Author: Onit

Introducing Legal Rate Benchmarking 2.0

Posted on May 23, 2022 by - Legal Operations

Rates for legal services are a black box. Are you getting a good rate? Are you overpaying for partners but getting a deal on associates?  

Historically it has been nearly impossible to know if your rates were market-appropriate. Available benchmarking reports were less-than-accurate, they often didn’t compare apples-to-apples, and they didn’t allow clients to understand the impact of their rates on their spend. 

We’ve got good news. Those days are GONE. 

Introducing Bodhala’s Rate Benchmarking 2.0 – a transparent comparison of your effective outside counsel rates against both the market and your panel – all the way down to the named timekeeper level. 

This new and improved solution delivers what legal departments have been waiting for — accurate benchmarks and usable insights on rates. We enhanced our proprietary rate benchmarks by analyzing cost impact, including estimated rate increases, historical analysis, and much more. 

Budgeting, rate negotiation, and internal reporting just got a whole lot easier! 

Let’s dive into what’s new and improved!

Compare Your Benchmarks from Firm to Firm 

Comparing each firm to the market is important — but understanding how all of your firms compare to each other is also critical. This comprehensive view of your firms’ benchmarks gives you a high-level overview of how your firms stack up against each other and the market, providing health scores for each firm. 

Historical Impact Analysis

Customers often ask us, “If I had paid market-appropriate rates, how would that have impacted my overall spend?” Great question — and now we include the answer front and center. 

We analyze your whole spend across your selected practice area, calculating how much you would have saved overall had your rates been closer to market standards. Then we break it down by timekeeper level, giving you a clear line of sight into the highest impact opportunities at your next rate negotiation.

Named Timekeeper Benchmarks & Cost Analysis

Breaking down benchmarks by timekeeper level is important. But we all know that not all timekeepers are created equal. Every team has its key players — their “Lebrons” — and they usually come at considerable cost. More often than not, superstars are worth the money. But are you being charged superstar prices for utility players? 

With granular benchmarking data about individual timekeepers, you can ensure you’re paying appropriate rates for every timekeeper. 

White-Glove Service & Expert Advisory

What if you don’t have internal resources to focus on benchmarking? Or you want expert advice on how to leverage your benchmarks to drive better outcomes at your next rate negotiation? 

No problem!

Bodhala’s Client Success Team offers white-glove services, including everything from highlighting key savings opportunities and creating sizzle-worthy decks to share with your internal stakeholders, to consulting on tactical strategies for rate negotiation and staffing recommendations. 

Whatever kind of support your team needs to meet your goals, we’ve got you covered.  

Ready to start running legal like a business?

When it comes to your law firm rates, you have more leverage than you realize. You just don’t have the data yet. Fortunately, with new Bodhala’s Rate Benchmarking, it’s now easy to budget smarter, negotiate harder, and get more value from our outside counsel.  

Test drive Rate Benchmarking for FREE!

Not ready to commit? Want to see it in action for free? 

Check out our FREE Rate Benchmarking Report to benchmark any firm in the AmLaw 200 across 10 top practice areas. No commitment, no need to give us a call — just a couple of clicks and you’ll have your benchmark.

GET MY FREE BENCHMARK

Which Internal Teams Work Best with Legal?

Posted on May 23, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Trusted relationships are everything.

According to Lord Richard Layard, today’s foremost happiness researcher and program director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, what matters most in business is what matters most in life: cultivating a sense of belonging and purpose bolstered by meaningful connection.

Any team, be it Sherlock and Watson or the Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams, possesses a shared objective, goal, or destination. Every player must be invested in doing the work needed to arrive at that pinnacle. And each individual must feel a connection with their colleagues or teammates to want to achieve that success together.

It’s no different for business teams. If you’ve ever wondered how you can enhance your relationship with internal clients, you aren’t alone. It turns out the status of the relationship with Legal can differ by department.

The Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report – a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany – found that the majority (77%) of enterprise employees believe that Legal is exceptional at negotiating on the behalf of their companies. However, less than one in five (19%) feels Legal prioritizes its internal clients, and the status of those relationships can vary across the enterprise.

So what accounts for this disconnect among departments? And what can be done to change it?

Satisfied with safeguarding

The ELR Report revealed that enterprise employees believe Legal’s charter is to protect the company, assets, and people. Additionally, 46% of all global employees consider Legal a trusted advisor. It makes sense, then, that the more liability-prone departments have a higher rate of positive engagement with Legal: Around the globe, 62% of employees from Human Resources (HR) and Finance note positive relations with Legal.

Even more impressively, seven in 10 U.S. respondents are pleased with Legal’s interactions with HR. Employees in France cite collegiality with both HR and Finance at 66%. In the United Kingdom, 64% tout a good working relationship with HR; 62% say the same of Finance, whereas in Germany – which reports the lowest rate of satisfaction with Legal — half (50%) are content with HR and 58% with Finance.

Feeling the strain

For Sales, IT, Marketing and Procurement, however, those numbers plummet – only 43% of global respondents say Legal’s interactions with Sales are positive, and that figure drops to 38% for IT and 37% for both Marketing and Procurement.

U.K. employees cite satisfaction with Sales, Marketing, and IT at just 35%. And in France – where, by and large, legal teams are viewed as uncompromising – only 29% consider Legal to share a decent connection with Procurement; 33% with IT.

Similarly, 40% of U.S. enterprise employees call Legal’s relationships with Sales and IT positive. Marketing comes in lower at 38%. Data are not much improved for these departments in Germany, where less the half have good interactions with Sales (49%) and IT (43%), and even fewer do with Marketing (37%) and Procurement (38%).

Looking in the mirror

Legal manages various types of matters including contracts, negotiations, lawsuits, and issues of compliance. Since HR and Finance are required to follow protocol – they are not supposed to deviate from “the book,” and the rules that Legal sets and abides by to safeguard the company – it’s only natural that they find dealing with Legal easier.

Meanwhile, Sales, Marketing, IT, and Procurement – departments that are, by their nature, meant to push the envelope to innovate, hit numbers, and modernize – report frustration working with Legal. As it is their responsibility to assertively grow and advance the enterprise in avant-garde and creative ways, they may feel stymied and stonewalled by the very parameters put into place to protect the business.

A call for change

Still, it doesn’t have to be this way. People are a company’s most valuable asset. And with the core of any business a collection of both internal and external relationships, the more connected the enterprise, the more successful it will be. For the sake of business growth and efficiency, Legal can seize this moment to become a more active partner, to nurture more collaborative alliances, to enhance relationships across the business – and to ultimately connect to the enterprise as a whole, now more than ever.

Take the next step in elevating your internal working relationships. Your business is counting on you.

Learn more by reading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

Leading from the Front: The Transformative Landscape of Legal Operations (CLOC 2022 Recap)

Posted on May 22, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The annual Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute 2022 just wrapped up in Las Vegas, gathering the most innovative and disruptive legal professionals from around the world for the event of the year. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to meet everyone in person and an absolute honor to sponsor the first in-person CLOC in two years. The networking was amazing and the learnings were invaluable. Here’s a recap of our week at CLOC.

CLOC 2022 in 5 key takeaways: There opportunity for meaningful change is here

  1. Embrace the connected enterprise. Legal departments do not operate in a silo. While it’s no secret that they are well-positioned to operationalize efficiencies, investing in relationships with other departments can have a significant impact on enterprises at large. Legal operations professionals benefit from learning the importance of building trust and relationships cross-departmentally, especially with IT, to deliver value and use that value as currency.
  2. Plan for workshop efficiency in your department. Legal is seeing many of the same trends that other departments face (increased costs, higher workloads, effects of inflation / post-Covid world) and need to be nimble in order to scale. Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons legal operations is important and growing so quickly. Its impact now and in the future is almost like a tidal wave hitting legal departments across the industry, but in the best of ways.
  3. Think of legal as a value creation center in the company. We’ve all heard about “running legal like a business.” Legal departments, great and small, no longer have the option of saying “no” to the concept of cutting-edge legal operations. We need to connect processes and the tech stack in a way that drives value rather than just reducing spend. When technology solution providers are aligned with core competencies, the legal department’s success already has a running head start.
  4. Meaningful change is needed in DE&I, CSR and ESG. Legal operations should be leading from the front on these programs. We need to infuse competence, compassion, courage, and tools to help each individual drive this transformation. Early diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts create a richer candidate pool of potential employees and result in significantly more diverse hires, but more work needs to be done in this area to get it right.
  5.  Defend your spend with data. Innovative legal operations leaders are pivoting their approach to managing outside counsel spend by using data to validate their spend and drive efficiency and savings. AI and machine learning present new opportunities to help corporate legal teams make better strategic decisions. Using legal business intelligence like comparative analytics and benchmarking, they are going beyond basic reporting to put spend in context with market insights. Market and panel benchmarking, firm report cards and comparative analytics can help strategically manage spend – and expectations from both firms and internal stakeholders.

CLOC 2022 in 5 quotes: Celebrating the resilience of the legal ops community

Quote 1

 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) has been a hot topic of conversation since last year and we’re not surprised to see it come up in this year’s CLOC Institute. Consilio’s session on how law firms and in-house teams can work collaboratively to measure, report, and improve law firm diversity showed that it’s no longer just a talking point; it’s also an action point.

Data is crucial to inform our conversations with law firms on their diversity. It’s harder to backtrack from a promise if it can be measured. However, measurability arose in question across many DE&I metric panels: How does legal ops handle the situation when attorneys choose not to disclose diversity status? The answer? “That’s a conversation you need to have with them. Why don’t they?”

It’s all about having these intentional conversations early on. While it may seem uncomfortable, legal operations has the power and flexibility to ask probing questions about underrepresented attorneys as clients of outside counsel. Legal ops also has the unique ability to share best practices they see their organization and other outside counsel practicing. “We don’t want to ask anything of our outside counsel firms that we’re not committed to doing ourselves.”

The takeaway? Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. To enact lasting change in the industry, we’re all working together to improve and support DE&I objectives with clear visibility into the data.

Quote 2

Working collaboratively has shown to be of great importance, especially when remote and hybrid workplaces are a lot more commonplace for legal ops now. In this session, we partnered with our parent company Onit to show how the foundation of communication begins with trust. Trust that your team will deliver value to the individuals you work with, to other departments, and to the overall business. That trust will pay off unexpected dividends, whether your team is part of a scaling business or a well-established enterprise.

That trust also connects back to any initiatives you bring up to the wider organization. Connecting back to our previous quote on DE&I, having that trust means that legal is at a prime position to mold the department and organization goals. Legal already has a reputation for being an unapproachable authority figure in the organization. When we meet, connect, and share some humanity, stopping and listening allows us to better meet the needs of the people we’re working with.

The takeaway? Make establishing a good working relationship with other departments a priority. We’re all here to ensure the business flourishes. You protect the business from external risks better when you’re not facing avoidable internal strife.

Quote 3

 

While this specific session may have been addressing contract legal management (CLM) users, we can apply this mindset to any technology solution. Like this attendee said, technology will never solve your problems if you don’t have a clear understanding of how it will improve your processes. And it seems like at least half of legal ops professionals are missing that essential understanding part if we take this audience as a microcosm of the larger community.

Would you use a screwdriver to hammer down a nail? Probably not (unless you’re desperate and don’t have anything better on hand at the moment). Likewise, technology is a tool at the end of the day. Whether or not it’s being used effectively all depends on the user. In legal speak, that’s you and your team. Having fancy technology to address your pain points might seem great at first, but it’s a bandage solution in the end. Kind of like forcing a circular peg into a square hole.

You wouldn’t start building a house without understanding exactly how loose wood, stone, and metal end up becoming a solid structure capable of withstanding wear and tear. So why shouldn’t your approach to bringing on new legal technology be the same?

The takeaway? Understanding your processes is key. From there, you and your team have the ability to convince others on why you need technology to improve them and how you will go about doing it.

Quote 4

 

On the topic of technology, we think we can accurately predict the trend for the rest of the year. The top priority for current and future transformative legal ops initiatives is digitizing their processes. That dominated every other topic at a whopping 54% in this panel, beating out the next emphasis on spend management by 34%. The need for technology has continued to increase in the face of a changing workforce and work environment.

This is fantastic news, especially in an industry that has traditionally been slow to embrace change. It’s not an exaggeration to say that law firms are still using spreadsheets to track their data even if many law firms are phasing into more secure tech solutions. However, what exactly does digitization of processes mean? An audience member raised an excellent counterpoint. What are the outcomes you want to drive by digitizing processes? And which processes? We know that one legal team’s answers will differ from another legal team. After all, no journey is exactly the same. But wanting to digitize processes is a great sign that many legal departments are ready to take the next step of maturing their legal operations function.

The takeaway? Legal technology is not a fad.

Quote 5

Why do we as in-house legal professionals do what we do? We’re here to facilitate risk for sure. But another powerful ability we have is enacting change on a scale beyond our departments. With spending power over outside counsel and protection over the business from external risk, in-house legal teams are in a unique position to become agents of change.

And how do we do that? As this session shows, we flip the script. We’re not here to be the heroes of the story. We’re here to ensure the end user is the hero. The end user can be anyone: the finance department your team is collaborating with to manage outside counsel, the wider organization you’re serving and its goals, or even the clients of whatever your organization provides. We’re the special tool they leverage. By empowering the end user, we enact change.

The takeaway? The legal operations community continues to innovate. Our ability to enact change as legal ops professionals are only limited by our imagination. You can always try again with a new perspective.

Introducing Bodhala’s New Legal Benchmarking Solutions

Posted on May 10, 2022 by - Legal Operations

Are you overpaying your law firms? What should your upcoming matter cost? Are your law firms delivering the value their rates warrant?

Historically, in-house teams have lacked the transparency and insights needed to answer these questions.

Until now.

Meet Bodhala’s new Benchmarking Solutions — the easiest way to compare your rates and matters against your panel and the market at large. 

With significant improvements to Rate Benchmarking and our brand new Matter Benchmarking solution, corporate legal teams can finally access the market insights necessary to budget smarter, negotiate harder, and save money on outside legal counsel.

Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Rate Benchmarking

Our new and improved Rate Benchmarking delivers what corporate legal leaders have been waiting for – accurate benchmarks coupled with usable insights. Get ready legal ops folks — budgeting, rate negotiation, and internal reporting just got a whole lot easier! 

We enhanced our rate benchmarks by adding named timekeeper benchmarks, cost impact analysis, projected ROI on increase mitigation, and more. 

Compare Your Benchmarks from Firm to Firm

We added an overview of all of your benchmarks, enabling you to easily find and compare your firm benchmarks. This comprehensive view highlights how each firm stacks up against one another and the rest of the market — plus, it makes all of your benchmarks easier to access.

Ratings in red, yellow, and green make it simple to identify where you’re getting a good deal and where you may want to focus your negotiation efforts. 

Historical Impact Analysis

Ever asked yourself, “How much could we have saved if we paid more market-appropriate rates?” 

We thought so. Well, it’s time to stop wondering because Bodhala’s new Rate Benchmarking crunches those numbers for you. 

We analyze your spend with a firm across practice areas, calculating how much you would have saved if your rates were closer to market standards. Seeing those numbers in black and white (or red…) really puts things in perspective, helping you decide if any rate mitigation effort is worth your time.

Named Timekeeper Benchmarks

All timekeepers are not created equal. Sure, you’re willing to pay the big bucks for those star players, but does every partner deserve that “star treatment”? 

Just think of how easy rate review will be when you can simply pull up the benchmarks for all of your individual timekeepers. And when it comes time to select counsel for that big upcoming matter? Break out those named timekeeper benchmarks and quickly identify the highest value player on your roster. 

Matter Benchmarking

With Bodhala’s Matter Benchmarking you’ll get unparalleled insights into what a matter costs, how many hours were worked, and a deep analysis of staffing and rates – down to the individual task or document. 

Matter benchmarks will simplify your budgeting process and help you refine your outside counsel guidelines to ensure you’re never paying more than you should for your matters.  

Get Market and Panel Benchmarks

Matter Benchmarking compares your matters not just against similar matters from similar firms across the market, but also to your own internal panel. 

Having both internal panel and market benchmarks provides you with a unique perspective on your current panel of firms. You can not only improve matter allocation on future matters but also make smarter decisions about how you manage your entire panel. 

Detailed Look at Rates & Hours

Every report breaks down both rates and hours by timekeeper level, comparing those rates and hours to both the market and your panel. Rates are only part of the picture so understanding how the matter was staffed, in addition to your rates, delivers true cost analysis. 

Drill Down Into Tasks & Documents 

Say you’re doing a fund formation and you’re curious how many hours a subscription agreement should really take. Look no further. 

You can stop wondering how many hours that document or task should take – Matter Benchmarking gives you the answers. With benchmarks for hours and staffing ratios, you can keep current matters on track, and budget more effectively for the next one. 

We’re here to help

Bodhala’s Client Success Team offers full white-glove service, from highlighting key savings opportunities to consulting on tactical strategies for rate negotiation or matter staffing — and everything in between.

Ready to start running legal like a business?

When it comes to managing your outside counsel spend, you have more leverage than you realize. You just don’t have the data yet. 

Bodhala’s Benchmarking Solutions put insights at your fingertips, enabling you to make strategic decisions across your legal department – from rates to matters and everything in between.

Ready to give it a spin?

TRY RATE BENCHMARKING FOR FREE!

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

Posted on May 9, 2022 by - Business Process Management

We live in a dynamic age. With the business landscape constantly transforming, legal operations is at a crossroad of material challenges and growth opportunities — from revenue generation and operational efficiency to innovation and corporate culture.

The good news? According to the Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report, nearly four in five (78%) enterprise respondents view Legal first and foremost as stellar business protectors. But what may come as a shock is that only 19% of employees believe that Legal prioritizes its internal clients. What’s more, only 39% of US employees see Legal as a good business partner — and, spanning the globe, that number plummets to just 24% in Germany and 16% in France.

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

There are five ways Legal can initiate, develop, and maintain trusting business partnerships within the enterprise:

  1. Shed the image of the “No” Police

It’s no surprise that Legal is not known to go rogue. Legal must play by the rules; the specific purpose of Legal is to establish and execute clear boundaries. However, the ELR report revealed that three in five respondents believe Legal can complicate matters with red tape, citing Legal as overwhelmingly bureaucratic.

This image of Legal as bottlenecks contributes to fracture: 10% of UK employees deem Legal as uninvolved, one in five claim that Legal is an unwilling business partner, and 19% of enterprise employees worldwide do not even believe that Legal even understands their needs.

But there is always time and room for change. Rather than saying no outright, Legal can act as a more consultative partner and offer alternatives that appease both parties.

  1. Quicker turnaround times

While 3 in 5 reported a matter of days as the average time for Legal teams to respond to requests, the ELR showed that at times inquiries can take weeks to be acknowledged, especially in the United States, Germany, and France — leading a similar 60% of respondents worldwide to perceive Legal as inefficient.

Ever-increasing workloads, chronically understaffed teams, and the constant mantra to “do more with less” can put a strain on both people and processes, hampering the ability to prioritize legal asks in a timely fashion, which in turn can impede the flow of business.

To turn this perception around, legal leaders can examine the current process for legal service requests (LSRs) to identify potential bottlenecks and then implement measures and technology that enable a faster response to inquiries.

  1. Embrace WFH 

While the capability to work remotely proved a blessing for most businesses during the height of COVID-19, 61% believe that Legal has been less responsive since the work-from-home (WFH) trend began. In fact, 38% of enterprise organizations say that Legal was more responsive prior to the pandemic.

With more than half of legal teams continuing to work at home full-time or on a hybrid schedule, this transition has presented novel challenges for collaboration and support – a sentiment magnified in the United Kingdom and France, where 42% of respondents reported a perceived slowdown by Legal.

Legal can set expectations for responsiveness by adding proactive communication around how or why processes may have changed in addition to offering direct solutions for adjusting to new working environments.

  1. Increase visibility

Similarly, while most respondents believe that Legal is visible and transparent regardless of their working location, two in five regard Legal as less so today than the department has been in the past.

Virtual and remote engagement, when compared to face-to-face office connections and real-time visibility, may understandably diminish approachability, which could in turn affect the resolution of legal issues and impact operational efficiency for a multitude of matters.

To increase visibility across the enterprise, legal departments may want to participate in company-wide communications to provide status updates into key initiatives or projects. Frequent and proactive touchpoints go a long way in promoting transparency.

  1. Encourage flexibility

Half of all global enterprise employees — 49%, and as high as 58% in France — believe that Legal creates an inflexible corporate culture. This perceived inflexibility can prohibit future collaboration, growth, and Legal’s fundamental role in the enterprise.

There is a colossal level of scrutiny on Legal and the department’s obligation to not only mitigate risk, but to set the standard for new and acceptable risks; this is true. The ELR Report found that Legal has a direct and positive impact on various functions from sales, revenue, and renewals to the corporate brand, R&D, and innovation. Legal can use this opportunity to lead from the front and transform beyond a traditional back-office function.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

“The ELR Report reveals a glaring reality check on how Legal is perceived by their enterprise organizations,” Onit CEO Eric Elfman said. “It’s time for Legal to evolve in impactful ways — their businesses are counting on them.”

Evaluate and implement cutting-edge technology, like workflow automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Improve efficiency and reduce rigidity. Be bold and step up as a business partner like never before.

Now is the time to evolve.

Get your head start on a legal evolution by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

The Transformative Legal Department: Building Stronger Connections to the Enterprise

Posted on April 13, 2022 by - Digital Transformation

Technology drives our modern universe, and it has been proven to galvanize legal departments. However, most legal tech systems—whether enterprise legal management (ELM), contract lifecycle management (CLM), AI, or others—orchestrate processes that also involve business units beyond legal.

At Legalweek 2022, Onit sponsored an emerging technology panel discussion featuring legal operations experts sharing their visions of how self-service technologies and digital transformation have enhanced and advanced their organizational relationships. By doing so—even through navigating the challenges of an increasingly complex regulatory environment and the COVID-19 pandemic—they have facilitated a vital connection to the broader enterprise.

Legal Ops: Initiator of Digital Transformation

Legal departments do not operate in a silo. While it’s no secret that they are well-positioned to operationalize efficiencies, investing in relationships with other departments can have a significant impact on enterprises at large.

“We have moved past the place where legal operations service only the legal department,” explains Jessica Williams, global outside counsel operations manager for Hearst Media Corporation. “Projects that start in legal, such as e-signature programs, often become enterprise-wide.”

Additional projects with cross-departmental span include creating a strategic game plan to deploy AI chatbots and a focus on ELM self-service, which is particularly advantageous for finance departments. Self-service solutions allow users to extract precisely what they need, such as revenue accrual or incurred expense reports, without requiring an administrator’s permission. This frees up time for both parties, a benefit for the business overall.

Corteva Agriscience legal operations leader Gregg McConnell agrees: Fostering relationships outside and across traditional team lines pays off immeasurably. Having spearheaded an enterprise-wide initiative to transition to all-digital documentation at Corteva, McConnell discovered that finance would often approach legal not only for automated reports, but also to identify and quantify the value of new tech.

“Building relationships that create end-to-end transparency across the organization contribute to the core foundation and make an organization bigger, faster and stronger,” McConnell believes.

Championing Projects for “Joe”

Leading in tech introduction while keeping “Joe” in mind—that is, the reluctant adopter of new products or systems, as McConnell says—is the goal. When Corteva found up to 75% of invoices through their ELM cycle had failed, a bulb of wisdom sparked: They needed to speak first to tech skeptics, then build a skillset to accomplish tasks in a simple and constructive manner and present them in a positive light, all while working to solve major pain points.

“Organization synthesizes operations. From a change management perspective, creating comfort and confidence in relationships is key,” says MassMutual business systems consultant Anthony Curzio.  “We learned that if info existed somewhere else, customers were imploring, ‘Please do not make us have to key it in again.’” This led from drag and drop functionality to an increasingly more complex data warehouse beyond matter and e-billing.

One transformation initiated by Nick Whitehouse, general manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, was connecting the contract process to the CRM process without creating any additional forms. “Pragmatic as that seems, that paved the way for pace of growth, creating transparency, freeing up time and massively improving the sales process,” notes Whitehouse.

The Art of the Possible

Even the most seemingly miraculous software, however, cannot do all the work: an enterprise requires resources, structure and regular “care and feeding.” This is where the magnitude of relationship cultivation matters most.

“If you automate a broken process, you just get a faster broken process. But taking a longer-term view of strategy and empathizing among teams will develop maturity and trust and ensure efficiency,” says Williams, dedicated to establishing quick automations and delving into predictive analytics for Hearst.

“Disrupting the way legal, finance, and procurement work and automating systems will make things quicker, better, faster and bring a work/life balance back to teams so we can build a real family,” insists McConnell, who is rolling out new ERPs to bring strategic partners together at Corteva. “It’s all about the people.”

Curzio, who pioneered a holistic lean transformation at MassMutual, calls finding the right solution for the time and the ability for legal to partner with finance, IT, service providers and end users the “art of the possible.” Similarly, Whitehouse sees enterprise connections as a servitude to service.

“Every process starts with people, and busy people don’t want to spend time changing things. But when you pose it as, ‘How many six-minute increments will this help you get back in your day? How many hours?’ and find that empirical data, it inspires the journey to build on systems and relationships that become amazingly valuable assets for the entire organization.”

When state-of-the-art user-savvy tools are utilized to amplify how legal ops serve a business, time is saved, never-before-seen financial and data transparency and risk are more effectively managed—and the enterprise becomes more connected as a whole, with the openness, innovation and evolution required for future excellence and success.

To learn more about the impactful role that legal technology plays in enterprise connections, you can explore the capabilities of solutions such as enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and AI.

Onit’s CEO Eric M. Elfman Featured in a CLOC Podcast: The Evolution of Matter Management and How to Leap-Frog Your Strategy

Posted on April 5, 2022 by - Company News and Events

Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit, recently participated in a timely and thought-provoking CLOC podcast, The Evolution of Matter Management and How to Leap-Frog your Strategy. In this episode, Eric was joined by CLOCTalk host Jenn McCarron, Head of Legal Operations and Technology, Netflix, and Duc Tran, Senior Manager at EY Law to discuss the evolution of matter management and how legal teams can successfully implement and leverage it across departments. This is the final episode in the three-part series CLOC is releasing in collaboration with EY Law, titled The Art of the Possible.

Onit was a pioneer in the development of automated matter management tools. Our current solution offers visibility about your overall matter portfolio and provides real-time data and dashboards so you can monitor and track all your matters throughout their lifecycle. Legal team members have immediate access to critical matter, financial and performance metrics through simple information collection, management, and workflow.

How to Learn More About Onit’s Matter Management Solution

Interested in learning more about Onit’s Matter Management? Start here or request a demonstration.  You can also learn more about Matter Management with these resources:

To listen to the CLOC podcast, click here.

How to Choose the Right Legal Tech Vendor for Your In-House Legal Team

Posted on March 30, 2022 by - Enterprise Legal Management

Technology is increasingly vital in helping in-house legal teams optimize their time and resources. The transformation of working practices over recent years, with the continued trend for remote working, means IT tools are more important than ever for communication, administration, data management, and knowledge sharing at work. In addition, legal teams require specific legal tech software to manage and automate everything from spend management and billing to matter management, reporting, and administration.

In-house legal teams face an array of vendors to choose from. With so much choice, how should in-house legal teams choose the right technology vendor for their needs?

To help you, we’ve compiled a checklist of key considerations:

YOUR LEGAL TECH VENDOR CHECKLIST

1. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY MEET DATA SECURITY REQUIREMENTS?

The data handled by legal teams are too sensitive to take any risks. You need to be confident the technology you choose meets every security requirement of your IT department. Look for solutions that offer data security assurances, such as banking-grade encryption, single-jurisdiction hosting, and compliance with regulatory standards, such as ISO 27001 and GDPR.

2. DOES THE TECH VENDOR MEET COUNTRY-SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS?

Define your requirements by thinking through your daily work and identifying what is missing. How can technology help? Ask vendors how their technology can address your specific challenges. For example, when your company is based in Europe, can the technology meet European country-specific requirements, such as taxation and invoicing?

3. WHAT LEVEL OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT IS ON OFFER?

Does the vendor have a professional customer service team? Will you be assigned a dedicated customer success manager? Does the vendor have dedicated European support capabilities? How many languages are supported? Do they have the resources to provide the support you need?

4. IS THE VENDOR TRUSTED BY CLIENTS AND INDEPENDENT COMMENTATORS?

Check out client testimonials, read case studies and ask to speak to clients. Find out if the vendor and its solutions are trusted and valued. Look for independent approvals or verifications from respected organizations, such as Hyperion Global Partners. Does the vendor have a network of trusted partners to support and champion its solutions?

5. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATE WITH EVERYDAY IT SYSTEMS?

We all use various software and IT systems to support efficient collaboration and communication. You need to find legal technology that integrates fully with common software from Microsoft, Google, and others. Choose interoperable legal technology tools that meet you where you work.

6. CAN YOU REQUEST A FREE DEMO?

Ask all shortlisted vendors for a demonstration of their software and its application to a practical example. Before committing to new software, take it for a test drive. Most vendors offer a free trial to test features, benefits, and usability.

MEET LOCALLY

If you need help choosing a vendor, you can meet many leading legal tech providers at conferences across the United States and Europe throughout the year. These provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about your region’s legal tech landscape, meet some of the people you could work with, ask questions, and sample the technology.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

Your New CLM Tool: 6 Unexpected Things to Consider Before You Buy

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The challenges around finding a good CLM tool continue to occupy the minds of CLOs and GCs. In a recent survey, 70% said they are looking to improve their existing contract management software, which is not surprising since a sophisticated, enterprise CLM tool can accelerate revenue, reduce risks and provide consistency and standardization.

When it comes to implementing technology to help handle your contracts, all contract software is not created equal. The following list shares key characteristics you should look for in a CLM tool.

A CLM Tool for All Phases of Contract Management

Getting a deal inked is only half of the process. Many contract management systems focus heavily (or even solely) on the pre-signature contracting phase. This is understandable since that phase requires a lot of heavy lifting in terms of workflow, collaboration and communications – often across multiple departments.

However, as corporate legal departments know, the contract lifecycle doesn’t end when the papers are signed. The contractual obligations must be managed to ensure critical dates, times and deliverables are met and accounted for. CLM technology that accomplishes this includes capabilities such as:

  • Batch review – Extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.
  • Repapering – Identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes in less than five seconds.
  • Contract abstraction – Identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents for easy analysis and management.
  • Audit compliance – Automate large-scale legal contract review during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.
  • Due diligence – Automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value tasks.
  • Legacy contract migration – Analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.

Unlimited Users

Contracts reach far beyond legal and across the enterprise, including sales, marketing, HR, procurement and more. All depend on contracts to move the company forward. Yet, many CLM tools require pricy licenses for each user – a situation that prioritizes dollars rather than speed, collaboration and productivity. With unlimited licenses, any stakeholder involved in a contracting process can access the system for self-service, submissions, updates and more.

Pre-Trained AI for Your CLM Tool

Historically, training AI is a time-consuming and costly endeavor that requires specialized AI-specific skills and resources. It’s understandably an endeavor that corporate legal departments are equipped to handle.

Your CLM tool should come with out-of-the-box functionality with pre-trained AI, and it should incorporate thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts. This means you can start using it – and seeing its value – right away.

Independence from Legacy Products

Since contract management challenges extend across an enterprise, some popular CLM solutions are reliant on specific legacy products or platforms. In this context, the contract management feature may be an addition with limited functionality bolted to a system built for an entirely different business use. This can present challenges, as it limits contract management potential. Beyond limited functionality, you may not be able to use or have access to the product (or have to pay for additional licenses). Additionally, the legacy product may require you to invest time in implementing and training to understand it beyond the contract management functionality. A better solution is to have a CLM tool independent of legacy products – a full-fledged system robust enough to handle the challenges of contract management on an enterprise level.

CLM Tool Integrations

Your CLM should work where you work, meaning integrations are vital. Most contract stakeholders – including lawyers – rely on Microsoft Word for contracts, which means you want to make sure your CLM system has a Microsoft Word add-in. The same is true for any other tools you use heavily or are used in your company. You want to make sure your CLM solution offers seamless integrations, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between solutions or resort to data entry to continue the information flow. This includes integration with existing legal systems such as matter management, spend management, legal holds, legal service requests, analytics and more.

Proven Expertise and Support

Never underestimate the value of your experience with a CLM technology provider. When you’re purchasing something as crucial as CLM, you want an expert sales representative who can understand your needs, ensure your CLM solution is a good fit and offer services and partners that can help with configuration, implementation and support.

The right CLM solution can mean significant savings in cost, better use of your staff’s time, increased efficiency and more. Schedule a demonstration with us today to learn more about how Onit CLM can work for you.

Legal AI Technology: How Its Adoption Leads to Real-World Results

Posted on March 15, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Legal AI technology, along with other forms of AI, was once the stuff of science fiction. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has entrenched itself in the mainstream. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions floating around about what AI is and what it can do, one thing is clear: AI gets results.

That’s why more and more corporate legal departments and legal ops professionals are turning to AI-powered solutions to boost efficiency, cut costs and more. As the year goes on, one of the top legal operations trends we expect to see is companies capitalizing on the practical, real-world results that AI can provide.

The Prevalence of Legal AI Technology

We’ve come a long way from the early days of AI, which were largely dominated by chess games and robot movies. Today, AI is present in nearly every aspect of business, with legal AI technology serving as an integral part of how modern legal ops teams function along with the benefits of a contract management system.

There’s no question that general AI adoption among companies of all sizes is on the rise. McKinsey’s State of AI in 2021 Report found that 56% of survey participants across multiple industries adopted AI in 2021, up 50% the previous year. This adoption significantly impacted companies’ bottom lines, with 27% of respondents saying they could trace at least 5% of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to AI.

Corporate legal departments are part of this upward trend. According to CLOC State of the Industry Reports, in-house AI usage increased from 12% in 2019 to 22% in 2021. Not surprisingly, the AI legal software market is predicted to grow by more than 28% between 2021 and 2026.

AI Results in Action

AI is a technology that learns, reasons and acts for itself. It can make decisions that usually require a human level of expertise, meaning it can help lawyers and legal ops professionals anticipate problems and address issues as, or even before, they arise.

AI is ideal for data-intensive tasks because it identifies patterns, learns from them, and generates insights faster and more accurately than humans. Legal work is increasingly made up of data-driven tasks, meaning more legal ops professionals should be turning to AI. A perfect example is contract management.

A study showed that legal contract review software makes new users immediately 51.5% more productive and roughly 33% more efficient by conducting first-pass contract review, making redlines and delivering a contract risk profile, all in a matter of minutes. If you take a typical midsize company with 55 lawyers who collectively review an average of 9,526 contracts each year, a 51.5% productivity increase allows the same legal team to process 4,906 additional contracts each year – the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to the team.

The benefits of AI based contract management don’t end when the deal is signed. Your contracts contain mountains of valuable data that can help you better run your business and increase efficiency. The only problem is that you historically needed someone to review all those contracts to get at that valuable data, and few legal departments had the time or staff to do the job correctly.

Legal AI technology, though, can review thousands of contracts at once and export data in five seconds or less. When you apply that power to time-intensive, voluminous tasks like repapering, batch review, legacy contract migration and more, AI can save in-house counsel and legal ops professionals a significant number of hours. And that time savings can be reinvested into tasks that create value for the company. In fact, it’s been shown that properly managing contracts from start to finish can increase revenues by up to 9.2%.

A World of Possibilities for Legal AI Technology

Contracting is just one area where in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals are seeing real-world results by implementing AI. As innovation continues to disrupt the legal tech world, AI is being introduced into nearly every aspect of practice and business. But now, AI has evolved beyond a buzzword to provide meaningful – and impactful – results.

To read more about how legal AI technology impacts legal departments and other top trends shaping legal ops today, download our white paper Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.