Author: Onit

What NOT To Do In 2022: Legal Tech Trends To Ignore in the New Year

Posted on December 21, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

As workloads and the need to contain costs increase, corporate legal departments continue to turn to legal technology – so much so that Gartner predicts legal technology budgets will increase threefold by 2025.

Technology innovation, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), has fundamentally transformed the way legal professionals do business and how organizations run their legal function. While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype of legal technology, it’s important to keep perspective. Not all legal industry tech trends are ones that should be followed.

How can you sort the helpful trends from the hype?

Three experts from Buying Legal, Consilio and Onit recently gathered to discuss just that. Together, they explored the current state of legal tech and AI, how corporate legal departments should function as we enter the new year and which current legal trends are better to avoid.

Read on to learn which legal tech trends you might want to pass on as we enter 2022.

The Current Pulse of Corporate Legal

As we get ready to wrap up 2021, it’s a good time to take stock of where we currently stand when it comes to legal tech and corporate legal operations.

While some have posited that AI has become over-hyped, our expert panel explains that that’s not entirely the case. Instead, AI tends to be misunderstood, with different people frequently meaning different things when they say AI. This can lead to misunderstandings and even disappointment when it comes to implementing AI.

The top legal areas where AI is currently seeing some of the most significant traction are invoice review, contract review and risk monitoring. Nonetheless, companies still take different approaches to overall legal tech implementation, ranging from all-in-one platforms to best-in-class point solutions to enterprise applications.

Regardless of how you’ve implemented AI and other legal technologies up till now, however, it’s important to remember going forward that legal no longer stands alone. To succeed, you need to involve your department in overall enterprise discussions and initiatives regarding technology.

Legal Tech Trends to Avoid in 2022

While interest in legal tech will only continue to grow in the coming year, not all legal technology trends should be followed. The webinar outlines several emerging trends to avoid in the new year, including:

  • DON’T jump on every new technology that comes out – New AI and other legal tech tools are coming out constantly. It can be tempting to buy the shiny object but think about what you’re trying to accomplish with technology before you buy.
  • DON’T make the mistake of thinking that huge AI systems will solve all your problems – When AI first came out, it made a massive splash with powerful tools like Watson. In reality, the AI you use at your organization will exist on a smaller scale and be targeted at solving discrete problems.
  • DON’T rush to widespread AI implementation – Consider the strategic places where AI will be most helpful and practical (for example, NDA automation). This approach gives you time to understand the technology and the value in a much quicker time frame.
  • DON’T think that all your data needs to be kept local – With the introduction of the GDPR and the proliferation of privacy regulations, there’s been a trend toward scaring people into thinking they need to keep all their data in-country for compliance reasons. In reality, this is just a backward path back to in-house servers when there are other ways to achieve compliance.
  • DON’T let cost concerns keep you from the technology you need – Yes, nearly all organizations are increasingly looking to cut costs. You shouldn’t, however, allow that trend keep you from innovating. Instead, you can justify to the business why an investment in technology now will pay off in the long run.

To hear more about the current state of legal tech, including which trends you should be adopting and which to avoid, you can listen to the entire webinar.

Contact Onit today to learn more about how our solutions can help you transform the way you do business in the new year.

How Legal Hold Products Help Your Company Preserve Electronically Stored Information

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

At a time when the amount of worldwide electronic data approaches hundreds and hundreds of zettabytes, preserving data represents a sizeable challenge for many companies. Many turn to legal hold products to accomplish this.

Companies have a duty to demonstrate that they have exercised the proper care to preserve and collect digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk. This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is reasonably anticipated, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e) states that when “electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery,” the court may take certain actions. The actions may include sanctions or fines totaling millions of dollars for companies who fail to act.

A legal hold, or litigation hold, is a notification to a company or individuals that material or data regarding an active or anticipated legal proceeding shouldn’t be destroyed. However, it doesn’t guarantee that the material will be preserved. Actual preservation is the responsibility of the notified organization’s leadership and employees involved. Legal hold products can help alleviate the worry and help you sleep well knowing that all bases are covered.

Old Software, More Challenges

Using software that does not simplify the legal hold process is counterproductive and, unfortunately, more common than one may think. Some companies rely on outdated legal hold software or using software that isn’t even designed to handle legal holds. For example, consider programs such as Outlook and Excel. They’re valuable tools used daily in companies worldwide. But using them to manage legal holds would result in a highly manual process that is difficult to track and probably does not meet the necessary level of ESI preservation.

How a Legal Hold Product Preserves ESI

Keeping employees trained and aware of their responsibility in protecting and preserving data is a must. However, legal hold software should be an integral part of the equation. It lets you quickly issue legal hold notifications and manage custodian acknowledgments. Well-chosen legal hold software will also help you:

  • Easily track the status of legal holds to know where they stand
  • Collect and store custodian acknowledgments and questions
  • Send automated notifications and reminders to help track compliance
  • Preserve notices and custodian data in a secure location
  • Gain a complete audit trail of all legal hold activity

When the legal hold product is built on a business process automation platform, workflows can be easily configured and tasks automatically assigned to the appropriate in-house team members.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Products

Companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercising proper care to preserve and collect ESI. The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization.

If you want to learn more about legal holds and legal hold products, here are three resources.

You can also reach out to us to learn more about our legal hold software.

Having Contract Management Issues? Here’s How CLM and AI Can Help.

Posted on December 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Many sales, procurement and corporate legal departments struggle with contract management issues. The issues may seem mundane – too much manual work, a lack of visibility or slow responses – but together, the issues collectively (and quickly) slow down valuable revenue-generating efforts or can lead to regulatory breaches.

Comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions can defeat contract management issues by automating and standardizing processes and decreasing risk and manual work. They streamline the entire contract lifecycle and provide ease of use for all parties. With the ability to have unlimited users and an intuitive, user-friendly interface, these solutions dramatically improve supplier and vendor relationships and overall customer satisfaction.

How Your CLM Defeats Contract Management Issues

What should you look for in a CLM solution to overcome contract management issues? Consider this list of necessities.

  • Automatically generate contracts – The CLM software should allow you to save time and reduce risk by automatically creating a contract with the appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Work where you want to work – Most lawyers rely on Microsoft Word for contracts. An MS Word integration maintains seamless version control and secure links to the CLM software.
  • Let stakeholders help themselves – With a self-service portal, partners and clients can quickly request, submit or create contracts. Contracts can be automatically assigned and tracked, increasing visibility and improving turnaround time.
  • Reduce risks with less work – Manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance via a dedicated dashboard and reporting. Likewise, automated risk mitigation in a CLM identifies clauses and terms which add risk to your agreement and scores your contract repository to assist you in both negotiations and renegotiations.
  • A quick time to value – A CLM solution on an advanced cloud platform means your CLM solution can be deployed in 30 days or less.

The Role of AI in Contract Lifecycle Management – And How it Helps You

In recent years, AI has taken businesses by storm, gaining recognition for its rapid evolution and considerable accomplishments. From driving cars to diagnosing illnesses, it continues to prove its value to all industries.

Contract management is no different. Sales, procurement and corporate legal departments have the opportunity to benefit from AI during the contract lifecycle, realizing increased efficiency from technology that not only understands their organization but learns and continually improves.

As you look for AI-based CLM tools, here is what you should expect in your chosen technology.

  • Out-of-the-box functionality from day one – Your CLM AI should work for you from day one by being pretrained and coming with thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts.
  • Faster review – Need a first-pass contract review in two minutes or less? Your CLM AI can do this, quashing some common contract management issues.
  • Easy edit tracking –Open a contract in Word or PDF to view AI redlines with track changes and commentary.
  • Checklists to streamline review – AI tracks and assigns alerts for reviewers with interactive, automated tasks within Microsoft Word.
  • Identify negotiation positions – Obtain suggested primary and fallback positions directly connected to your checklists with AI.
  • Empower users – Business professionals can get an AI-assisted review of standard contracts like NDAs through email or a self-service portal.
  • Review in batches – AI can extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts. You can also automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value M&A tasks.
  • Accelerate repapering – AI will amend or redline contract details and key terms due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes or M&A activities.
  • Quick analysis and management – Your CLM AI will identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents. It can also analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.
  • Large-scale contract review – Audit compliance with AI during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.

The Results

How much of an impact can AI and CLM have on contract management issues? CLM solutions can help you save 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20% or more.

A study of how legal AI contract review software affects in-house lawyers’ productivity showed that new users were immediately 51.5% more productive and 34% more efficient. And with post-signature contract AI, you improve efficiency by increasing the amount of data analyzed while reviewing and exporting data in five seconds or less.

As an example, consider what CLM AI can do for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). NDAs are the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today, with our customers telling us that they process anywhere between 500 and 100,000 NDAs every year. Processing that volume of contracts, no matter how standardized or routine, quickly adds up in cost and creates a real risk of spreading your legal department employees too thin. However, applying AI and CLM best practices can automate NDA management and cut time spent on them by up to 70%. This blog post shows you how this works.

Reach out to us to learn more or schedule a demonstration of our contract lifecycle management and contract AI, including ReviewAI, ExtractAI and Automate NDA.

 

The Latest in Corporate Legal News, Including Legal Business Solutions, Gift Buying and More (December 2021 Edition)

Posted on December 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management

Welcome to the December digest of leading news and resources for in-house counsel and legal operations professionals. In this edition, you’ll read about what’s creating change in the business of law, building a scalable and future-proof contracting process, technology trends for outside counsel, the history of ELM and where to find gifts for the lawyers in your life.

1.    The Four Primary Drivers of Change in the Modern Business of Law

The legal industry has seen significant changes in recent years. Legal professionals are starting to think differently about the business of law, focusing on new models for driving value, efficiency and effectiveness. Change is happening faster than ever and on far more sophisticated levels for corporate legal departments and legal operations. In this article, Brad Rogers, who has more than 25 years of experience in operations excellence, discusses what’s fueling changes in the business of law and how that influences transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

2.    How to Future-Proof Surges in Contract Activity with Legal Business Solutions

Creating a contract system that handles legal work is challenging, as the ebbs and flows of legal work can be highly unpredictable. Inevitably, you’ll face periods where you see sudden surges of contract activity, whether due to regulatory changes, significant deals or something else. Are you prepared to handle the waves of work when they arise? Experts from VMware and the World Commerce and Contracting organization discuss how companies can best prepare for sudden workload surges.

Source: Onit Resource Library

3.    The Technologies Your Law Firms Are Prioritizing, According to New Research From the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)

When it comes to legal business solutions, what technologies are law firms prioritizing? ILTA has released its 2021 Technology Survey, which features the responses of nearly 500 lawyers. It points out some of the overall trends, such as the move to simplify the legal desktop, accelerated digitization due to the work from home model and increased automation of areas like matter intake, conflicts and approval workflows.

Source: ILTA 2021 Technology Survey

4.    The History of the Enterprise Legal Management System

Did you know that a WANG VS word processing system kicked off the prototype for what is today’s enterprise legal management system (ELM)? ELM has evolved significantly since its first iteration more than 40 years ago, replacing paper-based systems with little oversight with sophisticated solutions that analyze legal spend, minimize risk and drive process efficiency. And this, in turn, helps corporate legal departments better support their businesses. This blog post breaks down the history of ELM and shares how some of the most innovative companies in the world are using it.

Source: Onit blog

5.    Holiday Shopping for a Lawyer? Here’s What the ABA Suggests for Gifts.

Holiday parties are in full swing now, meaning it’s time to consider what to get for the lawyers in your life (and yourself!). The ABA Journal has spared us some Google searches by compiling this list of gift ideas. Justice-themed socks? Don’t mind if I do.

Source: ABA Journal

Happy holidays! And remember, if you want to learn more about our legal business solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, AI and more, schedule a demo today or email [email protected].

2021: Bodhala’s Year in Review

Posted on December 7, 2021 by - Legal Operations

2021…where do we begin?! This was a monumental year for our business. Awards were won, bigger and bigger deals were closed, new products were released — and we were acquired by a company that you may have heard of (more on all that later!).

While we’re still working remotely, we did get to come together in person on several occasions for meetings, workshops, and dinners — plus one rooftop party for the books. We got to physically meet the faces we see on Zoom every day, reconnect with colleagues we haven’t seen since our office shut down, and finally find out how tall some people really are.

Our people are the foundation of our business. Having all of our brilliant minds together has been nothing short of invigorating.

Now, let’s dive into some of the highlights from the last twelve months!

Acquired by Onit!

It’s no surprise that our biggest news of the year was being acquired by Onit. We officially joined the Onit family of companies as an independent subsidiary in September. 

Onit is the indisputable market leader in enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation solutions — and we’re looking forward to continuing to usher in a new exciting phase of legaltech together in the years ahead.

With this exciting culmination of many years of hard work, we had to celebrate appropriately. We gathered with nearly all Bodhala employees, as well as many new teammates from Onit, in New York City for an amazing rooftop celebration. It was a great feeling to not only get our team back together after 18 months, but also to meet many of our new Onit family members. It was an apt celebration of success, as well as a strong kick-off to our next chapter!  

We Iterated & Improved

We continued to invest in our product, iterating where necessary and building where we saw the need. Our platform is the lifeblood of our business and we remain devoted to making our user experience better by the day. We’re proud to serve some of the largest companies in the world, helping them achieve their strategic spend priorities.

Thanks to the remote nature of our current work environment, we’ve expanded our talent pool, hiring new Bodhalians from not just around the country but around the world. We’ve grown our Client Success and Product/Data teams this past year, understanding the critical role these two functions play in serving our clients. 

Bodhala was founded to transform the legal industry and be the single source of truth for actionable insights on outside counsel spend. We’re proud to not only be a category creator but be the indisputable leader in this space. 

Released New QBR Program 

Corporate legal departments are increasingly acknowledging the importance of data but don’t exactly know how to get started — and we wanted to help.

We launched our Quarterly Business Review Program in October as an easy way for corporate legal departments to get their feet wet in legal data analytics. Our QBR program gives in-house teams the clarity on their legal spend that’s necessary to make more strategic decisions, impacting both their outside counsel spend and management.

All We Do is Win, Win, Win…

We’re both honored and humbled to see our hard work recognized. In 2021, Bodhala was named:

Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year by LegalTech Breakthrough Awards

101 Most Innovative New York Based Machine Learning Companies by Futurology

A New York City Company to Watch in 2021 by Built in NYC

Hot Off the Press

We can’t lie — we love the limelight. 

We’re proud to be a consistent thought leader for the industry, being featured in many mainstream and industry publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Nasdaq’s World Reimagined Podcast, Reuters, VC News Daily Podcast, PE Hub, and many more. You can check out all our press here.

Looking Back

2021 was a transformational year not only for our business but also for the entire legal tech industry. We could not be more excited to carry our momentum into 2022 and continue to drive this major wave of legal tech innovation. But we’re not finished yet! Big goals lie ahead in 2022 but we’re fortunate to have the best and the brightest on our side to help tackle our mission. 

We look forward to bringing you more exciting news in 2022!

Wishing you and yours a happy & healthy holiday season!

– Your friends at Bodhala

What To Expect in 2022: Your Legaltech Oracle

Posted on December 7, 2021 by - Legal Operations

It’s no secret that until recently, the word “technology” — or even worse, “AI” — could make in-house teams shudder, perpetuating the industry’s reputation as laggards in terms of technology innovation and adoption. But doing more with less means optimization of daily tasks is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s critical.

So what exactly can we expect to see from the legaltech industry in 2022? Here are some of our predictions:

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

Demand for solutions that automate frequent, repetitive tasks and enable workflow and process efficiency continues to fuel significant growth across the sector. 

And because of this growth, 2021 was a monumental year for legaltech. 2021 saw three legaltech unicorns go public, with many others reaching or coming dangerously close to unicorn status. Couple that with growing investment across the industry topping $1B and you’ve got all the makings of a major industry breakout. 

Just a decade ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find any private equity firm with a legaltech company on their balance sheet. Now? They not only have them on their balance sheets, but many have specialized verticals focused on legaltech. If that’s not a harbinger of growth, then what is? 

“The Business of Legal”

2021 was a transformative year for businesses across the board. With some companies still reeling from the economic effects of 2020, many corporate legal departments set out to do more with less in 2021 — with new technologies playing a key role in enabling their success. 

That theme — doing more with less — will drive a bigger trend across the industry: operationalizing and optimizing “the business of legal”. 

What will that mean? Sure, it will definitely lead to software adoption and increased use of analytics, but it will also be the driver of many other trends. 

“The Great Unbundling” 

2021 will continue to accelerate new approaches to getting things done. From ALSPs to other types of providers, alternative solutions for accomplishing tasks will continue to emerge and grow — and there’s an increasing focus on what corporate legal departments can do to allow lawyers to be lawyers. This will be true for both in-house and law firms.

We’re still in the early innings of the legaltech revolution, but the current notion of how certain types of work are executed is under increasing scrutiny. Does an in-house attorney really need to spend their time on discovery work when there are great alternative solutions for that? Nope. 

From states like Utah softening the rules on legal services ownership to the proliferation of ALSPs — both independent and captive — you can expect the “great unbundling” to continue in 2022.

Solution Platformification & Verticalization 

Corporate legal departments know they need to start leaning on technology but the plethora of solutions out there can be overwhelming. Buyer fatigue is real, and organizations don’t want to devote countless hours or resources to onboarding a multitude of vendors.

Leading legaltech organizations are taking note of this and leading the charge on platformification — and acquisitions are playing a major part in that. Just look at our parent company, Onit, who acquired five companies within the past few years — four of them in the past two years alone! Being a “one-stop-shop” for a buyer will continue to be incredibly valuable in 2022.

Aside from platformification, you can expect to see some verticalization in the legaltech space as well. Birds of a feather flock together and organizations want to follow in suit of their peers when it comes to the technology they use. Expect to see legaltech providers honing in on specific verticals as they find their niche market — especially in PE as high finance continues to boom.

The Rise of Legal Ops

So what do all the trends we just mentioned have in common? They create a distinct, and undeniable need for legal operations. 2021 presented corporate legal departments with the need to determine what’s a “nice-to-have” versus what’s a “need-to-have” — and a legal operations function has fallen into the latter. 2022 will solidify that, as more companies bring on legal operations in-house, or outsource it to consultancies or other white-glove services. 

Whether it be to improve the efficiency of the legal department, manage process automation and onboarding, or rein in inflated legal spend — legal operations teams will continue to be an invaluable asset to organizations across the globe. And as businesses continue to be tasked to do more with less, we can expect to see more legal ops professions, departments, and solutions in 2022.   

Here’s to 2022!

Legal services — both in-house and at law firms — is changing rapidly. 2020 presented many new challenges, accelerating the adoption of technology and changing the way the industry works. Innovation is disrupting the status quo, pushing legal departments and firms to take a hard look at how they operate. 2022 will double down on that trend, pushing teams to new heights of operational excellence. 

2021 was a turning point – and 2022? It will solidify legal operations — and the technology behind it — as a driving force of innovation across the industry. And we are extremely excited to help drive the industry into a bright new future! 

Digital Transformation in the Legal Industry: Inspiration and Advice

Posted on December 7, 2021 by - Digital Transformation

In recent years, digital transformation in the legal industry has been sweeping through companies of all sizes. Legal ops professionals have been tasked with boosting efficiency while decreasing costs. As new challenges continue to arise, many have embraced agility, constantly adapting and optimizing processes.

For many in-house business visionaries and legal operations professionals, the answer to facing down constant change has been technology and innovation. By capitalizing on these new advances, digital transformation has not just changed how legal works, but has brought value across organizations.

To inspire your own digital transformation in the legal industry, we’ve compiled our latest Quick Start Guide, which shares valuable advice on legal digital transformation from the leaders who created it.

Inspiration from the Best

The Quick Start Guide offers insight from some of the most successful digital transformation stories in the legal market – Onit customers BT, ADM and VMware. In their stories, we hope you’ll find inspiration for your own intentionally designed change.

  • BT’s Award-Winning Digital Transformation: BT, one of the largest global communications service providers, needed to reconceptualize their processes to optimize the delivery of legal services. Technology served as the backbone for its transformation vision. The company, which is the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider and a leading provider of global communications services and solutions, adopted a platform to fuel their transformation – one that won the prestigious Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and has been recognized by both the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and the Legal Procurement Awards.
  • ADM’s Self-Built Vendor Management App: Fortune 100 company ADM, a global leader in nutrition and agricultural origination and processing, turned to technology to streamline a common challenge – vendor management. A major issue, the company had no standardized processes around selecting the right vendor for any particular matter or project. They built their own solution to streamline the vendor management process on a no-code platform.
  • VMware’s Data-Centric Transformation Journey: Every company’s digital transformation stems from different priorities. For VMware, a leading provider of multi-cloud services, the goal was to transform and scale legal services to accelerate the company’s growth and simplify the customer experience. That could only happen if they could find a way to harness the power of the huge volumes of data they had in their possession and access benchmarking information. With careful planning, vision and technology, they accomplished just that.

Tips for Implementing Successful Legal Digital Transformation

In addition to these specific success stories, the Quick Start Guide outlines some top pieces of advice for how corporate legal departments can drive transformation at their organizations. From budgeting considerations to hiring the right talent, the guide draws on a recent CLOC panel of experts that offered best practices for scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization.

The Quick Start Guide also offers some valuable transformation advice from Brad Rogers, Onit’s own vice president of strategy and growth and former chief operations officer and chief of staff for advocacy and oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company.

As Brad explains, digital transformation in the legal industry requires a longer-term rethinking of the way you work and should be aimed at leveraging modern capabilities and business processes to change the way your company operates. He also lays out the three goals to keep in mind when building world-class legal operations from scratch.

You can find these successful examples of digital transformation and read more advice here.

The History of the Enterprise Legal Management System and How Today’s Innovators Use It

Posted on December 1, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The enterprise legal management system (ELM) has evolved significantly since its first iteration more than 40 years ago. Before ELM solutions, paper ruled every aspect of legal operations, overrunning critical processes like matter intake and bill submissions. Processes that powered critical legal operations workflows lacked visibility and efficiency.

Now, ELM systems digitize and automate legal operations, analyze legal spend, minimize company risk and drive process efficiency – all while helping corporate legal departments better support their businesses.

How did ELM software become critical to today’s corporate legal departments? And how are innovative GCs, in-house counsel and legal operations professionals using it today? Read on to find out.

The Enterprise Legal Management System – Introducing Matter Management

Enterprise legal management solutions trace back to 1978. Equitable Life’s legal department saw the potential for their new WANG VS word processing system to do more. They determined that it could be used to manage the details of each legal matter, outside counsel and many other things that the company needed to monitor for day-to-day legal operations.

Equitable developed a matter management system that ultimately became a product called Corporate LawPack. Over the next two decades, Corporate LawPack was ported to a variety of hardware and software platforms. This led to its eventual adoption by the legal departments of many Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and financial institutions.

During the 1980s and 1990s, matter management was broadly adopted and refined to facilitate the administration of corporate legal practices. These solutions provided a matter database and served as reporting tools but had little effect on overall efficiency. They required manual entry for a large amount of data to create meaningful value, which meant the systems were operated by support staff and not widely used by lawyers.

The Rise of Legal Spend Management

In the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, legal spend management – the companion to matter management and an essential component of an enterprise legal management system – made its debut. The DuPont Legal Model (1992) drove its development. DuPont partnered with outside counsel to manage the data provided on legal invoices, theorizing that it would lead to significant operational efficiencies and reduce legal spend. This led to the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) initiative and spawned the new class of spend management software.

Legal spend management systems gave clients visibility into the details of what law firms were billing and it became the primary means of exercising more control over how matters were managed by outside counsel. This transparency began a shift in the way legal business is conducted that continues today, with clients having more opportunities to require alternative fee arrangements, enforce billing guidelines and reduce costs.

The Modern Enterprise Legal Management System

Today, technologies like the cloud, workflow automation platforms, AI and business intelligence platforms have allowed for greater advances and enabled the execution of visionary thinking.

Corporate legal departments no longer want systems of record – software that merely tracks data added to them. Instead, they want systems of engagement for ELM. These systems move the needle of productivity, streamline and accelerate workflows and provide greater transparency and less risk to the legal department and the enterprise it serves.

Even more importantly, these legal leaders – both for operations and the practice of law – want to address larger challenges, ones that might be felt across the enterprise. Adopting a no-code platform approach for all solutions means legal departments can solve any needs, including enterprise legal management, NDA creation and distribution, legal holds and legal service requests. The no-code platform also makes it incredibly easy to create solutions that solve intradepartmental and cross-departmental needs. For example, this catalog shows how corporate legal departments have built their own Apps and solutions to work with HR, IT, compliance, marketing and more.

Innovative Use of ELM Solutions

How are innovative legal leaders using enterprise legal management solutions?

BT’s innovative approach, which combined matter management, legal spend management and a business process automation platform, won the 2021 Legal Innovation Awards in the category of “Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations.” According to the awards program, “BT’s new platform, ‘My Legal,’ allowed the legal team to overhaul how it managed external spend, as well as several other process improvements. Judges agreed that this winner stood out, not only due to the speed of their roll-out of the platform, but by taking an existing process and migrating it into a streamlined, efficient platform.” You can hear David Griffin, Head of Legal Technology and Change at BT, talk about the company’s award-winning transformation in this Onit podcast.

Christine DiDomizio, Legal Operations Lead at Jaguar Land Rover North America, shared the company’s story about implementing an enterprise legal management solution, digitizing processes and how collaboration changed after ELM. As a bonus, the solution also prepared them for the onset of the COVID crisis by providing a seamless transition from in-office to virtual work.

In this blog post, legal technology experts discuss four exciting ways in-house professionals are leveraging enterprise legal management, including workload management, diversity and inclusion, proving value and enterprise-wide operations.

You can find more ELM innovation and digital transformation stories in this Quick Start Guide: Advice on Legal Digital Transformation from the Leaders Who Created It.

How Digital Transformation and a Contract System Future-Proof Surges in Contract Activity   

Posted on November 23, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Creating a contract system that handles legal work is challenging, as the ebbs and flows of legal work can be highly unpredictable. Inevitably, you’ll face periods where you see sudden surges of contract activity, whether due to regulatory changes, significant deals or something else. Are you prepared to handle the waves of work when they arise?

Four experts gathered to discuss just this challenge recently during a World Commerce and Contracting event. They included Marcelo Peviani, Senior Director of Global Legal Services at VMware, Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence and Matt DenOuden, Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Onit. Together, they discussed how companies can best prepare for sudden workload surges by planning ahead and implementing a contract system and technologies.

Starting at Base Camp for Your Digital Transformation

When it comes to digital transformation and preparing for work surges, the panel likened the journey to climbing a mountain. You can think of your preparation stage as the base camp for your climb, while a full technology implementation is the summit.

They advised legal professionals to start by building a technology roadmap that considers the value you want the corporate legal department to deliver to the business and where you want to be in a year or two. Regardless of whether or not you have a specific current need or if you see yourself implementing a contract lifecycle management software in the future, it’s critical to start the conversation today.

Too many companies try to implement legal contract AI and other technologies as a reaction to events that happen. Unfortunately, though, this is rarely successful. Implementation takes time and digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. You need time for experimentation and getting your champions on board before you can roll your contract system out across the enterprise. Even if you’re not looking to roll out right away, you want to start setting the posture for an easy transition to automation as soon as possible and start engaging your stakeholders now.

The base camp for your digital journey is where your climb is organized. Your team members should all meet and you should start building a culture of success. When you’re implementing digital transformation from scratch, you need to start by standardizing processes and technology across all your players. Determine your goals and the pain points you want to relieve, and then map out the roles that will be responsible for or involved in getting your company there.

Future-Proofing Surges with a Contract System

In terms of addressing future contract surges, you should consider the types of contracts that are integral to your business and the contract system infrastructure, processes and resources that support and drive that kind of contractual work. Legal departments are increasingly playing a pivotal role in company governance and setting standards for the transactions the company engages in. The planning stage for your digital transformation is your opportunity to translate those standards into playbooks and actual processes that will be implemented across the organization.

Once you know your goals, you can choose the contract system and technologies that will help you meet them. These solutions will play a key role in delivering contract and other legal services to the business, either via self-service or with document automation tools. It’s essential to build that into the company mindset at the outset.

Scale the Peak with Steady Progress

Much like climbing a mountain, digital transformation involves steady progress. You should constantly be evaluating whether what you’re doing is working, if you should continue with your current solutions or if you should recalibrate your contract system to achieve different results. Any technology rollout should involve a process of experimentation. Your first try won’t be perfect, but it’ll set you on the road to creating a better contract system.

That’s why the first implementation is always the hardest. Once you’ve created a culture that’s open to digital change, you can start finding more opportunities to drive value for the business. You’ll also be in a better position to know how to weather the storms on your way up the mountain.

For more valuable insights for handling contract surges and contract systems, as well as making digital transformation a success (including examples from VMware’s own transformation journey), you can listen to the entire webinar here.

If you’d like to learn about how Onit can help your company’s digital transformation, schedule a demonstration of our contract lifecycle management or enterprise legal management today.

5 Ways Smart Legal Ops Teams Use QBRs

Posted on November 18, 2021 by - Legal Operations

Managing outside counsel can sometimes feel like herding cats. There, we said it. Phew. Glad that one’s out in the open.

Maybe you believe one firm is overcharging you on rates, while another is going to town on block billing, and another is staffing partners on tasks a first-year should definitely be doing. You know these things are happening, but do you have hard evidence? Figuring out how to drive meaningful change with your firms can be tough — even simply knowing where to begin is a challenge. 

Smart legal ops teams use, you guessed it, data (!) to manage their outside counsel — and their first stop on the road to crushing department priorities is quarterly business reviews, better known as QBRs. 

QBR meetings give them a platform to discuss performance and rate trends, successes, as well as opportunities for improvement. While it’s of course critical to meet about the meat of your matters, setting aside time to review your business relationship sets you up for success both with your firms, as well as with your internal stakeholders (budget season is coming, amirite?). 

So, what can you expect to get out of a well-prepared QBR? Here are five ways innovative legal ops teams are using their QBRs: 

1. Rate Review

Rate review shouldn’t be a once-a-year task — especially with the sly pricing tricks law firms are known to deploy to rack up their billings. Regular analysis of your law firm’s activity and rates by timekeeper level can ensure that you don’t overpay unnecessarily. 

By surfacing critical data across practice areas and analyzing rates on a quarterly basis, QBRs unearth important trends that can eliminate increases — sometimes even leading to reductions or discounts. QBRs provide the venue to negotiate fair market rates and manage your discounts, regardless of if they’re practice area-specific, volume-related, or otherwise. 

With clear and objective insights under your belt, you can easily open up a data-driven dialogue with your law firms to address any concerns, then start — and win — rate negotiations.

2. Panel Review

Without data on your side, value can be in the eye of the beholder. Consider what you’re paying your firms. Now think about what they’ve done for you in the past year. Are they congruent? Did you truly get what you paid for? How did they stack up against other firms you use in the same practice areas?

We’re guessing you might be feeling a slight wave of regret washing over you. Shake that right off. QBRs are a great fix.

By taking key metrics into account like total outside counsel spend, average hours per matter, and percentage of time block billed, QBRs surface insights on the value your firms deliver and opportunities for value to be maximized. By lining up those metrics against other firms working across the same practice areas — or the same panel — you can begin to see trends that may impact how you allocated work in the future, or even prompt you to change the panel composition.

3. Performance Management 

If you’re like most corporate legal departments we work with, you’re probably paying a partner for something a first-year associate should be doing. We emphasize “probably” because it’s nearly ubiquitous — Bodhala sees this behavior across nearly every firm. We like to call it “partner hoarding”. Some firms are more egregious than others, but it truly impacts your budget when it’s happening on a regular basis. 

With cost-cutting a constant priority for corporate legal departments, QBRs are a great way to easily help correct this problem.

Digging into activity across your practice areas can highlight key metrics, such as average partner hours, average associate hours, and your partner to associate ratio. By clearly highlighting key trends, such as partners logging significant hours on routine work or firms exceeding their associate ratio, you can determine where exactly you need to course-correct and rein in the unnecessary dollars being spent.

4. Reporting to Internal Stakeholders

Many legal departments are feeling the heat from the C-suite to cut costs and run their departments more like a ‘business’. We all know that reporting to internal stakeholders can become a real pain in the…you know what. For many corporate legal departments, reporting capabilities are stuck in the 1990s, leaving them to conduct manual analysis and pore over spreadsheets.

QBRs place all the data that in-house teams need at their fingertips — often in a format that they can pass along to internal stakeholders without any edits or changes. 

Your QBRs should deliver in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations – which can be tough without appropriate software or a robust legal ops team. Setting yourself up with a top-tier legal analytics platform (cough, cough…Bodhala…!) can be the difference between easy-breezy and hours of work. That said, the work is worth the impact and the ability to pass a nice, neat package to the finance department. 

5. Gut-Checking Large Matters

Law firms often claim forecasting a budget for upcoming matters is an impossible feat, citing a lack of precedent or the “unique nature” of every matter. Sure, not every matter is cookie-cutter, but there are absolutely trends. Just like you can dig into historical legal precedent, you can also dig into historical cost precedent. 

A great QBR will drill into top matters from the past quarter and highlight key metrics that you should watch in the future. Even without a sophisticated legal billing analytics engine, keeping a record of such historical analysis can be incredibly helpful in projecting costs — everything from setting expectations around hours and tasks to rates.  

Having this information on hand helps in-house teams gut-check future matters of similar volume and complexity. Not only that, but great QBRs should offer the opportunity to make the appropriate changes needed to rein in extraneous expenses and keep your budget in check, such as revisiting how work is allocated, renegotiating your practice area discount, or updating your outside counsel guidelines to eliminate unreasonable billings. 

Sophisticated Reporting + White Glove Service = Better Business Outcomes

Data-driven conversations are foundational to the success of not only your law firm relationships but your entire legal department. 

QBRs are a great opportunity for in-house teams to get their feet wet in legal data analytics and see how transparency — and even just incremental change – can drastically reduce your legal spend and eliminate budget overages. Transparency itself can often be a major catalyst. Ever notice that when someone knows you’re watching, they start acting differently? QBRs can produce that same effect, known as the Sentinel Effect — let them know big brother is in the building, and they’ll clean up their act. We wrote a whole piece about it — check it out.

If you’re resource-constrained or you don’t have a legal ops team, don’t worry. We got you. You don’t have to be a data scientist for QBRs to transform your legal department — that’s our job :). 

Ready to learn more? Get in touch with our team to discuss our QBR Program and the savings that await!