Category: Artificial Intelligence

Onit Acquires BusyLamp, a Premier Provider of Enterprise Legal Management Software in Europe

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

The Onit family of enterprise legal management software providers has grown today with our acquisition of BusyLamp. We are now one of the largest enterprise legal management conglomerates globally, with more than 600 implementations completed worldwide by Onit and its subsidiaries.

Who Is BusyLamp?

BusyLamp, based in Frankfurt, Germany, serves in-house counsel with the information, data, trust and tools they need so they can focus on the strategic tasks that matter most. Founded in 2012 by co-CEO Dr. Michael Tal, co-CEO Dr. Manuel Meder and CTO Konstantin Tadrowski, the company has been recognized by Hyperion Research as “highly innovative” and a “market leader.” Corporate legal leaders across sectors including automotive, telecommunications and banking rely on its award-winning eBilling.Space and recently launched matter management solution Matter.Space every day.

BusyLamp joins Onit as an independent subsidiary.

What Does This Mean for Onit and Enterprise Legal Management Software?

The acquisition of BusyLamp makes Onit one of the largest ELM software providers in the world, capable of meeting the requirements of any corporate legal department.

It also aligns with several of Onit’s top strategic priorities, including continuing to innovate through disruption, expanding our presence worldwide and pursuing rapid growth. This acquisition, along with the acquisitions of SimpleLegal and Bodhala, positions Onit as one of the largest global conglomerates of ELM software providers and offers an even broader pool of best practices and best-of-breed technologies to help us serve customers around the world.

BusyLamp expands Onit’s existing presence in Europe with some of the brightest minds in legal technology abroad – experts deeply embedded in the local community who understand the challenges and complexities of the business of law in Europe and beyond. To complement the expertise, BusyLamp also brings an industry-leading offering well-equipped for considerations such as VAT, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and regional tax policies.

Continued Legal Technology Disruption and Product Innovation

Onit is continually looking to innovate and expand our offerings for our customers and throughout the legal space. Acquisitions play a pivotal role in our commitment to this.

The BusyLamp acquisition is the fourth for Onit in less than 12 months and the fifth overall.

In 2019, Onit acquired SimpleLegal, modern legal operations software provider. Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch in 2020, establishing its AI Center of Excellence. Thirty days later, document automation provider AXDRAFT joined the Onit family of companies. Most recently, Onit announced the acquisition of Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence company.

Like BusyLamp, SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT and Bodhala all operate as independent subsidiaries of Onit.

In addition to acquiring disruptive companies, Onit also continues to innovate its product offerings – especially for AI. In less than 12 months, Onit has introduced five AI-based offerings to optimize critical business processes for corporate legal departments.

Onit’s InvoiceAI, which debuted to customers in May, uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments increase potential savings and reduce time reviewing invoices from outside counsel and legal vendors. Onit released the news in this video announcement. On average, InvoiceAI identifies an extra 10-20% in potential savings in addition to enterprise legal management and bill review savings.

In addition to InvoiceAI, Onit also offers:

  • Precedent, an AI-based business intelligence platform
  • ReviewAI, AI technology that reviews and redlines contracts in less than two minutes
  • ExtractAI, which analyzes, reviews and exports contract data in seconds
  • Automate NDA, a best practice solution that helps automate and manage the NDA process, reducing end-to-end processing time by 70%

Learn More about BusyLamp and Onit

To learn more about BusyLamp, visit www.BusyLamp.com, or you can request a demo here.

You can request a demo of Onit’s highly configurable platforms and solutions here.

Customers of Onit and BusyLamp can reach out to their account managers to find out more about the acquisition.

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

Posted on September 21, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Has your corporate legal department been struggling to figure out ways to cut down time spent on contracts, reduce the average sales cycle and find a better way to manage buy-side, sell-side and corporate contracts? Contract management platforms offer the ideal technology to help on all counts.

You may be at the stage where you’re considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to help you reach these goals, but are unsure about how to proceed. You’ve likely already heard and read about all the benefits of using a premier CLM solution. After all, it’s a technology many corporate legal departments have prioritized, and you’ve probably already reviewed resources or spoken with vendors. We’d like to take a different angle here and tell you about four common mistakes to avoid when evaluating a CLM solution.

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

  1. Believing That A Cutting-Edge CLM Solution Is Not Worth The Cost Of Investment.

For several years, the new paradigm has been to do more with less money and fewer resources. Technology has increasingly played a prominent role as legal operations focus on achieving objectives with “less.”

Driving efficiencies and controlling costs in the legal department are being borne, to a significant degree, by well-chosen technology solutions and legal operations managers who understand this are taking action. For example, Onit’s contract management platform streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk in the process and enables departments to save an average of 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce by 20% the average hours spent on contracts.

  1. Assuming That Staff Reduction Will Be Possible With Your CLM Implementation

It’s true that a good CLM offering streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk and enabling departments to save valuable time. The ideal contract management platform also makes quick work of many processes, relieving staff of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Having said that, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can save even more money with staff reductions. It’s a better strategy to remember that while you’re automating many processes and some staff functions may change or even be eliminated, staff reductions are usually not the best option in many cases.

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

Many legal departments already know how well CLM products empower legal and business teams with an enhanced contract management process. Some key benefits are conditional contract generation, MS Word integration, document management, secure collaboration and eSignature integrations.

With all that, what could be missing? Integrated artificial intelligence.

For example, in the pre-signature contract phase, the AI engine provides a first-pass review of the contract and annotates it based on your company’s checklist, playbook and information learned from AI models. By allowing a lawyer to focus on the medium- to high-risk areas, your legal team can reduce contract lead times, automate guidance and proactively address common pain points in the legal workflow.

In the post-signature contract phase, AI-driven data extraction allows you to complete projects at scale and at a fraction of the time manual processes take. Additionally, you can gain powerful insight from your contracts in real-time when coupled with a contract lifecycle management solution.

  1. Implementing a CLM Solution That Doesn’t Have All The Bells And Whistles

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process and are ready to implement your new CLM technology. It’s zero hour, and one of the staff asks you if the solution provides for automated risk mitigation – which somehow didn’t come up during the selection process. You learn that this system doesn’t have that feature, and now you’re wondering what other vital elements may be missing. Depending on your specific needs, here are five other features that are must-haves:

  • Conditional Contract Generation: Automatically generate a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Routing and Approval Workflow: The ability to design and build simple to complex workflows to generate and route your contracts.
  • Obligation Management: Give your users the power to manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance.
  • Clause/Template Library: Manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in a centralized and secure cloud-based location.
  • Partner and Client Self-Service: Provide partners and clients an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts.

It can undoubtedly be overwhelming trying to determine the best route to take in your digital transformation project. There are contract management platforms out there for practically every budget – meaning there is no longer a good reason not to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Still, the best advice is to go into your implementation with realistic expectations, a good understanding of exactly what your department needs and a plan to avoid common mistakes.

If you’d like to learn more about contract lifecycle management, here are some additional resources:

The Latest Advancement For AI in Spend Analytics: Finding Legal Invoice Errors “Between the Rules” with InvoiceAI

Posted on September 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Legal Management

Legal invoice review is rarely a top-ten task for corporate legal departments, meaning it’s the ideal process for AI in spend analytics to improve. That’s why Onit has announced the general availability of its AI-enabled invoice review offering – InvoiceAI.

Onit’s InvoiceAI analyzes historical and real-time legal invoices to find errors “between the billing rules.” It uses AI and machine learning to support outside counsel guidelines, looking into common invoice areas of note such as non-working travel, block billing, vague descriptions and work done by improper staff class.

How InvoiceAI Works

Before the rise of e-billing and legal spend management, paper ruled the invoice process. Law firms sent substantial bills – think hundreds of pages – to their corporate clients. In-house counsel, in return, rarely had the time, tools or resources to scrutinize line items.

The transition to e-billing opened the door for more technologies to improve bill review – namely, billing rules. Billing rules rely on specific descriptions and context provided (or not provided) by in-house legal professionals to evaluate line items. However, descriptions for line items can vary based on the biller and service. Invoices without the exact language or terms outlined in billing guidelines may evade review and be approved for payment. There is simply no way to code billing rules to cover every possible permutation of language that might populate future invoices.

This is where AI in spend analytics enters the picture.

InvoiceAI has been trained on millions of legal invoice charges. It fully integrates with Onit’s enterprise legal management system and works with billing rules to look for areas where overpayment is common. When these issues are flagged, InvoiceAI can automatically adjust an invoice to comply with guidelines or bring the item to reviewers’ attention.

Essentially, InvoiceAI allows machine learning to do what it does best, looking for discrepancies and continually learning and improving its invoice review. It also allows Onit’s existing e-billing rules to continue doing what they do best – focusing on compliance with outside counsel guidelines and flagging issues for additional expert review. Finally, it allows legal operations teams to do what they do best: reviewing trends for compliance, managing vendor relationships and implementing best practices across outside counsel guidelines.

As a result, corporate legal departments benefit from:

  • A reduction in invoice review time due to better recommendations and less manual work
  • The ability to review past invoices and have AI identify errors and unnecessary payments
  • Insight into legal spend trends and vendor performance
  • Access to Onit’s partner Sterling Analytics, the leader in third-party invoice review.

How to Learn More About AI in Spend Analytics

To learn more about InvoiceAI, hear Matt DenOuden, Senior Vice President of Sales, and Mary Fuzat, Vice President of Product Management, discuss how AI in spend analytics boosts efficiency and saves money in this podcast.

InvoiceAI is now available to all Onit customers. Reach out to us today at [email protected] to learn more about InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system. You can also schedule a demo here.

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.

Onit Acquires Bodhala, the Leading Provider of Legal Spend Analytics, Benchmarking, and Market Intelligence

Posted on September 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

At Onit, we always look for ways to innovate for our customers. An essential part of this priority has been strategically combining with other disruptive companies that are changing the way the world does business. To that end, Onit is proud to announce its fourth strategic acquisition since 2019: Bodhala, the leading provider of  legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence.

The combination of Onit’s and Bodhala’s capabilities creates the most complete enterprise legal management solution on the market, allowing corporate legal departments to evolve legal spend data into actionable intelligence.

Hear Onit CEO Eric M. Elfman and Bodhala CEO Raj Goyle discuss the acquisition and how actionable intelligence is the next wave of business transformation.

Actionable Intelligence for Legal Spend Management

A revolution of data and intelligence has been hitting every sector in recent years, and the legal industry is no exception. Running legal departments on actionable data is the future of digital transformation.

Bodhala helps corporate counsel understand what they should be paying outside counsel, making it easier to source law firms at competitive and market-driven rates. With its data and actionable intelligence, corporate legal departments can identify whether they should be paying the amounts they’re paying, whether they’re paying market price, if they’re properly allocating their work among their various law firms and more.

How does this translate to success? Here’s one example.

The general counsel of one of the largest private equity firms wanted to address annual rate increases from outside counsel. Their rates had been rising well above inflation every year. With Bodhala, the company conducted a competitive analysis of its law firms, compared rates to other firms in the market based on the type of law and complexity of work and gathered internal benchmarking across its panels.

After this analysis, the PE firm had the quantitative, actionable intelligence needed to negotiate a decrease in proposed annual outside counsel rates by 17% and save $27 million.

The Most Complete Enterprise Legal Management Solution on the Market

The combination of Onit and Bodhala creates the most complete, full-lifecycle enterprise legal management solution on the market.

Onit customers already have access to industry-leading enterprise legal management, AI-enabled invoice review and AI-based business intelligence and business process automation platforms. Now, with Bodhala, they can leverage legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence for a quantum leap in the value and savings they can produce for their businesses.

Bodhala will operate as an independent subsidiary of Onit. It is the third acquisition for Onit in less than a year. In November 2020, Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch and then document automation leader AXDRAFT 30 days later. Onit also acquired SimpleLegal, a modern legal operations software provider, in May 2019.

If you are an Onit or Bodhala customer, reach out to your account managers for more information or you can email Onit at [email protected].

To hear the CEOs of Onit and Bodhala discuss the acquisition, the strategy behind it and what it means for Onit and Bodhala customers, tune in to this podcast.

How Does A Contract Management System with AI Improve the Way Lawyers Work? Let’s Look at the Numbers [Infographic]

Posted on August 24, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract lifecycle management systems allow companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. It eliminates data silos, automates workflows and reduces the overall time spent – which means it adds to business value.

When you add AI, the value of a contract lifecycle system increases drastically as technology continuously learns and improves to support in-house counsel.

The Pitfalls of Managing Contracts Manually

Many corporations rely on manual (or mostly manual) processes to handle contracts from inception to execution and beyond. Not surprisingly, these methods include cutting and pasting into templates, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. The process is inefficient and poses risks such as a failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, inadequate delivery to customers, errors and a reactive vs. proactive approach to contract management. These challenges increase drastically considering that the contract process extends across multiple departments, geographies and external participants.

Signs that Your Corporate Legal Department Needs a Contract Management System

How can you tell if you need a contract lifecycle management system? Start by taking a look at your overall contract management methodology. If these problems keep occurring, it’s time to explore new options:

  • Inability to manage changes – Businesses need to be up to speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that require discussions with customers or vendors specifically about the contractual relationship. The ability to manage contracts – particularly changes over time and the renewal process – can directly impact customer retention rates.
  • Information silos and manual processes – A business can impair contract management progress and quality if it can’t maintain everything in a centralized location, accessible with permissions to involved parties and with changes tracked in real-time.
  • Inconsistent legal language – Gaps in standardized language introduce risk and confusion. If participants can’t determine if contracts contain accurate language or what is different between them, lawyers might have to get involved in every single deal. This also increases the risk of being noncompliant or leaving revenue on the table.
  • Lack of insight into contract processes and variables – Agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged. When corporate legal doesn’t have insight into contract terms, obligations and value, it cannot ensure the business is getting the correct value for deals and money may be lost.

Contract Lifecycle Management Systems Quantified

Businesses that implement a seamless contract lifecycle management process compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction.

How do the numbers add up? We’ve collected the latest statistics in a new infographic to demonstrate the impact of CLM and AI.

Please include attribution to https://onitprostg.wpengine.com with this graphic.

The benefits of a contract management system with artificial intelligence infographic

Onit’s AI-powered CLM solution can change the way your corporate legal department does business. Schedule a demonstration or email us at [email protected] to learn more.

Automated NDA: Speed Up Non-Disclosure Management for In-House Counsel

Posted on August 19, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Non-disclosure agreements (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.

Onit is transforming automated NDA with the introduction of Automate NDA, an easy-to-implement, best practice solution that automates NDA management and cuts time spent on them by up to 70%. Automate NDA brings together the best aspects of Onit’s workflow and AI platforms, Apptitude and Precedent, to automate drafting, review, negotiation, execution and management of NDAs at a price that won’t break the bank. All of this happens in an accessible, simplified legal portal that enables self-service.

Hear about NDA Automate and how it helps corporate legal departments from Nick Whitehouse, the GM of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. He discusses what it does, why it’s important and how it works in this podcast.

The Challenges of NDAs

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456.1 Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year and the price tag skyrockets easily.

Despite this volume and expense, NDAs are still frequently considered to be low-value work, even though they’re often the most frequent touchpoint between the legal department and the wider organization. This is a low-value dynamic that serves as a great source of frustration and friction – and is usually a lose-lose situation for the legal department.

There’s a widespread misconception out there that NDAs are always straightforward. That is most definitely not the case, particularly in increasingly competitive environments. This increasing complexity, when added to the sheer volume of NDAs at most organizations, creates a perfect storm of pressure and time demands on those reviewing the NDAs.

Finally, the mental toll this type of work takes on attorneys deserves consideration. In 2018, the American Bar Association conducted a study of 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout.

The study cited these culprits: tedious, boring work, long hours and overwork, and high-stress situations. Voluminous routine processes like NDAs contribute to all three.

A Step-by-Step Look at How Automate NDA Works

Automate NDA is a cost-effective solution that requires minimal effort to implement and speeds up the end-to-end NDA process by 70%.

The process starts with online submission. Anyone in your organization can visit the Automate NDA portal and request an NDA to be drafted or reviewed or ask for help.

Automate NDA Portal

When a request is submitted, Automate NDA automatically routes it through the appropriate workflow, be it generating your standard NDA and sending it for e-signature, or reviewing and redlining a third-party NDA.

In the example of a third-party NDA review, once you upload the NDA, Automate NDA will review and redline the contract based on the corporate legal department’s contract playbook and provide a link to the edited Word document. If there are major issues, Automate NDA will instead escalate the NDA to the legal team.

Automated NDA reviews and redlines contracts

The legal team can track all of this work from the Automate NDA dashboard.

Automate NDA dashboard

Interested in creating a streamlined, automated NDA experience? Schedule a demonstration today to learn more about Automate NDA.

1 Based on 1-4 hours of work per each NDA and the average rate per hour for an in-house attorney of $114 according to the 2019 Association of Corporate Counsel Global Legal Benchmarking Report.

Getting Started with Legal Contract Management Software and AI

Posted on July 20, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management – processes that are often fraught with complications and errors.

Data from the World Commerce & Contracting Association supports this idea. The organization recently surveyed its 70,000+ members about their contract challenges and priorities and found that 85% experience pressure for contract simplification. Another 81% said they have plans to implement contract automation. These points speak to the fact that poorly managed contracts lead to lost revenue, higher costs and more time devoted to manual tasks for all parties involved.

The Challenges of Contract Management

To understand the actual value of legal contract management software, it’s helpful to recap the inefficiencies associated with contract handling.

Manual processes open the door for errors and slow down overall contract execution. For example, approvals and negotiations done via email are often sluggish or overlooked. Untracked revisions can lead to confusion, conflict or non-compliance and a lack of standard legal language may result in lengthy review times or require lawyers to get involved.

Disparate repositories result in inefficient reporting and reduce contract visibility. Contracts spread out over different repositories, departments and geographical locations make monitoring corporate contracts holistically almost impossible. Without tracking expiring contracts and renewals, companies run the risk of compliance exposure as well as revenue loss.

Changes occur over the lifetime of a contract, including renewal dates, pricing, emerging legal requirements and other events. They require amendments and approvals from the contract parties. If these changes aren’t managed, implemented  and communicated correctly and quickly, organizations can increase compliance risks for themselves and all parties involved.

How Legal Contract Management Software Helps

Legal contract management software can reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20%, accelerate review and save on costs. It does this by:

  • Automating the contract lifecycle and maximizing speed and control. Workflows can be configured and automated to support how your company interacts with the contract lifecycle. Clause libraries in CLM automatically create new and approved contract language quickly, and pre-approved templates dramatically reduce creation time. Additionally, contracts can be delivered to all appropriate parties from the CLM solution and integrate with e-signature capabilities to maximize contract execution.
  • Centralizing contracts in one repository in the cloud. This makes them easier to find for appropriate parties and provides a real-time configurable dashboard that shows business-critical contract information at a glance. The legal contract management software also applies the proper metadata when a new contract is created or captured to ensure tracking and sends alerts to notify parties of key events, obligations, milestones and expiration and renewal dates.
  • Allowing lawyers to work where they’re comfortable working. In this case that means enabling them to manage contract changes with a Microsoft Word Add-In. They can receive contracts in a Word doc format with change-tracking locked, save the contract directly into the CLM solution and leave remarks while checking it back in.

CLM + AI: What Is the AI Difference?

CLM centralizes contract storage and automates the request, creation, negotiation, execution and management of any type of contract.

When you combine AI with CLM, you can lower the number of contracts needing to be reviewed. This gives the reviewer the ability to speed up a review and provide consistency across processes. AI also significantly enhances contract management after execution by extracting and obtaining usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

AI and Legal Contract Management Software: What to Look For and How to Get Started

Not all CLM AI is created the same. To get the full benefits of contract lifecycle management solutions, you should carefully evaluate AI for both the pre- and post-signature phases of contract management.

If you’re not sure what to look for in an AI-powered CLM solution, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve prepared a Quick Start Guide that highlights the ideal legal contract AI features you need if you want to reduce inefficiencies, errors and time spent on contracts without sacrificing compliance or visibility. It also provides valuable expert tips to help you get started.

The guide includes information such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Download the guide today to discover how AI can enhance your legal contract management software, what to look for and how you can get started quickly.

Legal Billing Review: How to Right-Size Invoice Charges

Posted on July 8, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

When it comes to legal billing, corporate legal departments often have a baseline expectation: Charge my company the correct amount.

What sounds like a simple premise (and one that should be easy to meet) comes with serious challenges. Invoice review is a rigorous process. Due to the work they represent, law firm bills are often long and complex and contain entries from numerous timekeepers. With hundreds of thousands of line items, vague descriptions or block billing may be missed by busy in-house reviewers. Violations of outside counsel guidelines, such as copy charges or work, may be hard to pinpoint. To top it off, in-house counsel and other professionals usually count invoice review as one of their many responsibilities – a list that has grown as work increases and resources remain stagnant or decrease.

Technology, such as enterprise legal management, has helped to alleviate some of the challenges. Paper invoices have moved to electronic billing. Billing rules, built to scour for specific terms in invoices, flag charges for review. Legal spend analytics identify trends and help to frame performance.

However, even with these additions, many reviewers often default to hitting approve. Who has time in the department to dig deeply into every questionable charge? Is there another approach to invoice review that will ensure companies aren’t overcharged?

We dug into these questions in a recent webinar.  Jonathan Weber, Chubb’s Vice President, Claim Optimization and Legal and Operations Lead, Marci Waterman, President of Sterling Analytics (and the newest member of Onit’s strategic alliance program), and Matt DenOuden, Onit’s SVP of Global Sales, explored the ideal approach that adds efficiency and expertise to invoice review while still honoring the company’s relationship with law firms.

Three Categories of Invoice Review Violations

Potential violations during invoice review often fall into three categories.

First, you have basic facts. For example, is the math correct? As Weber illustrated in the webinar, this is along the lines of getting a bill at a restaurant that is added correctly. Does your bill for two $25 entrees show $50?

Next, you have black and white decisions. For example, is the bill consistent with litigation management guidelines? Going back to the restaurant analogy, were you charged with what you ordered? Or did charges from another table end up on your tab?

Finally, you have gray areas. Are the charges reasonable? When we return to the restaurant idea, one way this might look is being charged for food that was ordered but was served cold. Generally, in a situation like that, the restaurant will comp the meal or replace it with another at no charge. Or perhaps you have three servers working your table. For a party of two, that makes no sense. But for a party of 25, it fits perfectly.

How can corporate legal ensure they’re billed properly in each of these categories? By combining AI and human review.

The Ideal Approach to Legal Billing Review: AI + Third-Party Human Expertise

Webber provided his insight on combining AI and third-party bill review. The company pays hundreds of invoices every day and has a sizeable legal spend. Meeting their goal of always being sure they’re paying the correct amount is a difficult task. They’ve defined strict processes for the flow of invoice review that allows them to look at their data in an organized way.

Part of that process is relying on AI and third-party legal billing review.

AI identifies non-compliance for things like wrong math, improper descriptions and block billing.  These are the kinds of basic or black-and-white decisions that machines handle well. As a bonus, the AI continues to learn so it will get more adept each day at identifying these types of issues.

For the gray areas, the human element comes in. This is where judgment is required. Sometimes the AI might flag things for a valid reason, but humans (such as the lawyers at Sterling) can understand the context and circumstances that make certain charges acceptable or unacceptable.

The result? Chubb is better able to accomplish its goal of always paying the right amount. You can hear the entire discussion, which goes more in-depth into this topic and its benefits.

The Benefits of AI and Third-Party Invoice Review for Legal Billing (and More Resources)

Combining AI-powered invoice review with human third-party review decreases the burden of invoice review while offering:

  • More consistent enforcement of outside counsel guidelines
  • A better understanding of the work being performed by outside firms
  • More time for in-house staff to focus on important, high-value work
  • Substantial cost savings

Here are resources for those who would like to learn more about this:

 

 

The Latest in Corporate Legal and Legal Operations News (July Edition)

Posted on July 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to Onit’s July compilation of some of the most pertinent and timely articles for corporate legal and legal operations news.

In this month’s digest, we explore corporate legal departments as profit centers, CLM ROI, the latest ACC benchmarking survey results, how to build a more resilient legal department and an approach to evaluate and control legal spend.

1. Are Corporate Legal Departments the Next Profit Centers?

Is litigation the next big revenue generator for companies? According to a study by a finance firm, companies with inadequate affirmative recovery programs are 27% more likely to leave money on the table. Meanwhile, 73% of CFOs say they have adequate programs to capture value through affirmative litigation, but 46% responded that they needed improvement.

According to the report:

“The research suggests that companies are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how they approach legal assets and that financial officers understand their value and have new opportunities to unlock them.”

As a result, we may see more corporate legal departments shifting some focus from managing risks and controlling costs to collaborating more closely with CFOs.

(source: Legaltech News and Burford)

2. Finding ROI for CLM

The latest legal tech darling – for a good reason – is contract lifecycle management (CLM). If you’re up-to-date on legal operations news, you’re probably all too familiar with the technology. Contract management is an area ripe for digital transformation.

Yet, the buzz around CLM is sometimes more hype than substance – especially when you consider CLM ROI. In this podcast, Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get a CLM solution from hype to payoff and an innovative approach to CLM technology with all the rewards and none of the risks.

(source: Onit blog)

3. One in Four Corporate Legal Departments Are Dedicating Spend to Contract Management Technology (and Other ACC Survey Insights)

Speaking of CLM technology and its popularity, you might not be surprised to find out that the top legal tech area by allocated spend is contract management solutions. This is according to the 2021 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report. Rounding out the top five are compliance, legal research services, IP management and matter management.

The survey includes responses from 493 legal departments in organizations across 24 industries and 40 countries.

Other interesting findings from a legal operations news perspective include:

  • The mean legal department composition is 66% lawyers, 12% paralegals, 6% legal operations professionals and 8% admin/secretarial staff.
  • The median total legal spend for companies is $1.2M for small companies, $8.4M for mid-sized companies and $64M for large companies.
  • 77% of the participants have a list of preferred law firms, ALSPs and other legal service providers. In 2020, they worked with 36 law firms and two ALSPs on average.

(Source: ACC Law Department Management Benchmarking Report)

4. Build a More Resilient Law Department With These Six Tips from Gartner

The pandemic has been one of the most significant disruptors in recent history. According to Gartner, persistent disruption can be expected over the next five years, leading to further risks. To counter these effects, legal departments must be able to provide timely guidance by evolving their departments.

How can they do this?

Gartner offers six shifts that will be critical in the coming years. These include assessing issues rapidly, prioritizing legal’s service portfolio by the impact of decisions, experimenting to deliver business outcomes and more. Conquering these attributes will lead to a more flexible and effective legal department.

(Source: Gartner)

5. Keep an Eye on Corporate Legal Spend

Nowadays, there is increasing pressure to run the legal department like a business – all while doing more with less and containing costs.

Enter the challenge of outside counsel invoices. The bills are often long, complex and can have differing or vague descriptions of charges. With limited resources, in-house professionals don’t always have time to dig deep into each line item.

How can you evaluate this facet of legal spend and ensure invoices are sticking to outside counsel guidelines?

PYMNTS.com explores viable and easily attainable solutions to counteract unnecessary overspending, offering an opportunity to support external legal service providers’ cash flow and optimize corporate’s legal spend.

(Source: Pymnts.com)

Bonus Resource for Legal Operations News: How CLM  and AI Pay Off for Corporate Legal, Sales and Procurement

This Quick Start Guide offers a bite-sized approach for exploring CLM and AI benefits and how they extend beyond in-house lawyers to sales and procurement. Learn how the technology can help you close deals faster, improve business outcomes and decrease risks. You can find the guide here.