Author: Onit

What is Legal Document Management?

Posted on December 6, 2022 by - Enterprise Legal Management

As the name suggests, legal document management involves storing and handling documents related to legal matters. Lawyers deal in vast numbers of documents and files every day, from contracts, licenses, and letters to emails, notices, and reports. For this reason, they need access to systems that not only help store documents but also track, manage and search them. In fact, document management should not be confused with document storage, which is merely the saving and ordering of documents within folders either stored locally or in a file server.

Document management is so much more. While there are numerous digital document management tools, document management practices for legal often differ significantly compared to standards in other industries. As a result, dedicated legal document management software emerged in the 1990s to support law firms and in-house legal teams. Since then, the legal document management market has matured dramatically, and the solutions have moved into the cloud and become collaborative.

ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF A LEGAL DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (DMS)

There are now many legal document management tools that can help legal teams to manage all their documents and correspondence; it can sometimes take time to know where to start and what functionality to look for. Before we get to some more interesting features, let’s start with the basic functionality essential for an excellent legal document management system.

STORE, ORGANIZE, AND SEARCH

A legal DMS should enable legal teams to store, organize and search their legal documents. This involves being able to move and copy documents where needed. Users should be able to record metadata about each document (e.g., matter number, team, location, etc.), and that metadata should be searchable along with the file name and document contents.

VERSION CONTROL

A legal DMS should also have version control functionality – allowing different versions of the same document to be saved (and in some cases restored), with the ability to check out documents to prevent version conflict. Auditing is also critical; there should be a record of every interaction between a user and a document version to clarify who did what and when.

NATIVE COMPATIBILITY

Documents should be able to be opened in their native applications directly from the legal DMS. It’s also vital that documents (both a copy and a link to the underlying document) can be shared via the legal DMS. With so many documents exchanged over email, integration with MS Outlook and other email clients is essential so that documents can be sent via email and emails and their attachments can be saved to the system. For this reason, it’s also crucial that legal document management systems support the storage of both emails and their metadata.

NUMBERING

Finally, a numbering convention is necessary with many documents and versions handled. Look for systems that automatically number documents, including matter and version numbers.

IMPORTANT LEGAL DMS FUNCTIONALITY

As well as the core features, there is another key functionality you should look for in a legal document management system.

SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

A legal professional must adhere to industry compliance and security standards. When choosing a legal DMS, ensure it has top-grade and industry-recognized security certifications (ISO, HIPAA, and SOC) and excellent infrastructure security, including firewalls, application-level filtering, antivirus scanning, and intrusion detection. Also, ensure that data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Application security is also vital – for example, password expiry and IP restrictions for cloud-based solutions. Any legal DMS vendor should be backing up data to multiple secure locations to ensure data integrity, and robust disaster recovery procedures should be in place.

Look for products that are thoroughly and regularly audited by third-party security experts who provide penetration testing and more. If you opt for a cloud solution, ensure you know where your data will be stored and that the data centers have state-of-the-art physical security.

RECORDS MANAGEMENT

Records management involves managing the creation, use, management, and disposal of records, including certain documents. It’s a critical component of most organizations’ risk and compliance activities. Therefore, any legal document management system should be able to allocate unique identifiers to documents, prevent unauthorized changes to documents, lock documents to avoid modification, and create audit trails of the document lifecycle. The system should also support retention scheduling and rules for how long different documents should be kept. These rules should be assigned based on the type of document. Finally, the legal DMS should allow for the disposition of documents that no longer need to be retained.

PERMISSIONS MANAGEMENT

Look for systems that provide role-based permissioning to reduce the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information. With this functionality, documents and folders can be restricted for access by certain users or groups only. However, sometimes more than this level of permissioning is needed when specific matters and associated data need to be completely hidden from all but a small group of people. Just because you can’t see a particular document doesn’t mean metadata (e.g., matter name) will also be hidden in other system areas, such as lookups, which could be a problem for highly sensitive matters. Look for legal DMS that lock down the whole matter by hiding the matter and its data and documents from appearing anywhere in the system for non-authorized users.

INTEGRATIONS

Documents, and contracts, in particular, are part of a broader lifecycle encompassing drafting, review, negotiation, execution, and management. While legal document management systems help with storage and versioning, many legal teams rely on other tools to support the different elements of the document lifecycle. For this reason, when looking at legal DMS, you should make sure it has the integrations you need right now and the future integrations you may need. At a minimum, ensure the system integrates well with Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Given we are now a remote workforce following the pandemic, look for tools that integrate with collaboration and instant messaging tools like MS Teams and Slack. You can also look at integrations with document assembly tools for drafting documents and eSignature tools for document execution. You may also favor legal DMS platforms that integrate with artificial intelligence (AI) tools so that you can intelligently sort, categorize and review your documents and extract meaningful data. AI integrations can significantly improve the search quality within your legal DMS.

Legal documents go hand-in-hand with legal matters and projects. There needs to be a very close alignment between a legal DMS and a matter management system. This enables matter data to be associated with documents and invoices in the legal DMS, and the matter management system pulls in relevant documents for a particular matter. For legal teams to operate efficiently, they need to consolidate and align their data across multiple systems. This also offers the best user experience, so users are not always “context switching” into different software tools. All your systems need to communicate so counsel can navigate easily across matters and their documents. Legal teams should be looking to start building their “legal operations space” – consisting of a legal document management system alongside matter management, eBilling, and contract management software.

DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS

When purchasing a legal DMS, you will likely have two primary deployment options: on-premise, which means the application and documents will be hosted and stored in your organization’s own IT infrastructure, and cloud, where they are hosted and stored on secure remote servers within one or more data centers. There is a third option – hybrid storage, where the application is cloud-hosted, but documents and data are stored on-premise.

Cloud has its benefits in terms of speed of deployment, scalability, and reduced cost of operation and maintenance; however, on-premise and hybrid solutions are suitable for organizations that want more control over their data and have higher security requirements. Organizations such as financial institutions need very high levels of security. While some cloud providers can meet these standards, some organizations will always insist on on-premise deployments. Make sure you know what your organization expects by deployment and document hosting and that the legal DMS will support this.

COLLABORATION AND PRODUCTIVITY

A good legal document management system will help you and your team get work done. Document collaboration is increasingly moving online with document co-authoring tools, including those with MS Office online. This offers a better drafting experience where colleagues can work in real-time to amend and refine documents. Legal DMS systems should offer collaboration tools and integrations to help users not only store and locate documents but also work on them. Look for legal DMS platforms that offer a range of collaboration functionality – from co-authoring and annotations to commenting and approvals. With a growing remote workforce, see if the legal DMS has tools supporting asynchronous working across remotely dispersed teams. Also, consider exploring AI tools to deliver intelligent search capability so users have better access to legal knowledge in context.

TRANSFORM CHAOS INTO ORDER WITH A LEGAL DMS

A legal DMS can transform the way your legal team works, collaborates, and accesses knowledge. It will bring order to the chaos of legal documents and will create a secure and searchable repository that gives your team quick and straightforward access to the documents they need when they need them. The right integrations and functionality will help manage entire document lifecycles and make your legal team more productive with collaboration tools.

Stop hunting down documents across email, local folders, and shared drives, and make the leap to a modern legal DMS. Hopefully, our tips for what to consider will set you and your team on course for an efficient and productive future where working with documents is a pleasure — and not a chore.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

Embracing the Paradigm Shift: Enterprise Legal Management and AI

Posted on November 30, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

This article was first published on LegalDive. 

The history of enterprise legal management (ELM) is a study of slow-moving but immensely consequential shifts in purpose, mission and access. For several years, ELM was limited to matter management and spend management. After that, the first paradigm shift occurred when the best ELM platforms began to facilitate engagement, focus on process, offer a user-friendly environment, empower organizations and enable management of many other legal methods.

The second paradigm shift is happening now, taking advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology. Today, the top ELM tools combine the powers of artificial intelligence with existing ELM rules to offer a game-changing solution for legal teams. This combination enables legal to operate faster, more accurately, and more efficiently — in everything from invoice processing and contract management to vendor management and many other tasks.

Just as critical to legal departments are the data insights that this new combination provides. ELM’s embrace of AI empowers organizations to look between the rules to find missed savings, provide real-time invoice error detection and analyze how vendors and bill reviewers perform.

So, with all the insights and efficiency this combination of AI and ELM can provide, why are some still hesitant to embrace the change? The embrace of this paradigm shift is not universal – and their arguments deserve examination.

Let’s look at the three most common arguments against AI:

It’s not worth the hype.

The most common blowback against this is simple: AI-enabled technology isn’t worth the hype.

“We have yet to see AI tools in this industry that fully replace people or processes,” one e-discovery specialist says in a LegalTech News piece. “They are better marketed as augmenting a procedure, improving the performance of a team or workstream, or adding automation and precision to workflows.”

True, AI is not sufficiently advanced to replace lawyers or remove critical thinking from processes, but this does not mean there isn’t a huge amount of value in what AI can do now. Where AI excels is in augmenting the work of legal professionals (typically the stuff they don’t want to do), providing insight from large, unstructured, unseen data and automation of simple, highly repetitive tasks. So, while AI is not a “magic bullet,” it offers genuine benefits, not just the reduction of “time spent in the process” but improvements to consistency, transparency, and mitigation of risk, all of which directly impact the top and bottom lines of your business.

To unlock these benefits, look for vendors that have a clear roadmap and will work with your organization to develop a successful rollout plan and deploy their AI+ELM solution to augment and enhance your capabilities.

It doesn’t solve our specific problems.

Transparency in the selection process will go a long way toward choosing a product that does solve those specific issues. Legal technology vendors should clearly lay out the purpose of their AI solution. What problems will it solve? What is the implementation process? What kind of support and training will they provide? What does the return on investment (ROI) look like? On the user side, legal departments must do their homework with stakeholders before they rush into buying a tech solution. Legal should have a clear picture of success and should come prepared with use cases to illustrate the desired outcome.

“Technology for technology’s sake” isn’t a solution. As much as AI can be used, there remains a bigger challenge of whether it will be used. Understanding the use case, implementation, and return on investment are especially important; bringing in nascent technology means you must have a strong change management process. Understanding how the organization will adopt the technology and including all key individuals — from the influencers to the naysayers — are critical to the successful rollout of AI.

With that type of transparency and communication, organizations can find the right vendor for their project needs. Remember this quote from business leader Andrew Shimek when embarking on the search:

“You shouldn’t chase AI in a vacuum,” one industry expert said in an Iltacon panel. “You should think about what are the problems that we have that need to be solved. And if AI is a critical tool that can help solve that faster and better, not at the expense of quality, let’s adopt it. But I think it’s use-case first and AI second—not AI in a vacuum.”

It doesn’t provide the data for success.

Nowadays, many AI solutions are trained out of the box, eliminating the need to collect enormous amounts of data to get started. Of course, to create a highly custom solution, you will need to spend time collecting data, training, and validating. This can be difficult and risky.

Like any digital transformation, you should ask yourself whether you are innovating to sustain the existing approach (by making it faster, more efficient, cheaper, etc.) or disrupting the existing one. Most innovation is centered around sustaining innovation — of which success comes through iteration, not giant leaps. “Don’t let best get in the way of better” is a great motto to remember.

Starting with out-of-the-box solutions that might not be an exact fit BUT offer a faster pathway to value and building internal support for such a transformation is a secure way of creating success, helping you learn, measure and prepare for more customized solutions in the future.

Embracing the paradigm shift

McKinsey’s State of AI survey in 2021 shows that AI adoption continues to grow with significant benefits; most respondents say that adopting AI has resulted in a demonstrable positive impact. In fact, a report from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) that adoption of AI by legal teams doubled from 2020 to 2021 – from one in 10 teams to one in five.

Legal professionals everywhere are embracing the AI+ELM paradigm shift. On its most basic level, AI platforms can augment and improve both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals, and procurement teams. With the focused mission of helping business professionals get more work done faster, an AI engine can automate the existing repetitive, manual, and costly legal processes, enabling continuous learning and workflow improvements. The best intelligence platforms combine advanced AI techniques with workflow management to empower organizations with AI that not only finds and reports on things but does things for you.

The bottom line? While AI is not coming for lawyers’ jobs — and won’t be any time soon — the most innovative, forward-thinking legal departments recognize this paradigm shift and are acting to bolster their arsenal with AI-enabled workflow management solutions.

Learn how Onit’s ELM solutions can help your enterprise embrace this paradigm shift.

Strategically Negotiate Rates and Build Better Budgets with Rate Proposal Analyzer

Posted on November 15, 2022 by - Legal Operations

As we find ourselves nearing the end of another year, how confident do you feel in the rates you’ve negotiated for 2023?

C-suite executives are increasingly holding their corporate legal departments accountable for their spend. The Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report found that 37% of corporate legal departments feel this pressure from their CFO, while 30% feel it from their CEO, and 10% from their Board of Directors.

With mounting pressure to contain costs, your law firm rates are a great place to identify quick savings opportunities. That’s why we launched Rate Proposal Analyzer, the easiest way to collect, compare, and analyze your annual rate proposals. 

With a centralized view of your law firms’ rate proposals, you can finally say goodbye to the days of accepting above-market rate increases due to a storied law firm relationship or increasing caseloads. Rate Proposal Analyzer makes identifying savings opportunities quick and easy!

One Centralized Dashboard

Consolidating law firm rate proposals hasn’t been easy for corporate legal departments. 

Rates from one firm are submitted via email, while another is submitted via snail mail. And to make matters worse, you’re drowning in spreadsheets trying to keep track of everything.

From rate request to approval, our Rate Proposal Analyzer centralizes and streamlines your 

entire rate proposal process. 
Law firms can upload their rate proposals directly to the dashboard through manual submission or a spreadsheet.

Unprecedented Analysis & Internal Benchmarking

Collecting rate proposals is only half the battle–now, you have to determine which rates will or will not get approved.

Historically, this has been a headache for corporate legal departments. But the good news is rate proposal comparison and analysis just got significantly easier. 

With Rate Proposal Analyzer, corporate legal departments can now:

  • Simplify rate proposal requests, including simultaneous submissions from multiple law firms
  • Aggregate completed proposals in one place for easy review and comparison
  • Request diversity information on timekeepers for specific projects

No more wondering where you’re overpaying–Rate Proposal Analyzer puts these insights at your fingertips.

Align Negotiations to Budget Goals

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again–rates cannot be accepted blindly. 

And we don’t just mean reviewing your rates before approving them. You have to go one step further and consider the impact these rates will have on your budget. 

Your budget is your North Star, so the rates you approve should align with your budget goals for the year. 

Rate Proposal Analyzer enables corporate legal departments to analyze cost impact with scenario forecasting. 

Now, you can easily assess the impact of your proposed rate increases with clear cost projections based on your historical spend from the previous year. 

Rate Proposal Analyzer offers unparalleled forecasting capabilities that you won’t find anywhere else in the market. 

Strategic Spend Decisions Await…

As organizations continue to prioritize cost optimization, you can’t afford to overpay on your law firm rates.

Our Rate Proposal Analyzer provides a holistic, centralized view of your law firm rate proposals, empowering your corporate legal department to budget smarter, negotiate harder, and make more strategic spend decisions.

Ready to take the next step in your spend optimization journey? Get in touch with a member of our team to get started.

Understand Law Firm Performance with Firm Report Cards

Posted on November 8, 2022 by - Legal Operations

Law firm relationships have long been measured with gut rather than metrics.

But should you really work with a certain firm just because a partner is your GC’s law school buddy? (Hint: the answer is no!)

While your law firms are trusted business partners to your organization, C-suite executives are holding legal departments accountable for understanding the value law firms deliver. To ensure you partner with the right firms on your matters, you must leverage a mixture of qualitative and quantitative metrics. 

But how can you determine if your law firms are making the grade without poring over spreadsheets for hours?

Introducing Bodhala’s new and improved Firm Report Cards, the best, most holistic view of how your law firms stack up against one another.

Now, you can get a detailed look at your firm’s rates and key performance indicators in one concise report–all in just one click. 

Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Unprecedented Analysis & Internal Benchmarking

Firm Report Cards leverages Bodhala’s reporting and analytics capabilities and presents it in a concise and easy-to-digest view for each firm. 

Customizable cohorts of firms are selected for comparison against one another to aid in panel management and potential consolidation.  

Full Transparency

Effective relationship management requires transparency and full transparency requires data. 

Firm Report Cards empower you to manage with metrics, not gut.

Flexible, customizable reporting can be shared directly with your firms, dramatically simplifying vendor management and increasing transparency.

Sharing Firm Report Cards with key internal and external stakeholders lets them know you’re paying attention and makes it easier to justify your spend decisions and display where you’re getting value. 

Instant Comparisons 

The Comparison Report shows how a firm stacks up against the rest of your panel across key metrics–such as overall spend, average partner and associate rate, average matter cost, and more. 

Need different metrics? No problem. Customize the Comparison Report to fit even the most unique needs.

Historical Trend Analysis 

The Trend Analysis Report shows how a firm has been trending over time, making it easy to see how well your law firms are managing your business. 

With this information under your belt, you can instantly prioritize your areas of focus in your next QBR or conversation with your law firm. 

Customizable & Shareable Scorecards

The KPIs included in Firm Report Cards are completely customizable to ensure that your legal department can score your firms on metrics you care about. 

The Report Cards can also be exported to PDF and shared directly with the firm for a line of sight into how you are monitoring firm performance. 

Repetitive Value Over Time

Firms are aware of the metrics they are being monitored on and where they sit relative to the other firms your corporate legal department is using. 

With the help of a dedicated Bodhala Client Success representative, you’re can monitor trends in firm behavior and leverage data to increase firm efficiency and drive continuous value over time. 

The Key to Successful Law Firm Relationships

Data sets the foundation for successful law firm relationships. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Firm Report Cards put data-driven insights at your fingertips, making law firm relationship management that much easier. 

So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with our team to learn how you can simplify your vendor management with Firm Report Cards. 

A New Approach to Contract Management

Posted on November 2, 2022 by - Contract Lifecycle Management

Until recently, contract management was a manual process, making it rife with inefficiencies, says Charmel Rhyne, Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Director for Onit. She shares how the best CLM tools incorporate configurable workflows that adapt to users’ way of working, not the other way around, and shares the seven attributes of a best-in-class CLM system, while conforming to your preferred work style. 

When it comes to business, there’s a lot of talk about efficiency. The concept of efficiency, however, differs for larger corporations. When poor processes, communications and technologies prevail, the consequences are substantial. These inefficiencies hinder collaboration, visibility, compliance and, ultimately, growth.

The need for efficiency is especially prevalent in the legal industry, where the demand for contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology has skyrocketed. The global contract lifecycle management software market is projected to reach $2.9B by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 13.5%.

The value of CLM solutions lies in their ability to make companies more efficient by capturing, automating and analyzing the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. By eliminating data silos and automating workflows, CLM solutions reduce legal spend so teams can focus on higher value work.

The Pitfalls of Manual Contract Management

Traditional contract management is largely manual labor. From inception to execution and beyond, many teams find themselves cutting and pasting into templates, entering codes, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and data, and saving to multiple drives. While the work may seem mindless or harmless, the manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks, including:

  • Inadequate delivery to customers. Failure to meet customer expectations is inevitable without clear and consistent protocols like establishing a project timeline, production schedule and delivery process — leading to missed revenue opportunities, lost time and inflated costs.
  • Failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms. If businesses are not diligent about receiving or delivering everything agreed upon, the money gained through negotiations can be quickly lost — particularly if terms are buried in a file cabinet and easy to overlook.
  • Time lost from disorganization. Looking for contracts, schedules, notes, and data drains time that could be dedicated to higher-value projects like analyzing data and seeking new contract opportunities.
  • Perception as a cost center. Most enterprise employees view the legal departments as a cost center. CLM solutions empower legal departments to stop revenue leakage by proactively managing revenue-facing contractual obligations, eliminating manual processes and introducing efficiencies.

The 7 Attributes of a High-Quality Contract Lifecycle Management Solution

Don’t wait until the inefficiencies of manual contract management negatively affect company growth. The search for a new foundation must begin before the first cracks appear. However, in an industry where CLM solutions have only boomed since the Covid-19 pandemic proved remote or hybrid work possible, where does one begin? Here are the seven key features of a high-quality CLM solution:

  • Collaboration – A secure collaborative capability facilitates editing and communication among various team members across departments.
  • Client and partner self-service – Highly intuitive, streamlined portals give authorized individuals access to commonly used contract templates and verbiage.
  • A central repository – A single source for all contracts and associated documentation means no more searching for information.
  • E-sign capabilities – Timely signatures are vital to the contract process. After a contract is electronically signed, the CLM solution should automatically store the contract in the central repository with all the expected notifications and without any additional intervention.
  • Routing and approval – The technology should enable the easy building of configurable workflows to route contracts for review and/or approval. Intuitive, lightweight and human-centric user interfaces should require little to no training.
  • Notifications – Proactive alerts such as notifications or reminders should be sent by the technology as the contract progresses through its lifecycle.
  • Enterprise contract management – The software should manage sell-side, buy-side and corporate contracts.

The Future of End-to-End CLM

The profound impact of CLM solutions is gaining visibility globally as more companies realize the extensive benefits. These cloud-based technologies reduce legal spend and provide painless integration, user-friendly interfaces, and increased workflow for organizations of all sizes and needs. They also introduce more collaborative functionality across departments and external participants. To be truly effective, CLM solutions should increase the efficiency in managing customer contracts in all stages — from review to approval to execution to renewal.

At the end of the day, high-quality CLM solutions must simplify the increasingly complicated contract process. The submission, review, approval, and management of contracts should be in one easy-to-use tool where team members never have to search their inbox or hard drive for the latest version or keep an Excel spreadsheet to manage their contracts.

Contract lifecycle management, powered by analytics and reporting engines, represent a significant opportunity to increase productivity, achieve higher compliance, compress time to revenue and improve accuracy across organizations.

Learn how Onit’s CLM solution supports every element of the contract lifecycle, from capture and creation through negotiations and approvals to execution and management.

Originally posted on Future of Sourcing

Modern Legal Tech for the Business of Law: A Future-Forward Playbook

Posted on October 31, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Technology is an enabler for businesses and practitioners who wish to differentiate, grow, and succeed. Here is a comprehensive blueprint of the most innovative and essential solutions Legal requires to evolve into a true business partner, impactful revenue generator, and corporate leader — for today, tomorrow, and years to come.

Today, the world seems to move at the speed of light.  Chatbots respond instantaneously to our online queries. True teleportation may not exist yet, but more than 15 million people are shuttled by rideshare companies daily. And somewhere between our first sip of coffee and setting our cell phone alarm for the next morning, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day.

The last chapter of the multinational study* Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report highlights the remarkable potential for legal operations to be a change agent driving business results with the assistance of technology. While, on average, three in four (77%) legal departments have integrated some level of artificial intelligence (AI) into their day-to-day operations, nearly half admit their department is averse to change, citing budget issues (48%), perceived lack of tech competency (31%), and lack of time for learning new systems (25%) as barriers to tech adoption.

But digital technology is reinventing the way we live, play, and work — and businesses that invest in state-of-the-art tech will remain several steps ahead.

Embedding tech in Legal’s DNA

Fortunately, legal tech investment is at a record high: although none of us has a crystal ball to predict how the current macroeconomic market will affect corporate decision-making, two in three (67%) professionals do see tech budgets increasing.

Investing, however, is only the first step. The true cornerstone to modernized legal operations is ensuring tools are adopted. According to the ELR report, less than three in 10 (28%) respondents describe themselves as early adopters by nature, while another six in 10 (62%) classify as middle adopters.

In many legal departments, though, things simply “get in the way.” But inefficiency can damage both a legal department’s brand image and hold back the enterprise. The message is clear: embrace next-stage tech or get left behind.  

The “legal team of tomorrow” tool kit 

Here are the four areas of technology integral to the success of forward-thinking legal departments. 

1. Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

A pioneering digital embodiment of the adage “work smarter, not harder,” the latest ELM solutions have transformed from systems of record to systems of engagement, encouraging true collaboration, operational transparency, and enterprise connection between Legal, its internal clients, and external stakeholders. ELM manages matters, e-billing, spend, and analytics, providing a single source of truth to capture every transaction, project, and matter. By extracting insights, developing metrics, and exposing trends that evaluate performance, ELM establishes benchmarks and streamlines workflows – yet less than half (48%) of ELR respondents currently utilize e-billing and other spend optimization solutions.  

2. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Contracts are at the core of revenue generation – and one of the biggest time-sucks for legal professionals, with two in five (40%) spending half of every workday, week, and quarter managing routine agreement work. But the latest CLM solutions offer self-service portals that can automate contract review and administer the data required to identify revenue recognition and acceleration opportunities. This enhanced visibility jumpstarts efficiency, reducing the length of the typical sales cycle by 24%, skyrocketing legal spend savings by 50%, and giving Legal up to 30% of its time back to focus on developing business acumen, delivering client advice, and working toward meaningful change. 

3. Data Governance & Cybersecurity

To become a corporate material influencer, Legal must think and act strategically — and doing so requires data. Data has emerged as the most instrumental decision-making tool, whether it involves tracking staffing needs, optimizing outside counsel spend, or driving vendor diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) efforts. Having visual analytics dashboards provides reporting fundamentals for initiating data-driven negotiations, rate benchmarking, and forecasting future projects and budgets as cost-efficiently and effectively as possible. Further, as data pools expand for corporations, the security scope and threat landscape will broaden — providing an opportunity for Legal to show greater impact as guardian of the enterprise.  

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Imperative for speed and efficiency, artificial intelligence (AI) is not a single tool — it is a wide-ranging continuum of technological solutions and applications that can accelerate legal operations, virtualize legal expertise, and automate and augment business processes. AI can apply semantic analysis to find patterns in contracts, provide task recommendations, suggest revisions for standardized agreements like NDAs, and consult the company playbook for MSAs and SOWs, all while flagging any potential issues. AI-enabled invoice review can justify line items and enforce billing guidelines, and AI-assisted research can complete work in record time while elevating accuracy and precision.  

Legal’s eye on the horizon

While it’s true that it has never been Legal’s nature to be cutting-edge — not when the department is one established on being “by the book” and upholding precedents — there is no denying the legal tech revolution is here. With it comes a golden opportunity for Legal to evolve its role as a business protector and create significant impact when it comes to cost and operational efficiency, material growth, and collaborative cultural change.  

Technology is a catalyst for evolution. By seizing the innovative solutions available for legal operations, Legal can change the way it touches business in every realm — from revenue acquisition and EBITDA to competitive differentiation — and not only lead the evolution, but be the future.  

*Read the ELR Report to learn more about how legal professionals view their relationships with internal clients in comparison to the image enterprise employees have of their legal departments and how Legal can evolve to prove material impact and improve efficiencies across the business. 

5 Ways to Make Sure Your Legal Matter Management Implementation is a Success 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

So, you have carefully assessed your legal team’s challenges, mapped detailed requirements, completed a thorough assessment process, and selected your preferred matter management platform – now what next? Unfortunately, many legal teams stop here without properly thinking about how they will make the deployment and adoption of the new system a success. Bringing in a new matter management system takes time, money, and effort. Therefore, plans must be made to ensure that the new tool delivers the anticipated value and outcomes for your legal department and the broader organization.  

In the fourth and final part of our matter management blog series (read the first installments here: Part I, Part II, Part III), we explore five ways to ensure that your matter management implementation is a great success.  

1. Start Small, but Aim Big

This is less of a tangible step and more of a mindset. Many legal teams (energized by the selection process) get excited by the potential impact of a new legal matter management tool and want to roll it out as quickly and widely as possible. Other teams are immediately under pressure to prove their value to the organization – even if they are more cautious about the rollout. This leads to overambitious implementations that are almost doomed to failure before they begin. It’s great to have grand plans, but to succeed, it’s essential to build toward that success incrementally. For example, identify a small sub-team for the initial rollout or choose a larger group, limiting the initial deployed functionality. This allows you to put the necessary support in place, take feedback, measure impact, and learn valuable lessons before a broader rollout.

2. Bring Users on a Journey With You and Implement a Solid Training Program

While some users of a new matter management system may have been involved in the procurement process, many will not have been. You should not assume those users will understand the rationale for bringing in the new tool or be as enthused as the project team. One of the main reasons that new software implementations fail is down to end-user resistance or low adoption. Some put this down to people being stuck in their ways or technophobic, but often it is down to a lack of understanding and ‘buy-in’ on the part of the users. Therefore, make sure you explain to users why the new matter management system is being implemented, link it to their daily challenges, and showcase how it will benefit them personally. Users soon get on board when they realize a new tech tool will make their working life easier! Find more insights on how to secure legal technology adoption in this blog.

Another reason why user adoption of a new matter management system is often low has nothing to do with possible skepticism and resistance on – the part of users – it’s simply because users were not instructed on how to use the software. While many newer software platforms are built with an exceptional user experience and are intuitive, there is still a steep learning curve for any new software platform. It’s a simple fix! When looking for a new matter management system, ensure there is good user guidance and support built into the system, ensure you have coordinated thorough training for users, and build an associated knowledge base to deliver learning resources, keep users informed, and support new joiners. Ask your vendor to help support your training program, as any Customer-Success driven vendor will have pre-prepared materials and extensive experience onboarding other clients’ users. Also, consider seeking internal volunteers willing to champion the new system and provide support and training to new users.

3. Measure, Measure, Measure

Doubtless, part of the business plan when requesting a budget for a new matter management system included details about the value such a tool would bring to your team and organization. That value could have been in the shape of lower costs, increased revenues, reduced risk, etc. But once you implement a new system, how do you know if it delivers the desired impact? The answer is that you measure it. To measure the impact, you must see the status quo before implementing the tool. Therefore, make sure you have identified your baseline metrics before implementation. You might also consider them as your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For example, if you’re interested in measuring how a matter management system reduces average matter cycle times, then make sure you know what average cycle times were before implementing the tool. After this, you need to track the metric to monitor impact and trends over time. Read more about typical KPIs in legal departments in this article. These steps will help you avoid the ‘implement and hope’ trap many teams fall into.

You also want to make sure you have a functioning feedback loop. No technology implementation is perfect the first time. It’s a very rare thing indeed for software to be deployed seamlessly without any issues or subsequent enhancement requests. To see the full value of a new matter management system, listening to your users and adapting accordingly is critical. Therefore, when implementing a new system, ensure you have created a user feedback mechanism and communicated this accordingly. Seek as much feedback as possible, monitor trends, and share the results amongst leadership and your users. Transparency is key! Treat implementation as the first step in the journey of your new tool – seek to learn and aim for continuous improvement. As a legal operations software provider, we’ve observed this many times; you may find new value from the tool and out-delivering on your forecasted ROI.

4. Create New Roles to Help Drive Success

Legal technology has evolved considerably over the last decade. Read more on the evolution of matter management here. Legal departments are looking beyond the traditional document and contract management tools and are now embracing solutions to support intelligent workflows, contract analysis, document assembly, decision automation, etc. Many new-generation tools are highly configurable and can be crafted to solve challenges or optimize certain processes. This requires people with both the legal and technical knowledge to “engineer” these solutions.

Furthermore, as legal department tech stacks grow, there is a requirement to manage the different solutions, maintain relationships with vendors, look for synergies, engage with central IT departments and ensure the legal team is supported and enabled from a technology perspective. Therefore, when thinking about implementing a new matter management system, why not consider bringing in additional roles, such as legal engineers and legal technology managers, to ensure its success? Don’t think that only lawyers can pick this up – legal technology is now a vocation in its own right! Many legal teams, therefore, increasingly bring experts from alternative professional backgrounds to the table. Use this opportunity to make your legal team even more agile and diverse.

5. Support Your New Users

Upfront training for a new matter management system isn’t enough on its own – it is also critical to make ongoing support available to users so that any technical or usability issues can be addressed quickly to reduce friction. The minute a user runs into friction, they will likely switch off the new system. This friction may be caused by not understanding certain functionality, performance issues, or even bugs in the system. Whatever causes the friction, systems and processes should be in place for a user to report their issue and obtain help and guidance. It’s critical to agree from the outset who within your organization will support your new matter management system. The best practice is not to assume it will be IT – as they only have limited resources and adding a new tool to their list may not be easy. Therefore, ensure you discuss support adequately before implementing a new system and agree on responsibility and internal SLAs, e.g., what issues are supported, by whom, and when support is provided. Then make sure your users know what support is available and how they reach it. Many sophisticated vendors also offer a support area within their application. This can anticipate many issues from the outset and avoid frustration and a high workload for your internal colleagues. Ask about this when selecting a vendor. Also, consider monitoring support data to help identify common issues – this can help improve training and support processes.

Let’s Summarize…

Implementing a new legal matter management system takes work. It takes careful planning and involves putting in place processes and support to ensure everyone is enabled to see the total value of the new tool and ensure that value is continually delivered throughout the lifecycle of the matter management platform. Starting with these five key tips will undoubtedly help keep you focused during your matter management implementation journey.

This is the final entry in a four-part series. Read the prior installments here:
Part I: The Definition of a Legal Matter and its Management,
Part II: 7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System,
Part III: 7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor

7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

This article is the third of our four-part blog series, focusing solely on matter management and its various aspects. If you have not yet read the first two articles, click here (Part I, Part II) to catch up. 

In part three, Carina Smolik-Fischer, director of product at BusyLamp (an Onit company) sums up 7 key aspects legal departments should consider when choosing the right matter management vendor. Here, you’ll get guidance on how to proceed once you have decided to purchase matter management software.

The decision has been made! You want to implement a matter management solution that makes your daily work more efficient, lets you work more effectively on matters, documents, legal intakes, and makes internal and external collaboration easier – congratulations on that! But now it’s time to ask yourself who is the right sparring partner for the job. Someone who assists you with scoping the project, supporting you with configuration, and onboarding your legal team to make this project a success. In my professional career, I gained profound experience with various matter management solutions. I found that some rules have proven true regarding finding the ideal matter management solution for a legal department. In the following, I would like to share the most valuable insights with you:

1. Your IT and Technology Matters

First and foremost, you must clarify with your IT and security department which requirements the new application must meet. IT will support you in checking if the matter management vendors meet important requirements like system provider and localization, data privacy, security, and certificates. BusyLamp meets a range of global certifications and regulatory and compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, GDPR, and more. Learn more about it here.

Next to the technical topics, support and provisions are vital, like license model, support model, updated deployment and maintenance, as well as integrations and quick implementation possibilities. Our data security checklist for in-house teams can help you keep the key IT considerations in mind.

And finally, costs and contract considerations like licenses and onboarding costs, contract duration, and payment terms are crucial. Our blog about hidden costs can help you to avoid underestimating the investment and to keep all costs in mind. This way, you can aim to select only the most suitable providers and shorten your vendors list.

2. Is the organization sustainable and scalable?

Besides the hard facts, soft skills should also drive your decision. When evaluating software vendors, take the time to dive into their backgrounds. Find out how long they have been active in the legal industry and whether they are currently growing or downsizing. Do they have a professional product and customer service team? Are they big enough and experienced enough to address your potential questions and concerns? Are they constantly developing the product and thus willing to grow with your future requirements? Make sure other customers are satisfied. Customer satisfaction is the best currency when predicting your project success.

3. Onboard your legal department early in the process

Get your legal department on board to drive user adoption. The project will only succeed if you have your colleagues by your side. This aspect should never be underestimated. We highly recommend you form a team with tech-savvy colleagues who represent your activities and know your department well. These can be lawyers, paralegals, assistants, and/or Legal Operations. Further recommendations on how to secure user adoption can be found within this blog article.

4. Request specific information from your potential matter management vendor

Let the team define its requirements. The best is using specific examples of their daily work and identifying what’s missing. Collect, classify and prioritize challenges and find intersection points. Which “pain points” are most relevant, which aspects are not so important, and which would be “nice to have”? Create a list and make it accessible to the team so that each team member feels included. Add key aspects your IT departments provide and collect all the data you need to make the right decision.

Once you have your list ready, share it with the potential providers and ask them to fill in their details. Use this sheet as preparation for the software presentation meeting.

5. Schedule Software Preparations and Work on a Practical Example

Once the day arrives, and you have invited vendors for the software presentation, it’s time to get down to business. Invite your team (the devil is in the details) and prepare your requirements list. Also, consider inviting a key user from the IT department to clarify all potential IT questions.

Take the chance and ask all the questions you and your team have. Ask the presenter to run through a specific use case completely. Make sure that the whole flow can be mapped within the application. That way, you will receive a realistic idea of whether the software suits your needs.

6. Ask for a Test Drive

Before committing to a new software solution, be sure to kick the tires. Most vendors offer a free trial to test features, benefits, and usability. Make sure the software contains the features you need, as well as the functionality. Use this critical phase to examine the software and put the provider through its paces. This is the only way for you to find out if it is a perfect match.

7. “It Takes Two to Tango”

At the end of the day, the relationship with the software solution representative is very important for mutual success. There must be clear communication and trust on both sides. Make use of a reliable and experienced single point of contact. You and your team spend plenty of effort defining your legal department’s goals and requirements, so it’s important that you don’t rush the last phase of your evaluation process and choose the most suitable matter management vendor wisely.

Read Part IV: 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Matter Management Implementation is a Success. 

7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

This article is the second of our four-part blog series focusing solely on matter management and various aspects. If you have not yet read the first article, click here to catch up. In part two, we will focus on the question of how full-suite digital matter management platforms help to optimize and streamline the management of legal matters.

In short, the answer is simple: If we take the core components of a matter, then we can easily deduce the benefits and efficiencies that matter management systems provide for legal departments. This boils down to: 

1. Central and Secure Document Management 

Matter management systems centralize document storage for matters and provide a secure location where important matter documents can be accessed. Essential document management functionality is normally present, including versioning, redlining, custom metadata, tagging, granular permissioning, etc. Integrations with MS Office and Google Workspace are often available, making editing and collaborating on documents quick and easy. Matter management tools also make it simple for documents and their content to be searched and found. Some matter management systems also offer specific contract management capabilities, such as e-signature integration and clause extraction for contract-related matters.

2. Discoverable Know-How

One benefit of managing matters in a single system is that all matter-related information and knowledge is collated in one location, a single source of truth. It also gives structure and taxonomy to that data. Good matter management systems harness this data and make know-how searchable and easily available in context when needed. Some matter management systems are actually utilizing AI to simplify and support knowledge delivery, connect data, help keep it up to date, and put it into context. Some matter management platforms leverage integrations with other systems to centralize data and make multiple sources searchable; others also embed chatbots and decision automation tools to deliver answers to specific questions and circumstances rather than just search results.

3. Efficient Communication and Collaboration

Following the pandemic and the rise in remote working, the best matter management platforms will now integrate with market-leading collaboration tools such as MS Teams. Good matter management platforms will also be systems of engagement (not just systems of record), enabling users from both within and outside the organization to collaborate on the delivery of matters. This is particularly helpful when legal teams are working with outside counsel. Communication should also be possible within the matter management platform, with social collaboration functionality like messaging, comments, and sharing. We are seeing a trend towards the “meet users where they work” model, so expect to see matter management tools integrating with more personal productivity and collaboration tools in the future.

4. Automated Workflows and Self-Service

Automating standardized workflows and reducing manual intervention is the key to making any legal process more efficient. Therefore, matter management platforms often provide workflow automation functionality. Process automation can range from standardized and fixed to fully configurable (often known as no-code automation). It can be used to optimize a wide range of matter processes, including notifications, legal intake, document automation, approval processes, risk escalation mechanisms, and contract lifecycles, to name just a few. One key benefit of automation is that it unlocks greater self-service. Legal teams are busy enough, so the more they can enable others to help themselves, the more they can focus on higher-value work. Matter management platforms are therefore being used to enable stakeholders within the business to instruct the legal team, generate their own documents, and access relevant guidance and know-how.

5. Clear Organization of Work

Delivering a legal matter involves the intricate coordination and management of resources, status, and risk to ensure delivery of the matter on time and on budget. Matter management systems often include tools to help with planning, resource allocation, and scheduling. From task management, work allocation, and project plans to capacity trackers, team calendars, and timelines – matter management tools help map the work necessary for the delivery of the legal matter and support the management of the resource to ensure proper execution of that matter. In some cases, matter management platforms will also include time-tracking features to enable legal teams to record the time they spend working on matters. However, project management isn’t just about resources, it’s about monitoring status changes, tracking risk, and ensuring transparent reporting. Matter management tools, therefore, provide tools that ensure complete transparency over matter activity. 

6. Transparent Spend Management

While many matters are dealt with in-house, a large proportion still require the support and input of outside counsel. Full-suite matter management tools often provide the functionality to help source legal service providers, create budgets, track spend, review invoices, enforce billing guidelines and run approval processes. Since spend is such a large element of any legal matter, it makes sense for spend management to form part of broader matter management systems – after all, it’s possible to derive more valuable insight when spend data is layered against other matter data. For example, comparing a law firm’s spend with its cycle times and outcomes can help determine whether a legal department sees value in its legal service providers.

7. Access to Data

The more matter activity conducted within matter management systems, the more useful data they hold. Whether the data relates to spend, status, resourcing, contracts, risk, or legal intake – it’s important to ensure that the data can be properly accessed and interrogated and that insights can be delivered quickly. Many matter management systems provide sophisticated reporting and analysis tools that enable matter data to be filtered and extracted. Alternatively, data can be visualized in charts and graphs within reporting dashboards or via connectors with tools such as Power BI. It’s important to note that many matter management systems go beyond simple reporting and now use data to predict future outcomes and spot trends. 

Putting it Into Practice

Matter management is a broad discipline that involves the efficient coordination and delivery of all aspects of a legal matter. Optimizing the matter management process is critical in the current landscape but may seem daunting given the scope of many legal matters; however, there are significant gains to be made by deploying technology solutions to streamline and support the management of legal matters. Instead of trying to stitch together different tech tools, look for full-suite matter management platforms that can enhance the entire matter lifecycle. These tools will help you start small but will provide the foundation for your team to scale into an organized, productive, and informed legal function! 

Read Part III of this series: 7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor. 

The Definition of a Legal Matter and its Management

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

This article is the first of our four-part blog series focusing solely on matter management and its various aspects and best practices. To kick off the series, we will be going back to the basics. In this article, we look at what matter management and legal matters are and why digital matter management is rising in importance.

Matter management is a term that is regularly used within the legal industry. It’s what lawyers and legal operations professionals want to optimize, and it’s the challenge that legal tech vendors are trying to solve. However, its scope is so broad that it’s easy to get confused as to what “matter management” is. To help address any uncertainty, we thought that we’d share our thoughts on the subject and set out what we believe matter management means and how technology can play a part. 

Starting With the 7 Core Components of a Legal Matter 

While matter management has received more attention with the growth in legal tools aimed at streamlining the process, it’s important to note that matter management is a discipline that has been around much longer than any software tool.  

As the name suggests, matter management is the process of managing a legal matter (with or without technology). But what does this entail? To explain, it’s easiest to first look at the constituent elements of a legal matter.

1. Documents

Think of lawyers, and you’ll often conjure up images of huge contracts and files full to the brim with documents. Every legal matter involves documentation of some description, from contracts and licenses to emails and letters. All this documentation needs to be centrally and securely stored and managed.

2. Knowledge

While legal teams are smart people, it’s perfectly natural they cannot have all the answers. They need quick access to quality and accurate data and know-how to support the delivery of any legal matter. Making this knowledge accessible when it is needed is a core component of matter management.

3. Collaboration

Law is a team sport. Every legal matter involves a broad range of different stakeholders – within the legal department and the wider business, as well as external to the organization. Efficient matter management requires seamless communication and collaboration between all parties.

4. Workflow

While many legal matters are complex and have their own nuances, most legal matters are quite formulaic. In other words, they follow a set sequence of phases and stages depending on the facts and circumstances of the matter.

5. Management

Matters are projects, so they need to be managed with the same diligence and attention. From scope, budgeting, and resourcing to task allocation, risk tracking, and status reporting, matters need to be carefully managed like any other project to ensure delivery on time and within budget.

6. Spend

Tracking spend against budget is a key component any matter where outside counsel or other legal service provider is instructed. It’s always vital to monitor how matter spend is performing against budget, keep track of work-in-progress (WIP) and accruals, as well as look out for issues that might adversely impact the budget and matter spend.

7. Reporting

In order to properly manage any legal matter or portfolio of matters, it’s necessary to have access to all the information about the relevant matters. Whether it’s information about status, risk, resourcing, spend, contracts, matters, etc., this information needs to be collated, available, and capable of being easily reportable. 

Matter management simply involves the efficient coordination, organization, and delivery of all these core components for legal matters. 

Micro vs Macro Matter Management 

When people think of matter management, they are usually thinking about it at matter (micro) level, e.g., the management of a single matter. This will normally be the case for participants in particular matters who need visibility over matter activity and have access to matter-related documents and know-how. However, legal departments are constantly handling large numbers of ongoing matters that also need to be managed and tracked at a portfolio (macro) level. This will particularly be the case for General Counsel, CLOs, and legal operations managers who need visibility, reporting, and insight across all legal matters. Therefore, it’s important to remember that matter management also includes matter portfolio management. 

The Rise of Digital Matter Management 

Unsurprisingly, digital matter management (DMM) involves the use of technology to support the management and delivery of legal matters. There are many software tools available that will help improve the discreet elements of a legal matter listed above, from contract assembly and document management systems to spend management and enterprise collaboration applications. Whilst it’s a basic approach, even the use of tools like MS Excel and Dropbox is a form of digital matter management that works for many legal teams. 

Currently, there is no shortage of software point solutions to help manage and streamline different components of a legal matter. However, the use of separate tech tools presents its own challenges – for example, integration difficulties, data silos, and inefficiency caused by context switching across applications. Legal departments are also under pressure from their organization’s IT teams to simplify and reduce the tech stack. For these reasons, there is a growing trend away from point solutions for matter management and towards single platforms that aim to optimize the full matter lifecycle in one central system. Therefore, in recent years, legal departments have been increasingly adopting full-suite cloud platforms. 

What is Driving the Focus on Digital Matter Management?  

Optimizing matter management has become a key focus for many legal teams in recent years, and they’re turning to technology to support this initiative. It’s part of a rapid digital transformation trend across legal departments that is being driven by a range of different factors, including, but not limited to: 

  • Move to remote working, which requires greater focus and investment in legal productivity and workflow tools and easy access to know-how from anywhere and at any time 
  • Pressure to be more cost-efficient as a legal function and deliver more value to their organizations 
  • Growing global regulation and uncertainty causing increased legal workloads 
  • More work being serviced in-house without legal department headcounts increasing significantly 
  • Need to improve internal customer engagement as well as vendor selection and management 
  • Maturing of legal operations and rise in dedicated legal technology strategies for corporate legal departments 
  • Need for legal departments to demonstrate that they are a net contributor to the business

All these factors are leading many legal departments to seriously explore the adoption of matter management platforms to alleviate these pressures and help boost the value that they are delivering to their businesses.

Read Part II of this series: 7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System.