Author: Onit

Your Opinion Counts: Give us an Hour and We’ll Contribute to a Charity of Your Choice

Posted on June 10, 2010 by - Company News and Events

In a post last month, I talked about the formation of the Onit Advisory Group (OAG) to help with the strategic development of our premium legal spend management module. Since then, we have received a great deal of feedback that many of you would like to participate but do not have enough time to commit to the group.

If you fall into this category, we have a solution that we think is mutually beneficial. Give us one hour of your time to discuss your opinions about billing policies and guidelines, electronic bill submission, invoice workflow, alternative free arrangements, etc. and we’ll donate $250 to the charity of your choice.

There is a small disclaimer though. We are seeking corporate legal attorneys or professionals from companies with revenue of at least $1.5 billion dollars. We are targeting this segment of the market because we feel there is great opportunity for a comprehensive legal spend management and project management tool. Your feedback will help us shape the product development, which is scheduled for launch in early fall.

Please email me at [email protected] if you can donate an hour of your time to help a charity of your choice. Your opinion matters. Thank you in advance for your participation.

Depth Verse Breadth

Posted on June 3, 2010 by - Business Process Management

As we prepare for our new website launch and begin work on our premium product tailored at the legal vertical, we continue to struggle with how we talk about what we do. Although we designed Onit specifically for lawyers, we quickly realized that Onit is a universal project management tool that any professional, or non-professional for that matter, could use.

At the highest level, a lawyer’s project management needs are not that dissimilar than most people’s needs. On the one hand, we have a great, general project management tool that we will continue to grow for all professionals. On the other hand, our business plan predicts that 100% of our revenue will come from the legal vertical in the next five years.

It is the classic “depth verse breadth” battle that most software companies encounter. So far, we have tried to straddle both: Onit is for everybody; Onit Premium will be for lawyers and people that work with lawyers. Now, we have to find a middle ground that clearly articulates Onit’s value proposition to both audiences.

1,000 Users and Going Strong: Results from the Onit Beta Program

Posted on May 14, 2010 by - Company News and Events

As we near the end of the Onit beta, I have been thinking about the success of the last three months. Since launching at LegalTech New York on February 1, 2010, we have had almost 1,000 business and legal professionals register for our beta. In addition to wildly exceeding our expectations, we are encouraged to learn that there is a need for a legal project management tool like Onit.

We also got a fair amount of action on our community site and encourage users to continue to submit questions, share ideas and report bugs. Our main goal with the beta program was to gain an active group of users and we were pleased to find just that. Thank you to everyone who made this beta a success. We will continue to engage with our active users and solicit feedback for new legal project management features.

Our users broke down in ways that we didn’t completely anticipate: 35% were law firms, 20% corporate/government/education, 10% competitors/vendors, and 35% were other types of users that had nothing to do with legal. While we were hopeful that law firms and people not associated with the legal industry would adopt our platform, we didn’t realize either group would be so large.

Looking forward, we have some major functionality that we plan to roll out in the next week or so, but the big news is that we are working on our electronic billing and legal spend management module. This will be targeted at the legal industry and will add the ability to budget and track the financial side of projects. We will be in beta with this module over the summer.

We’re Onit: New Enhancements to Project Plan

Posted on March 29, 2010 by - Company News and Events

We appreciate the feedback we have received from our beta users and wanted to share some news about new enhancements to the Project Plan. We recently updated a section in Project Plan that lets you add detailed information to tasks. Now, it is faster than ever to add new items and you can track the status of items like you can with project status.

In the Project Plan, you can assign tasks to team members, add a description, set deadlines, estimate costs associated with a task and update your personal status. You can also quickly upload and attach multiple documents to projects. We also fixed how the Project Plan is displayed in Internet Explorer. The screen shot below shows this new functionality. Log on now to see these new enhancements.

onit screenshot

How E-billing Has Evolved Since the 90’s

Posted on March 5, 2010 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

I have been thinking about legal e-billing and spend management for a long time now. My partner and I implemented the first really successful e-billing systems in corporate legal back in the late 1990’s. At that time, corporations were dealing with invoices the size of phone books from their outside lawyers. They were simply too big for busy inside lawyers to review.

The goal with our product was to identify waste. Everyone knew the waste was there. They knew that their invoices were too high. They also knew this was not because the firms were cheating them but because no one was reviewing the invoices for mistakes made by their firms.

Many of the Fortune 500 were the earliest adopters of the technology and the earliest success stories. We designed our product with their requirements in mind. We developed big hairy systems to get invoices electronically from law firms to their corporation customers. We wanted to help them save time and money and eliminate waste.

We at Onit are in the process of developing a new e-billing system that will work for BOTH small and large corporations. One of the first things we learned was that scale matters. Smaller firms and workgroups have very different problems and barriers to adoptions than the largest corporations in the world. Trying to implement software designed to squeeze pennies out of every line item will not work for you unless you have lots of line items.

We have a philosophy about how, why and when you should adopt e-billing and spend management systems and this collection of blog posts, I hope, will articulate some of that philosophy.

The Downfalls of the Waterfall

Posted on February 16, 2010 by - Business Process Management

In our last post we briefly mention waterfall development and why in client work, it’s important to avoid that method when managing a project. To explain why, we want to go into a little more detail on what waterfall development really means.

It is typically defined by seven linear stages: conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing and maintenance. Some of these stages can last months and are usually marked by big milestones. It is only upon the completion of these milestones that the customer or client is reengaged for review.

The advantage of this method is that the customer has to really think about what he wants before software engineers spend time coding. And it allows for predictable, top-down management of engineers from the project manager’s perspective. But the biggest disadvantage of this method is that if the product starts to veer, or if too many project interpretations are wrong, it is a long time before the customer knows it. There is the potential for vast amounts of rework and very unhappy customers.

The Importance of E-billing

Posted on February 6, 2010 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Before I start discussing e-billing, let me tell you a story to illustrate how important it is.

I remember walking through a large bank’s offices in the late 1990’s. As we walked back to the conference room to give our sales pitch on why they needed a e-billing system we had to squeeze past boxes four feet high.

I asked “What’s in the boxes?” They said legal bills.

During the sales pitch I asked several questions:

How much do you spend in legal bills? Answer: we don’t know.
How many law firm vendors do you have? Answer: we don’t know.
Home many legal bills do you get a year? Answer: we don’t know.

I knew then that the software we had designed was going to sell itself. In the next series of posts I will be explaining why e-billing is so important and why we at Onit have spent so much time designing a system that works for you, no matter how big or how small your company may be.

Agile Project Management

Posted on January 29, 2010 by - Business Process Management, Community Resource

In the software engineering world, they use a disciplined project management process called “agile” The agile method is based on teamwork, frequent inspection and adaption, self-organization and accountability, and a business approach that aligns work with customer needs and company goals.

We think those tenets should be applied to all project management systems, not just the development world, so the agile method was central to our thinking when we designed Onit.

Agile project management, unlike more traditional systems, is neither linear nor marked by complete specifications being written up front. Agile project managers work in much smaller chunks of time, 2 weeks for example, and fast iteration is key. Yes, specifications still need to be well understood but that doesn’t have to happen up front. Since you are moving fast, you can change those quickly and incorporate new ones as needed. These constant updates also keep everyone in the loop and save time.

We think agile lawyering makes sense. My lawyers and I should iterate more frequently on my projects. Onit allows you to define your goals clearly and up front and then through “discussions” in the service, you can iterate to make sure the project gets completed with the least rework. And you have a running transcript of decisions and conversations. Imagine having one place where you can see everyone’s updates, rather than having to call a meeting to discuss them!

Another online project management system?! Another project management blog?!

Posted on January 28, 2010 by - Business Process Management, Community Resource

The answer to both of your questions is no.

At Onit, we recognize that the discipline of project management could play a valuable role in the average lawyer’s practice. None of the tools currently out there are a good fit so we spent the last year studying lawyers and trying to determine what was missing in the market for them. What we created is not the ‘building a freeway,’ heavy, top-down project management that most people think of when they think of project management. Rather, we think what they need is more akin to lean project management, which is collaborative and is focused on eliminating waste as it’s primary function.

We have applied what we learned into a flexible, online project management tool based on lawyer’s specific needs. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal industry: we discovered that lawyer’s project management needs are no different than most people. Perhaps the scale is a little different, but when we stepped back from what we had built, we realized that we created a tool that anybody could get value from. The reality is we are all project managers, whether we have that in our title or not.

We will continue to post on topics that are important to us and that are the foundation of how we think about project management. Next will be a post about our borrowing of concepts from software developers about iterating and frequent status updates.

On Monday, February 1st, we’ll be debuting Onit at the LegalTech 2010 conference in New York City so stop by and visit us! Onit will also be available for beta testing and we encourage you to sign up and try it now. Your feedback is important to us, so please leave comments and interact with our community forum!

The Need for Speed: 3 Ways Legal Can Elevate Efficiency

Posted on January 1, 1970 by - Business Process Management, Community Resource, Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

As the current macroeconomic climate puts pressure on businesses, there isn’t time to wait on delays or holdups — creating a growing demand for speed and agility from Legal. Here’s why efficiency matters more than ever for legal departments, and how to execute sizable gains for yours.

Efficiency is a currency of inestimable worth — one with even more value in this uncertain economic era. As corporate legal departments face immense pressure to handle an increasing volume of matters, faster execution has become critical for risk mitigation, competitive advantage, and revenue generation.

In fact, the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report uncovered a growing demand for more speed, agility, and efficiency from Legal, especially from go-to-market teams striving to meet sales and pipeline numbers. With deal cycles lengthening and earnings projections being more deeply scrutinized, sales and marketing teams are feeling the gravity — to the tune of a 30% and 27% drop, respectively, in positive interactions with Legal since the inaugural ELR Report last year.

But time is money, and there simply isn’t time for businesses to wait on lengthy support for deals — not when that might mean money is left on the table at a time when both revenue acquisition and EBITDA matter exponentially.

For the second year in a row, three in five (59%) non-legal practitioners do not consider Legal particularly efficient. For myriad reasons, respondents call out the department’s lack of operational efficiency: overall, many view Legal as a “bottleneck.” Those in the United Kingdom note Legal as “adding unnecessary roadblocks.” In Germany, corporate employees report they “simply expect to experience holdups” interacting with Legal.

That said, of those who do rate Legal as efficient, nine in 10 (91%) believe Legal shines in its handling of sales and revenue cycles — proof positive that Legal’s effect on materiality is real. However, an equal percentage (91%) of legal professionals admit to being acutely aware they are being bypassed by their internal clients, at least on occasion.

It is Legal’s duty and very nature as protector of the business to be cautious and to examine the crucial details of every contract or deal. But Legal also has the power to grow the business in every capacity if it can strike a balance between process and speed.

That factor is efficiency.

3 Ways to Fast-Track Efficiency

When asked how their legal department could best support them during the current economic climate, enterprise employees reported a wish list that mirrors the people, process, and technology (PPT) framework created to magnify efficiency: better communication and collaboration (43%), streamlined processes (22%), and accelerated due dates (13%).

1. Enhancing communication among people.

According to the ELR Report, two in three (65%) employees do not find Legal responsive enough. Of course, legal service requests (LSRs) can be unpredictable; some may take just hours, while others do require weeks, even months. Clients do understand this variability. Yet they also express a profound desire to remain regularly informed about status and updates.

The most sophisticated enterprise legal management (ELM) platforms, which have matured from systems of record to systems of engagement, now act as a single source of truth. In turn, this constant shared connection provides a distinct anchor to the enterprise, a deeper awareness of the “exactly who is working on precisely what,” and more seamless collaboration on initiatives.

2. Utilizing spend management to upgrade process.

In reality, efficiency in business encompasses both operational efficiency, or the speed of matter execution important to internal clients, and cost efficiency, which executive boards must heed and account for, namely during economic crunches.

More than one in three (35%) legal respondents does not feel legal is very cost-efficient. With increased stress on legal departments to both hasten productivity and control costs, modern legal spend management solutions are a wise choice to tackle both speed and spend. E-billing automates business-critical workflows, offering visibility and consistency for how legal bills and budgets are processed. This permits legal departments to identify immediate cost-saving measures as well as to explore trends that lead to unparalleled data-driven insights for the future. Further, legal spend management dramatically reduces the time of administrative and compliance tasks, streamlining workflows and, thus, improving efficiency.

3. Embracing AI-enabled CLM technology.

One in five (21%) legal respondents overall, and one in four (24%) in the United States, spends six to eight hours daily on contracts. That’s nearly every hour of every workday spent on contracts alone. Moreover, more than eight in 10 (84%) say sales contracts usually take a month or longer to push through — and more than one in four (26%) sales contracts require three months or more.

Leaving little time left for other priorities, contract management propagates issues of responsiveness and inefficiency. Enter intelligent contract lifecycle management (CLM). Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to support the entire contract lifecycle, AI-based CLM reduces time spent on contracts and integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) systems to reduce the likelihood of inconsistencies, proving to shrink deal cycle times by up to 20% and speed time to revenue by 24%.

Accelerating Time to Material Success

“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done,” iconic management consultant Peter Drucker once said.

At a time when time itself is truly of the essence, Legal must listen deeply to their internal clients, streamline workflows, and adopt and invest in innovation to navigate the complex corporate landscape. In turn, the department will emerge as a more visible, strategic partner and indispensable business influencer that sparks faster execution and greater material impact.

Download the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report today to discover how both corporate employees and legal professionals view their interactions and collaboration and ways in which Legal can evolve its relationships and brand image to impact revenue generation, growth, and operational efficiency more positively.