even limit the potential of an organization and its people.

The consequences of not managing change effectively can be devastating and long-lasting, so all company-wide stakeholders must understand the potential issues and equip themselves with techniques to support change-management initiatives.

Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space helps customers plan their change management and user acceptance initiatives, as we understand how vital it is to your project’s success.

Learn more about BusyLamp by requesting a demo today.

What is Legal Operations?

Posted on April 4, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Legal operations encompasses all the legal department’s responsibilities that are not the law itself. This includes spend management, efficiency and productivity, communication, vendor management, technology, change management, and data analysis. The most specific definition on offer is from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), which umbrellas legal operations over 12 competencies that every legal function should aspire to have at three maturity levels; you can find this resource on their website.

Typical roles and responsibilities of legal operations include:

  • Defining and driving initiatives to improve efficiency and process workflows
  • Managing outside counsel guidelines, legal spend (visibility, control, and reduction) and department budget
  • Optimizing law firm performance for maximum value for money
  • Implementing, measuring, and analyzing metrics that inform decision-making, turning them into actions that deliver improvements
  • Implementing technology to achieve these goals
  • Working cross-functionally to demonstrate the legal department’s value within the organization to the business
  • Effectively executing these functions to produce benefits that improve the productivity and profitability of the legal department, allowing the team to demonstrate their value to the business
  • Helping to shape focus areas for the department and defining areas for short- and long-term improvement.
  • Introducing metrics and KPIs for measuring and benchmarking these focus areas.
  • Deploying dedicated legal operations resources undistracted by the practice of law to focus on raising the profile of Legal and its value to the business.
  • Building stronger, data-driven, transparent relationships with external providers to maximize value
  • Building more strategic partnerships with outside counsel and service providers.
  • Standardization and automation of repetitive or administrative tasks such as invoice review so that the team can spend more time on high-value work.
  • Encouraging consistent use of technology and processes across the team and integrating with systems in the broader business for company-wide strategic analytics.
  • Influencing data-driven staffing, matter resourcing and other decisions.

The function has been around longer than you might realize. CLOC, for example, was formed in the USA back in 2010. In our survey of legal departments, the Legal Operations Benchmarking Report, only 2% of departments were not focusing on legal operations at some level.

So, what’s driving the recent prevalence of the legal operations function? In the 1980s and earlier, corporate legal departments were almost entirely focused on risk and compliance and advising the business. The legal function was the cost of doing business. Over time, business has become more complex, regulated, and global. With that, demand for legal services (and therefore costs) has increased, with increased pressure to control these costs and complexities. Organizations now expect the legal department to manage budgets and efficiencies like other departments.

General Counsel are under more pressure than ever to justify their legal costs and improve the efficiency of their department. With this demand to make the legal department act more “like a business” comes a need for cost control and process improvement. The challenge for a traditional legal team is that the skills needed to do this effectively are separate from a standard lawyer’s repertoire. This has led to the need and rapid spread of legal operations-specific technology, processes, and people.

Options are available for legal departments that need to cover legal operations responsibilities. They can upskill existing legal team members, bring in commercial managers from elsewhere to manage the legal operations, use consultants, or hire an experienced legal operations manager from outside.

An effective legal operations manager combines knowledge of the practice of law, an understanding of the business and its challenges, and commercial skills. Besides the technical skills of change management, commercials, data analysis and technology, a successful legal operations manager can navigate the business and manage multiple stakeholders. As a support function, if the manager is unaware of the challenges, they will not be able to solve them. They should also demonstrate a proven track record of transformation, efficiency, and cost control initiatives.

For example, a lawyer moving into this role may need upskilling in data and technology. A business manager moving into this role will need upskilling in managing law firms and the legal industry. All the necessary skills are essential throughout the team, even if they are not the legal operations manager. Don’t split the team into lawyers and non-lawyers but have the whole team working together operationally towards common goals. Identify where your skills gaps are and look to address these when hiring the legal operations manager.

Even in teams with no legal operations manager, the responsibilities of legal operations are still getting done – even if they don’t have the “legal operations” name. Around 44% of the Legal Operations Benchmarking Report respondents have legal operations tasks assigned to one or more individuals not solely dedicated to the legal operations function. In this case, ensure there is someone in the business who oversees the responsibility, usually the General Counsel. If the skills exist throughout the team and there is an individual responsible for the strategy, your legal department can achieve operational goals without a dedicated manager.

You may, however, need to introduce non-lawyers into the team if the change, technology, data, and commercial skills are otherwise lacking. We do advocate hiring a dedicated resource to manage legal operations. Without a dedicated resource, operations will take a back seat to the practice of advising the business, especially during busy or under-resourced periods. A dedicated manager ensures operational goals get the focus and attention they need.

In today’s business world, the combination of skilled personnel and software fuels goals such as transparency, efficiency gains and data analysis. Legal Operations is no exception, proven by glancing at the world’s leading legal operations teams. No one among them does not rely on legal operations tools in their daily work.

Some of the applications and benefits of technology include:

  • Creating workflows for repetitive tasks automates manual processes and improves productivity
  • Real-time dashboards on matter or contract statuses give visibility to stakeholders
  • Legal e-billing ensures law firms adhere to billing guidelines which saves money and time
  • Organizations can compare law firm prices and performance for more transparent and fair reviews and negotiations
  • Knowledge management tools make it easier to collaborate, search and find information and documents
  • Consistent data creates reports and analytical capabilities to enable decision making

Our Legal Operations Benchmarking Report found a high correlation between legal operations maturity and the breadth of legal technology used. Whether the results compare country, industry, or company size, the result is the same; there is a correlation between mature legal operations and technology usage. Using technology to assist in achieving goals means greater success, which leads to growing legal operations departments and more advanced capabilities and goals. But a warning: legal as a department is typically behind the curve when it comes to digitalization, and although the benefits of legal technology are apparent, adoption and change management issues can slow down your route to success. Look for experience in this area when building your team.

E-billing, legal spend, and matter management are solutions often implemented for legal operations because it’s easy to achieve a fast ROI. As many of the benefits are directly related to cost savings, the solution soon pays for itself. For example, automatic enforcement of billing guidelines spots errors a human invoice reviewer can miss, generating considerable savings in the first year of software usage. Real-time cost transparency, such as Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space‘s Work in Progress tracker, removes surprises when the invoice arrives and allows for more accurate budgeting.

In addition, matter and spend management solutions deliver many efficiency and collaboration benefits, such as:

  • Invoice processing is automated, faster than a human reviewer, reduces manual errors, and frees up lawyers to do more valuable and engaging work.
  • Reports and dashboards are generated automatically or built quickly, using a centralized database of matter and spend information. No more hours and days wasted compiling information from multiple sources of on and offline data. They also improve the visibility of actual and upcoming spend and flag high-risk matters.
  • Centralized matter and documents improve collaboration internally and with law firms and enable fact-based negotiations and reviews.
  • The data generated by using technology can be analyzed and used to make strategic decisions to further improve legal operations and Legal’s value to the business.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.space.

Using Legal Data to Drive Decision-Making 

Posted on April 4, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Strategic decision-making is crucial to the long-term success of any organization. But do you have the right solution that enables you to make more informed decisions? With BusyLamp, your Legal team can track and analyze legal spend, identify areas for cost savings and make informed decisions about the allocation of legal resources. By providing real-time cost transparency and customizable dashboards, Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space helps to make data-driven decisions that drive business success.

Want to hear about BusyLamp in action? Here are five real-world, game-changing use cases that show the difference BusyLamp can make.

This in-house team was under pressure from the business to accurately forecast external legal spend. However, this is only possible after removing anomalies, as matters such as litigation and M&A are unpredictable. The business will always pay for this type of work, regardless of budget and where spend is regarding budget. The legal department, therefore, agreed with the business that they would deliver forecasting on business-as-usual spend only.

The team deployed BusyLamp to calculate their business-as-usual spend on a monthly and annual basis. This is easy with BusyLamp reporting, as they can exclude litigation and M&A data categories when creating a report. This report gets sent to stakeholders regularly and enables daily tracking of business-as-usual spend. This data is further analyzed to understand what this spend looks like by jurisdiction, matter type, internal client, and more so that they can provide more detailed forecasting.

Our client has dramatically improved their forecasting accuracy, and the business is happy with the level of detail they now provide.

Making a Business Case for More Headcount

A very under-resourced internal legal team often outsourced matters because they could not meet internal deadlines. They used BusyLamp reporting to understand their spend by matter type over a year, assessing what they spend on each practice area and the PQE of the external lawyer doing the work.

They could spot that a lot of general commercial work was being outsourced purely because of the capacity of their team. They quickly understood how much they were spending on these matters in total, so they evaluated what the cost would be if they could work on these matters internally instead.

Legal Operations created a business case to grow the team by two additional personnel. After approval, they successfully added two general commercial lawyers to the team, reducing the volume of work outsourced to their law firms. This resulted in a substantial reduction in their total legal spend.

Deciding Which Firms to Outsource Work

After using BusyLamp for some time, this in-house team decided they wanted to collate qualitative data and the quantitative data already held in the system. They chose to use BusyLamp surveys to measure the quality of the work completed by firms. The team looked at the seniority of the external lawyer, the score given by the in-house lawyer assessing the work, and the types of matters.

They identified that one of their law firms had scored an average of 9/10 for IP work, with a partner doing the work at a premium rate. Another one of their law firms had scored an average of 8/10 for IP work, with an associate doing the work.

They considered that 8/10 was still of sufficiently good quality but at a much lower rate than the partner at the other firm. The team allocated more IP work to the Associate, with the most critical IP work still going to the other firm’s partner. This resulted in a significant saving in costs for IP matters without compromising on quality or value for money.

Reaching Volume Discount Milestones

In this case, a customer had negotiated volume discounts with the law firms; however, they had no way of tracking when firms reached the spend milestones. After implementing BusyLamp, the company scheduled several reports for periodic automatic delivery, including monitoring spend by firm.

Today, legal operations know the exact spend for each law firm. When the firm approaches a rebate or discount milestone, the in-house team allocates as much work as is reasonable and appropriate to these firms to hit the milestone and activate the discount. This significantly reduces annual external spend.

Getting Visibility of Spend by Activity Type

By using “spend by activity type” reporting in BusyLamp, this in-house legal team realized they were spending a lot of money on “internal communications” with their law firms. This spend included many matter types that did not usually require this amount of internal communication allocation.

The team contacted their law firms and requested that the correct lawyer be allocated to their matters in the first instance to reduce internal communications. They also informed the law firms that the organization would no longer pay for internal communications. Their law firms agreed to the terms.

Internal communications were then added to their billing guidelines so that any line items relating to this activity type would get flagged for review. The change helped our client to reduce their spend and the amount of time their law firm partners spend completing their matters.

How BusyLamp Helps

With BusyLamp, Legal departments can:

  • See their legal matters and spend from the entire business in one place.
  • Understand where legal budget is being spent; what types of matters, in what jurisdictions, with which firms
  • Stop wasting time compiling spreadsheets – reports can be built in an easy-to-use report wizard.
  • Save even more time by automating delivery of reports that are needed frequently.
  • Create reports on any field within the system to understand your matters and make data-driven strategic decisions, whether that be to reduce legal spend, manage legal risk, or evaluate law firm performance.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.space.

Legal’s Brand Image: A Shining Opportunity for Positive Influence

Posted on March 23, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Legal Operations

Legal is most often viewed as a stellar guardian of the enterprise and outstanding advisor — yet its perception as a business partner is not quite as golden. In these uncertain economic times when businesses are searching for both cost efficiency and growth, what can Legal do to reconcile its reputation and magnify its material impact?

In business as in life, image is essential. It is also a principal focus of the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report*, which reconfirms one of the most prominent findings from its inaugural edition: Four in five (78%) corporate employees perceive Legal’s enduring image as a trustworthy protector of the business that imparts sage advice.

Yet even though respondents view Legal as an authority figure and business protector, nearly three in four (73%) do not consider Legal an approachable business partner. In fact, many view Legal as a “bottleneck,” as “adding unnecessary roadblocks,” or “simply expect to experience holdups” when interacting with legal teams. As a result, relationships between Legal and its internal clients have declined year-over-year (YoY) in every department — by almost 10% in HR, 18% in Finance, 30% in Sales, 27% in Marketing, and 41% in Procurement.

Image is (Almost) Everything

Though Legal’s inherent image has remained, the world has changed dramatically over this past year. The bullish economy at the outset of 2022’s data collection is now besieged by the effects of inflation and layoffs due to the macroeconomic climate. This itself had been sparked by the continuing effects of the global pandemic and social and political unrest that have set off a chain reaction of privacy concerns, regulatory revisions, and disruptions to overseas vendors and supply chains.

Cost containment and EBITDA are now the terms of the day, and legal departments are no exception to enduring employee burnout and smaller budgets. For a function established to protect the business, it is not overwhelmingly startling, then, that when so much seems fragile and beyond our control, trust in Legal might experience a stress fracture of sorts.

There is a silver lining, however: The major finding in the 2023 ELR Report is that Legal can play a meaningful part in impacting business materiality, growth, and operational efficiency. Right now, Legal has the opportunity to reset expectations and reshape its reputation in the eyes of its internal clients and executive teams. Here are three ways that Legal can “up” both its positive image and material impact, especially in these times of economic uncertainty.

1. Collaborating more intently.

The 2023 ELR Report reveals that nearly half (43%) of the study’s non-legal respondents state that better communication and collaboration is the most essential way Legal can support its internal clients. Of course, execution of matters is always important. Providing better law firm or outside counsel management is as well. But what clients say they need more from Legal is more involved client service within the business, and that starts with better communication and greater responsiveness.

2. Accelerating processes and workflows.

While there are many capacities in which Legal shines, almost half (45%) of corporate employee respondents feel that Legal can be too slow. Another 15% cite the fact that they feel processes are overly manual, which also has a negative impact on efficiency. Some legal matters do take longer than others, of course, but this is where technology — including AI — can play a significant role in keeping everything from spend management to contracts moving.

3. Championing corporate culture.

Another way Legal can demonstrate its charter as protector is with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Although current macroeconomic conditions may force companies to put the bottom line ahead of investment in cultural initiatives, Legal has a powerful base from which to influence DEI: More than half (57%) say Legal’s impact on corporate culture is positive. That fact must remain top of mind for Legal — to provide a safe and equitable work environment, to elevate problem-solving and competitive differentiation, and to foster and nurture lasting trust.

Reputation, it has been said, is the echo that remains once we are no longer in the room. It can make or break us — and that goes for legal departments as well. Fortunately, Legal has a firm foundation on which to continue building, with its enduring image as trustworthy protector and advisor. Yet Legal doesn’t exist only to protect.

This is Legal’s metamorphosis moment to evolve its image into that of a greater, more strategic business partner — by communicating more deeply with clients, accelerating efficiency, and embracing cultural and technological innovation. In turn, Legal will have a more positive and direct influence on the growth and materiality of every corner of the enterprise.

Read Chapter 1 of the 2023 ELR Report to discover new and enduring perceptions of the legal department, how corporate employees view their interactions and relationships with Legal, and ways in which Legal can evolve its brand image to more directly impact revenue generation, growth, and operational efficiency for its businesses.

*The 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report is the second installment of a multinational annual study spotlighting year-over-year changes in the brand image of corporate legal departments through the eyes of their internal clients.

Experts Evaluate the Potential of Legal Contract Management Software and AI  

Posted on March 23, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract management software also referred to as contract lifecycle management, has made significant headway in the world of in-house counsel, racking up impressive stats such as reducing the average sales cycle by 24% and saving 9% on annual average costs. But what happens when you combine legal contract management software with AI?

A panel of legal and AI experts from organizations including Adobe and Onit, presented at Legalweek on just this topic, examining the potential impact of AI on managing contracts and how to start implementing AI into your contract management workflows. The conversation touched on the business value of using AI in legal ops, the efficiencies AI can bring to your business and future trends in AI, among other things.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways for AI and legal contract management software.

How to get started with AI

One of the easiest places for legal departments to start using contract AI and automation is in common use cases like reviewing NDAs and other routine contracts because these are high-value but time-consuming activities. The need to increase speed is high, but the risk is relatively low.

On the applicability of AI to law

AI has strong applications to both the business side of law and the practice of law. From a business perspective, contract AI can help with important, routine tasks like invoice review and billing. As for the practice of law, AI is ideal for tasks like tracking 20 different clauses in the 56,000 NDAs you handle each year, significantly boosting productivity and efficiency.

Do your research

To get the most out of your AI tools, you want your relationship with your technology vendor to be a true partnership, and you want to apply your own judgment to why your solutions are doing what they’re doing. With both your vendor and your solution, you want to retain a certain level of control to ensure you’re getting the results you want.

Have a strategy

When you start implementing AI with your legal contract management software, you don’t want to be thinking just six or twelve months down the road but further down the horizon. When you create a longer-term vision, you’ll be better able to take into account the needs of your various stakeholders and secure their buy-in for your chosen AI solutions.

Laying the groundwork for adoption

Many companies find it easiest to start with a single use case or data set and train their AI models from there. Once you have your first success, it will be easier to roll out your new technology across other business units and the organization as a whole.

AI and compliance

When you use AI for contract lifecycle management, your tools can help you stay on top of the constantly changing federal and state regulatory landscape. AI can assess your legacy contracts against new regulatory changes and ensure that any necessary updates are made.

Contract AI and CLM

AI helps in the pre-signature phase of contracts by creating centralized workflows for contract management and templates that allow your team to draft, review and redline contracts with just a click. AI also assists in the post-signature phase by extracting actionable intelligence from your contracts that can serve as the basis for informed decision-making.

On justifying spending money on AI to the C-suite

According to a recent study, users saw on average a 51.5% gain in productivity after using AI for contract review. That’s an almost immediate gain in productivity, and some use cases saw even better results. Moreover, the efficiency continued to increase over time as users became more familiar with the tools and the tools got smarter. The data extraction capabilities of AI contract tools also help to reduce risk and stop revenue leakage, which has a positive financial impact on the business as a whole.

Future trends in AI

While AI was originally targeted more toward law firms, the focus has shifted to in-house teams. We’re likely to see an even greater emphasis on using AI in contract drafting and CLM this year.

If you’d like to learn more about AI and contract lifecycle management, here are two helpful webinar replays:

  • The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo – Every company needs a faster and more efficient contracting process that enhances risk and spend management, improves revenue and profit margins, and increases visibility into counterparty relationships. The Lenovo Legal Department’s transformation journey is delivering value to the business by centralizing the global legal transactional support resources, standardizing the contract process across the company and optimizing the process with technology.
  • AI Mythbusters: Deprogramming Misconceptions – Confusion and misinformation around what Artificial Intelligence is and how it works is widespread, particularly in the legal technology space. Watch this webinar to debunk ten common misconceptions and learn how to decipher marketing-speak to separate true AI from just software.

OnitX Legal Holds Management: An Easier Path Through a Challenging Trail

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The legal holds process is often a painful one; it’s also a necessary part of doing business, as a critical and extremely visible cornerstone of litigation and e-discovery. Unfortunately, too many legal holds products on the market present a poor fit for legal organizations. Most options for legal holds come built for specialized teams, with complex software, manual processes, and a highly technical focus; they’re built for e-discovery first, with the idea of legal holds as an afterthought (at best).

This presents a massive challenge to mainstream legal departments, as these options lack the accessibility, convenience, and straightforward management required to secure a smooth legal holds process throughout the organization. The good news? There is a better legal holds option out there.

A Simpler Solution for Legal Departments: The Benefits of OnitX Legal Holds Management

Purpose-built for mainstream legal teams, OnitX Legal Holds Management delivers an easy-to-use, easy-to-initiate solution for this vital task. OnitX Legal Holds Management offers a straightforward four-step process for initiating holds:

  • Select the custodians you want to put on the hold. A pre-configured integration works with virtually every HR and back-end system to ensure distribution to the correct parties. One-click options release or restore custodians from legal holds as the needs of the matter change.
  • Draft and review the legal hold notice. Utilize the Legal Holds Management template library to cut down on creation time and use for future holds.
  • Review the legal hold notice with essential parties. Approval steps can be configured and assigned to the appropriate reviewers.
  • Distribute the legal hold. Custom dashboards and reports allow organizations to check in on the status of legal holds and analyze key metrics.

Another benefit of OnitX Legal Holds Management? Significantly improved communication with essential custodians throughout the organization. Instead of a time-intensive administrative task — chasing down non-responsive custodians to secure their involvement – Legal Holds Management provides a streamlined, automated way to communicate the legal hold status to involved parties. Communication features include:

  • Automated custom scheduling of communications to remind custodians of the legal hold status — and alert others to non-responsive personnel
  • Proxy acknowledgment to reduce the burden on key executives, empowering assistants and other proxies to keep the legal holds workflow going
  • Custodian digest emails so custodians can quickly see which holds they are on and what they must do
  • Custodian dashboards to easily resolve all holds in one space

Finally, Legal Holds Management takes the pressure off an organization’s IT department by delivering simplified and comprehensive document preservation through Integration (powered by Workato). Legal no longer needs to coordinate with overworked IT staff to ensure the department secures every must-keep document. Legal Holds Management removes the ask for IT support with easy, fast preservation of all necessary files and includes:

  • Single-checkbox enablement by legal staff, with no IT help required (beyond initial setup)
  • Slack preservation by channel and direct message
  • Google Vault preservation for docs, chat, and/or email on a service level
  • Microsoft 365 email and Teams preservation with the click of a button

Legal Holds Management also delivers organizations complete auditability, getting a complete trail of legal hold activity and complying with Electronically Stored Information (ESI) requests for overseas employees.

Seamless Integration with Matter Management

In an economic environment where the organization expects every department to drive business revenue, Legal must take the initiative to create streamlined processes and make the most out of its resources. Legal Holds Management integrates seamlessly with OnitX Matter Management where the initiation of a litigation matter starts.

The simplified, user-friendly, and accessible Legal Holds Management gives Legal the efficient edge it needs.

Learn more about OnitX Legal Holds Management here.

Powering Scalable and Rapid Integrations: Onit’s Partnership with Workato 

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Legal Operations

A streamlined, scalable, and rapid application integration layer is essential to the success of a SaaS platform. A modern platform must ensure connectivity and communication with business-critical applications and data sources throughout the organization. This makes it easy for users to perform workflows that cross over multiple applications. Integrations also deliver critical connections between the platform and stand-alone analytic tools, enabling powerful insights derived from the platform’s data repository.

If application integrations are seamless and easy to implement, the solution can do what it must without any headaches for vendor or customer — and quickly secure its return on investment. On the other hand, a platform that fails to integrate rapidly with other necessary business applications can be devastating for an organization. Poor integration can bring about a loss in productivity, wasted time and resources, and overall platform failure (not to mention the catastrophic budgetary consequences).

OnitX, a smart workflow platform for sophisticated legal matters and contract solutions, has introduced a scalable and secure integration layer powered by Workato. One of the most honored companies in the space (recognition includes a coveted place on the “Forbes” Cloud 100 list and the “Leader” designation from Gartner five years in a row), Workato delivers simple connections of applications that match business needs and reinforce integrated workflows.

The new OnitX integration layer offers SSO authentication, tailored resources, and custom integrations. It also provides unlimited scalability, a centralized admin console, and high-end security features that allow for future growth, easy management, and complete customer and vendor safety. Powerful auditability features enable IT departments and compliance efforts to track the digital trail of essential documents and communications. Additionally, Workato API abstraction makes it simple to adopt new software versions.

Additionally, the platform makes it simple for organizations to preserve APIs as future versions roll out — keeping integrations up to date, so clients do not have to worry about time-consuming version maintenance.

The OnitX platform provides three integration options:

  • Standard OnitX integrations for typical applications that are part of legal matters and contract workflows
  • Custom integrations built by Onit to support the unique needs of individual corporations
  • Partner or customer-built integrations later this year using the OnitX Integration Builder

Several standard OnitX Integrations are either available today or will be available shortly, including:

  • OnitX Legal Holds Management integrations: Allows for the seamless preservation-in-place of electronic documents through integrations with standard productivity tools such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack.
  • Salesforce integration for OnitX CLM: Gives sales teams the transparency to always know the location and status of their contracts within Salesforce, including agreements coming up for renewal.
  • SAP Ariba integration for OnitX CLM: Enables users to initiate contract workspace creation within SAP Ariba and streamline the flow of supplier data into OnitX CLM, reducing data re-entry and improving efficiency.

To learn more about the OnitX platform, please read this blog.

Introducing Onit Catalyst – Upping the AI Game for ELM and CLM

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Legal Operations

Since the birth of artificial intelligence at a conference held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, it has made rapid strides. In recent years, AI has garnered considerable investment; as of the end of 2020, the top 100 AI startups globally had a combined valuation of over $258 billion.

However, in some regards, AI technology has become a commodity, with many of the technologies being part of the open source community. Its application to specific business or technical use cases that depend on models built by a combination of data scientists and engineers, functional or industry experts, and a large amount of curated data makes AI a valuable business contributor.

We have been at the forefront of incorporating AI technology into our product as we seek to add more customer value through automation and intelligence. Beyond AI-based products developed in-house, we have acquired various AI-based products and technologies to bolster our capabilities.

We are excited to announce the new brand name of our AI-enabled products purpose-built to transform ELM and CLM is Onit Catalyst. A chemical catalyst is an inert substance, but when added to a reaction, it accelerates it. Onit is applying AI in the same way – combining it with your data, use cases, and other Onit products – to accelerate the value you receive from it. The Onit Catalyst products were previously marketed under the Precedent and Bodhala brands.

Onit Catalyst provides actionable insights from legal matters or contract data through better reporting, dashboards, benchmarks, and legal business intelligence. They can be implemented alongside an existing third-party ELM or CLM implementation or with the OnitX platform, to which they have tight and seamless integrations. With Onit Catalyst, we have done the data science for you. In addition, our AI Center of Excellence has applied AI and other analytic techniques to address real and practice use cases related to enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. Powering the Onit Catalyst products is a dataset that includes $47B+ in legal billings, over 200,000 timekeepers, 8,900 law firms, and more than 1 million assisted legal interactions each year.

Below are the products within the Onit Catalyst family:

Onit Catalyst for ELM
Proactive law firm management using legal business intelligence so legal can run like a business		Onit Catalyst for CLM
Smart management of legal documents via process automation, augmentation, and intelligence
Onit Catalyst Report Cards
Onit Catalyst Quarterly Business Review
Onit Catalyst Rate Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Matter Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Rate Proposal Analyzer
Onit Catalyst Comparative Analysis		Onit Catalyst ReviewAI
Onit Catalyst Contract Extraction

Onit Catalyst products will always work best with the OnitX platform to form smart solutions that provide insights at the point of decision and need.

Contact us to learn how Onit Catalyst can enhance your ELM and CLM workflows today.

From Manual to Magical: The Power of AI in Contract Management

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

World Commerce & Contracting states, “Smarter contracting is a new vision for how modern enterprises should experience contracting. A vision that elevates the role of contracts as a source of the real-time data needed to manage the complexity of today’s business environment.”

Contract management is a vital process in any business, and it can be complex and time-consuming. However, contracts are the backbone of any business relationship and must be well-managed to satisfy all parties involved. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software has been around for some time, but the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) re-introduced innovation to this field. Whether you are part of corporate legal, procurement, or sales operations, you need reliable tools to streamline workflows, reduce manual workloads, and increase productivity. So, what’s required to make this vision a reality?

By 2024, Gartner predicts a 50% reduction in manual effort for contract review % due to the adoption of AI-based contract analytics solutions. While technology is a vital part of this puzzle, it needs to be approached differently. AI-powered CLM is the way businesses go from manual to magical. AI is infinitely more effective when closely interwoven into enterprise functions connecting people, integrating systems and data, and facilitating the flow of intelligence.

Introducing Onit’s Smart CLM Solution

This is why Onit developed Smart CLM. Onit’s Smart CLM solution streamlines the contract management process pre- and post-signature, reducing the time and resources required to manage contracts. The solution uses AI to automate the review of contracts and extract essential data from them, such as key terms and obligations, dates, and other relevant information. As a result, businesses can quickly and easily identify potential risks and opportunities in their contracts, which can help them make informed decisions and negotiate better terms.

Key to Onit’s Smart CLM is the tight integration of OnitX CLM with two new products, Onit Catalyst ReviewAI and Contract Extraction. Catalyst ReviewAI utilizes advanced AI algorithms to analyze and extract key contract data points, such as dates, clauses, and obligations. As a result, you can quickly identify potential risks and issues and prioritize your work accordingly. By using ReviewAI, you can locate misaligned contract terms and missed renewal dates, reducing the risk of errors or misinterpretation. In addition, with powerful analytics and reporting capabilities enhanced by the Risk Analysis Dashboard, you can make informed decisions, negotiate better contract terms, and reduce your organization’s legal risk.

Contracts are only sometimes in a centralized repository, obligations are ambiguous, rules and regulations constantly change, and market trends and business decisions can send you in different directions. The newest addition to Onit’s Smart CLM solution, Catalyst Contract Extraction, solves this challenge and creates structure from unstructured contracts by automating and augmenting contract data extraction to report and act on previously hidden information. Catalyst Contract Extraction uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the text in contracts and identify key phrases and clauses. It also uses advanced machine learning algorithms to automate bulk contract migration and accelerate the repapering process; Contract Extraction also locates poor data and contract clauses that may impact your contract’s compliance.

With Contract Extraction, you can reduce the time and resources required for legacy contract migration, manual document review, and management, ultimately minimizing the risk of errors or misinterpretation.

The Benefits of Onit’s Smart CLM Solution

One of the most significant benefits of using AI in contract management is that it can save time and reduce errors. Manual contract review is a time-consuming, error-prone process, especially when dealing with large volumes of contracts. With Onit Smart CLM, businesses can automate much of the review process, significantly reducing the time and resources required. As a result, companies can focus on more strategic activities, such as negotiating better terms and managing relationships with their partners.

Another benefit of using Smart CLM is that it can help businesses identify potential risks and opportunities in their contracts. By extracting essential data from contracts, companies can quickly identify areas of risk exposure, such as non-compliance with regulations or breaches of confidentiality. As a result, you can now proactively mitigate these risks and protect their business interests. Similarly, by identifying contract opportunities, businesses can negotiate better terms and improve their bottom line.

Onit’s Smart CLM, comprised of OnitX, Catalyst ReviewAI, and Catalyst Contract Extraction, is designed to help enterprise business professionals work more efficiently, make informed decisions, increase compliance, and reduce the legal risk for their organizations. By automating much of the contract review process, businesses can save time and resources, reduce errors, and identify potential risks and opportunities in their contracts. In addition, with the help of AI, companies can manage their contracts more efficiently and effectively, ultimately leading to better business outcomes. So why wait? Try Onit’s Smart CLM today and see the difference they can make for your enterprise.

Schedule a call with us today to see how Onit’s Smart CLM can help your organization.

Introducing OnitX – A Modern Platform for Transforming Legal-Related Workflows

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

We previously shared how 2023 is the year for every legal department to optimize their operations to deliver critical business outcomes with fewer resources and budget. It is our opinion that Legal needs to adopt a platform model approach to serve the internal demand for legal-related services more efficiently, so the legal team can spend more substantial time on initiatives impacting the entire enterprise.

To usher in the era of optimized legal operations, Onit is proud to announce OnitX, the smart workflow platform for sophisticated legal matters and contract solutions that speeds the business. The “X” represents the innovative nature of Onit and signifies how the platform is highly configurable to customers’ unique needs, provides integrations with a broad range of technologies and business applications, and ensures a path to the future with extensibility to support new features and capabilities.

OnitX delivers several key customer benefits. First, it provides better visibility to legal services demand, which can feed an internal quarterly “report card” and give the data needed to forecast future needs. It supports greater operational efficiency for the legal department through user self-service, more seamless collaboration, and intelligent automation of legal workflows. Finally, OnitX enables better management of all legal resources, such as a deeper awareness of the “what and who” of legal operation, an improved ability to balance work done internally versus by outside counsel, and a greater understanding of outside counsel activity and spending so you can proactively manage outside law firm work.

OnitX is the evolution of the Onit Apptitude workflow platform that forms the foundation to many of Onit’s products. It includes the critical layers of a modern SaaS platform and adds several innovations:

  • Smart new rate approval through embedded visibility to rate benchmarking data that includes $47.6B+ in legal billings, 200,000+ timekeepers, and 8,900 law firms.
  • An integrated ELM solution tailored for European legal departments
  • Actionable contract insights provided by risk dashboards and mining contract language
  • An easy-to-use Legal Holds Management capability that streamlines compliance and reduces risk
  • A visual forms builder for the workflow engine that makes it easier to build applications.
  • A new, scalable capability to build third-party application integrations powered by Workato, an industry-leading iPaaS technology provider, as well as better and scalable data integration capabilities with Data-as-a-Service

OnitX also seamlessly integrates with the Onit Catalyst family of AI-enabled products to provide smart solutions for ELM and CLM.

The following products are available within the OnitX platform:

Contact us today to learn how OnitX can be your modern matter and contract solutions platform.