Category: Artificial Intelligence

Free Yourself from Legal Invoice Review with InvoiceAI

Posted on March 3, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

What’s the best part of the day for in-house counsel? Probably not legal invoice review.

While it’s often necessary to ensure adherence to outside counsel billing guidelines, it still consumes valuable time on highly manual work.

That’s why we are introducing InvoiceAI to our enterprise legal management – to free in-house lawyers from the manual labor of tedious legal invoice review.

Onit announced this next significant phase of innovation at Legalweek(year) with our first InvoiceAI video. Launching in May for both Onit and SimpleLegal, InvoiceAI harnesses AI’s power to increase the efficiency of the invoice review process. It handles the first-pass review of incoming bills and sets up a framework that will continuously learn as invoice corrections are refined in the system. The result: General counsel and in-house counsel can transfer rediscovered bandwidth and energy to higher-value work for their companies.

This second InvoiceAI video shares more about the InvoiceAI.

To learn more about InvoiceAI from Onit and how AI can streamline your legal invoice review, contact your Onit account manager today or email [email protected].

Legal Invoice AI Joins Our Contract AI

AI-enabled invoice review from InvoiceAI modernizes the legal operations function and automates the review of law firm billing for corporations. It perfectly illustrates our founding principle: To help lawyers more effectively practice law.

When InvoiceAI launches in May, it will join an impressive roster of AI solutions already on offer from Onit, including:

  • Precedent, Onit’s AI-powered business intelligence platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals and procurement teams.
  • ReviewAI, contract AI for pre-signature contract review that reviews, redlines and edits all types of contracts in minutes, increasing contract review speed by 60-70%.
  • ExtractAI, contract AI for post-signature contract management that extracts usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

You can schedule a demonstration of any of Onit’s AI solutions here.

A Legal AI Refresher

The field of AI is continually evolving, and it’s essential for today’s legal professionals to stay ahead of the curve. If you’re looking to bone up on AI, here are some great places to start:

Remember: AI won’t replace lawyers. But lawyers using AI will replace those that don’t.

Thanks for your time and stay tuned to our blog. We’ll have more InvoiceAI and contract AI announcements coming soon.

Six Features of the Best Matter Management Software

Posted on February 25, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

Matter management software puts critical matter, financial and performance data at the fingertips of corporate counsel and legal operations. But what features should a corporate legal department prioritize to gain the best return on investment? In the first blog post on this series, we explored essential legal spend management technology features for enterprise legal management. Now, we follow up with an exploration of the critical components of matter management.

According to Deloitte’s 2020 Legal Operations Survey, 74% of the corporate legal professionals surveyed felt they did not have clear or accurate metrics on work performed internally or externally. Additionally, 71% said that manual tasks take up a “significant amount” of their teams’ time.

Yet, technology – specifically matter management software – is designed to address challenges such as these.

Catherine Moynihan, associate vice president of legal management services with the Association of Corporate Counsel, told Legaltech News that GCs have seen growing interest from corporate leadership for technology investments. As she explains:

“While budget restraints have constrained the implementation of technology, I think we’re now approaching a tipping point where it’s budget challenges that will help make the case to make that short-term investment because the ROI is there.”

Fortunately, there are advanced enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions available, including matter management tools specifically designed to address issues such as the ones mentioned above.

What to Look For in Matter Management Software

From a high-level perspective, corporate legal departments need data that can show how their internal or external resources are leveraged. This is where matter management technology comes in. With this technology, corporate legal departments gain visibility into an overall matter portfolio and real-time data and dashboards to monitor and track all matters throughout their lifecycle. Legal team members should have immediate access to critical matter metrics, including performance data, through simple information collection, management and workflow.

Here are six features you should look for in a matter management solution:

  1. Custom Intake and Matter Forms

Most businesses require some custom forms for matter management, including custom intake and data forms for multiple matter types such as litigation, employment, intellectual property and claims.

  1. Flexible Workflow

Organization is mandatory, especially when dealing with matters that can substantially impact a business. Corporate legal professionals need configurable workflows relative to the matter type, dollar amount or specific business rules. No-code workflow and business process automation platforms powering ELM, matter management and legal spend management tools enable legal professionals of all technical proficiencies to create, automate and edit necessary workflows easily. To learn more about a platform approach, view this CLOC presentation by Colgate-Palmolive and Baker & McKenzie.

  1. Data Management and Robust Search

One of the necessary conveniences of matter management is that you can easily find the data you need at all times. A solution with full-text search capabilities for all information—including documents, transaction details, emails and notes – makes that happen. This benefit is further enhanced by searching capabilities that put critical matter information, including tasks, documents and notes, in front of you in a click.

  1. Outlook Integration

Those who proclaimed the death of email need to retract their statements. In 2020, more than 306 billion emails were sent and received. Email remains a critical component of communications and information exchange for businesses and many companies use Microsoft Outlook. If Outlook isn’t syncing with a matter management solution, a corporate legal team will ultimately face more manual processes and the potential for inaccurate or missing data.

  1. Email Notifications

To easily share information with corporate legal team members involved with matters, matter management technology should provide automated notifications that replace manual processes. This includes matter-unique emails within the system that keep team members up-to-date on matters.

  1. Reporting and Analytics

As mentioned above, metrics and analytics help legal professionals better understand their matters’ statuses, finances and performance. A matter management solution should have the ability to create dashboards to manage matters by type, location or geography as an essential part of reporting and analytics.

For more enterprise legal management and matter management inspiration, we invite you to check out the following resources:

  • Learn more about InvoiceAI, an AI-enabled legal invoice review offering for enterprise legal management.
  • Access this webinar replay for “Legal Operations Reporting Done Right,” where the global healthcare company Viatris (formerly Mylan) discusses its approach to identifying and collecting the right data and creating reports that are meaningful to different audiences across the organization.
  • Hear how McDonald’s formulated a cohesive, long-term strategy to achieve the right balance of people, process and technology here.

Contract Management in Procurement is Fueling Transformation and Streamlining Processes

Posted on February 23, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

At its core, contract management for procurement enables a team to manage spend against budget and automate the contracting process. We’ve previously explored how technologies like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and contract AI increase efficiency and reduce risk for general counsel, legal operations and sales operations. Now, we’ll examine the power of contract management for procurement and how it increases visibility and cuts time through automation.

Procurement is a critical role in any organization. As Chief Procurement Officer at a global enterprise, you’re ultimately responsible for all procurement transformation efforts around the world, and you’re expected to lead those efforts efficiently and effectively. In doing so, you enable spend owners, such as business units and functional partners, to maximize the value they receive from suppliers to meet their objectives.

Technology is integral to effective and efficient procurement in the modern era. Because contracts are such a key part of procurement activities, having the right contract management (CLM) tool for procurement can make all the difference.

CLM and Contract AI in Procurement

A Chief Procurement Officer is responsible for accomplishing some of the organization’s most critical business goals, including ensuring that the company has ongoing value creation via a world-class supply base, developing the company’s overall procurement strategy and identifying and realizing cost-saving and cost reduction opportunities for the enterprise. There’s also the need to manage budgets and an overall expectation for procurement transformation to create a center of excellence resulting in lasting value for the organization.

In addition to these crucial overarching functions, Chief Procurement Officers must also control and manage the inner workings of the procurement department, including its employees and the systems they use. They must manage procurement staff in and across sourcing, contracting, transactional purchasing, supplier management, and miscellaneous internal procurement support activities, while also managing the skills and competency development of that staff, including training development and knowledge management capabilities.

As a foundation for all of these important roles and expectations, the Chief Procurement Officer is responsible for the selection and management of procurement systems. This can, and indeed should, include incorporating the technologies necessary to build the procurement center of excellence the organization expects and needs. Because contract management for procurement, along with contract AI, is imperative, having the right CLM tool for procurement will boost effectiveness and efficiency across all those activities, increasing excellence and bringing value to the enterprise as a whole.

Benefits for Procurement

In selecting a CLM tool to transform your procurement operations, keep in mind the importance of understanding the needs of different stakeholders who will be impacted by any new system. Consider the benefits of contract management for various different roles within your procurement staff, and balance their needs to get the most out of your system. At its core, your CLM solution for procurement must be flexible enough to meet a variety of needs and be easily applied across all the different tasks that make up the procurement function.

Because contract management for procurement is so foundational, your CLM solution needs to serve as a centralized tool for managing procurement contracts across the organization, regardless of where around the globe they originate – think of your CLM solution as a single point of truth for your procurement activities across the enterprise.

Being able to centrally manage contracts will help you handle some of your most critical Chief Procurement Officer tasks, including improving business outcomes, decreasing risk and managing spend against budget. With a CLM solution, you’ll always be able to know exactly where every procurement contract is and see the status of current contract negotiations. If someone is causing delays, you’ll know who it is and how you can help move them forward. CLM tools can also automate routine contracts like NDAs, bringing even more efficiency to the procurement function and shifting your focus to tasks that create more value for your organization.

When you’re the head of procurement at an organization responsible for high levels of spend, you understand the importance of contract management in procurement to deliver savings and value. You need the right CLM tool for procurement to make the most of those contracts and support the critical activities of your enterprise.

Onit’s CLMs solution provides the flexibility and efficiency your procurement function needs to become a center of excellence for your enterprise. Contact us today to learn more.

February Digest: The Latest in Legal Operations Trends and News

Posted on February 17, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to our February run-down of the latest in legal operations trends and news. In this digest, we dig into the results from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2021 Chief Legal Officers survey and how ADM controls legal spend. Experts will share real-life numbers that illustrate contract AI benefits and a new approach to legal operations maturity models. Finally, we’ll talk about CLOC and its strategy for expanding membership.

#1

Contract Management Tops General Counsel Wish Lists, According to Survey

 According to the 2021 Chief Legal Officers survey conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel, corporate legal departments are pursuing more hiring as privacy and compliance challenges increase. More than 30% plan to add in-house lawyers and nearly half said they will send more work to outside counsel this year and increase headcount for corporate legal.

Artificial Lawyer analyzed the results as well, focusing on the types of legal technology GCs and CLOs want in the next two years. Taking first place: Contract management, with 67%. With contract AI accelerating contract approvals by up to 70%, it isn’t hard to understand why this is a priority corporate legal top brass.

The ACC survey includes feedback from 947 participants in 44 countries.

(sources: Corporate Counsel and Artificial Lawyer)

#2

ADM Legal Chief Redesigned Law Firm Relationships and Cut Spend. Here’s How.

In legal operations news regarding outside counsel spend, Cam Findlay, Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary at Archer Daniels Midland, shares how his team significantly reduced legal spend. The company dropped its legal spend from 85% to 50% of its budget. How? The department relied on technology, best practices and a law firm panel.

As he explains to Bloomberg Law:

“One of the first things we did was get better technology. We put in place a matter management system that allows us to track every penny—well, we think we track every penny—of spending by an outside law firm. We can even track the diversity of the lawyers who are working for us, how many hours were done by women or people of color.

“We use Onit, and we were one of the first major companies to use it, I believe. It’s a very good system because it’s beyond just matter management and e-billing, and we use it for all sorts of purposes throughout the company. It’s a good platform that you can plug and play other aspects onto.”

He also discusses how the law firm panel – called the ADM Law Firm Alliance – helped drive them to their global spending goals:

“We sit down with our top firms early in the year, every year, and through our Onit system, we’re able to prepare a firm report card for them that shows how their rates compare to other law firms, how their staffing compares, in terms of whether they are partner heavy or associate heavy. It also shows how they’re doing in terms of the diversity of the team that they’re putting on our matters. That’s been a really effective tool. We can sit down with a firm and say, ‘Your team was 100% white male. Your competitors here have been able to put much more diverse teams on our matters. That’s something we want you to work on for next year.’”

(source: Bloomberg Law)

#3

How Effective is Contract AI for Legal? Here Are the Numbers.

A panel of experts from Adobe and Onit gathered at Legalweek(year) tackled the latest legal operations trends by discussing contract AI and its impact on corporate legal. Instead of general benefits, though, these presenters provided quantitative numbers showing how effective this technology is.

A recent study of contract AI found that:

  • New AI users become 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive
  • Contracts are reviewed and redlined in less than two minutes
  • The technology helps corporate legal reduce contract processing costs by 33%
  • Users can shift work to higher-value activities, with one senior lawyer reallocating 15% of his time from contract work and team management to more strategic endeavors.

To hear the panel discussion, visit here.

(source: Legalweek[year])

#4

A New Approach to Legal Operations Maturity Models

According to the 2020 State of the Industry survey by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), there has been a steady growth trajectory in legal operations across organizations of all sizes. The outcome has been an increase in new hires and technology to deliver legal services efficiently, cost-effectively and across departments.

Nathan Wenzel, the co-founder of SimpleLegal, proposes an alternative to existing legal operations maturity models – one honed from working with more than 200 corporate legal departments.  While he outlines five distinct levels of legal operations maturity, he also emphasizes that the goal is to find the place in the spectrum that works best for your organization.

(source: Law Technology Today)

#5

CLOC Welcomes New Legal Technology Members

In 2016, CLOC allowed only in-house counsel as members. In 2019, they welcomed legal operations professionals. In the latest legal operations news, they’re opening the doors wider by inviting more members, including technology companies, service providers and law schools.

What should all CLOC members expect? According to Betsi Roach, CLOC’s executive director, there will be an expanded array of topics and perspectives. As she explains in the CLOC press release on the matter:

“Our members and the greater legal community are hungry for more resources to answer questions and advance their careers. Creating a place that champions diversity of ideas and thoughts will not only disrupt the business of law but will define professional growth paths and pave the way for future generations. This is an exciting advancement on our continued journey to make a real impact on both the legal industry and for those in our community to grow their networks.” 

To learn more about CLOC memberships, visit here.

(sources: Corporate Counsel and CLOC)

Discover More Legal Operations Trends with Lean Into Legal Ops

Speaking of legal operations, Onit is expanding our Lean Into Legal Ops virtual learning program to include even more members of the legal community and provide even more diverse content. Past webinars have included:

Get the inside track on legal operations trends, the very best events and helpful content from the legal community by joining Legal Into Legal Ops today. Visit this page to join.

How Sales CLM with Contract AI Helps Business Development Automation

Posted on February 9, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

It’s impossible to imagine any organization’s sales function without considering contracts. Sales operations professionals handle some of a company’s most value-generating activities: overseeing daily sales activity, meeting with major clients, drawing up sales reports, designing new and more effective sales strategies, and working to market and promote company products and services. 

None of those activities are possible if you can’t effectively manage your sales contracts and glean insights from them. Tools to manage contracts, including contract AI, are designed to ensure that sales operations and the VP of sales have a single point of truth for contracts. In addition, business development automation makes the sales Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) process more efficient, and the entire sales function more effective. 

Contract AI Software in Sales

The sales function at any enterprise encompasses various duties, ranging from discrete contractual tasks to overarching strategy. On the contractual front, sales operations are responsible for many phases of contract lifecycle management, including: 

  • Creating requests for contracts 
  • Drafting contracts 
  • Monitoring the progress of those contracts 
  • Keeping contracts moving forward when things stall 
  • Approving contract terms 
  • Delivering contracts to customers for signature 

The sales function doesn’t end there. In addition to handling contracts daily, sales operations professionals find new opportunities to expand the organization’s client base and devise new and innovative ways to market products and services. It’s also responsible for setting specific critical enterprise goals and ensuring they’re met, including quarterly or annual sales and ongoing productivity goals. 

Underlying all sales functions, whether drafting a contract or setting the right sales goals for the entire company, is the expectation that the VP of sales and the sales operations team will continuously improve the sales team’s effectiveness and productivity. 

Technology is the key to ensuring continuous improvement. Sales CLM tools and contract AI empower sales operations professionals to better tackle both aspects of the job by making the contract process more efficient and effective from start to finish. In addition, AI–enabled sales management software helps create a central repository for the organization’s contract data. The central repository is a critical source of information for making informed decisions about sales goals and marketing strategies.

Finding the Right Sales CLM Solution and Contract AI Software

While every company and sales department is different, some common barriers prevent sales operations from performing effectively and efficiently. These include: 

  • Having little to no insight into where deals are, who’s responsible for them, and what the next steps are
  • Missing an easy way to keep deals moving forward
  • Not having mobile technology options to effectively handle work tasks in today’s on-the-go and remote working scenarios
  • Lacking self-service options that allow the various interested parties to create and manage that contract or request information directly.

A valuable sales CLM tool and contract AI software will remove barriers and help sales by: 

  • Closing deals faster with features such as self-service and contract AI that reviews, redlines and edits first-pass review within two minutes
  • Automating the contract request process to improve sales representative productivity 
  • Giving sales a real-time view of bottlenecks, where every contract is, and if the process is stalled 
  • Only showing the information you need when you need it, rather than burying you in a mountain of data irrelevant to what you’re doing at any given moment. Having immediate access to the correct data is critical to setting the right sales and productivity goals for your team and the entire organization. 

Speeding Up CLM for Sales – and Welcoming Revenue More Quickly

Sales operations professionals understand the role of contracts in doing their job right. However, they need the right CLM tools for sales to manage those contracts end-to-end. Onit’s CLM solution helps with business development automation for the entire contract management process, allowing for a more efficient sales function and better insight into sales data. Contact us today to learn more.

The Future of the Legal Profession, AI and Legal Work

Posted on February 4, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

The legal profession faced down seemingly endless changes this past year, and many people are understandably wondering what’s in store for the future. In a recent webinar sponsored by Onit and titled The Future of the Legal Profession, leading economist Daniel Susskind tackled exactly that question, offering insights on what changes the industry should expect in the future, what role technology and AI will play and much more.

A Tale of Two Futures

Susskind envisions two possible futures for the legal profession, both rooted in technology: one that’s simply a more efficient version of the current profession, and another in which technology actively displaces professionals.

In the first, today’s professionals continue to incorporate more technology to streamline and optimize the traditional ways they’ve worked, changing practices that may have been in place for several decades. In the second, technology isn’t just streamlining and optimizing traditional work practices, but fully replacing professionals with increasingly capable systems and machines. In the short term, these two divergent futures will develop in parallel. However, in the long term, Susskind expects the second future to dominate due to its greater efficiency and more effective problem-solving abilities.

How Technology Affects Professions

Professions evolved in modern society because no one was capable of doing everything, and therefore specialists – lawyers, doctors, educators, etc. – were needed to solve common challenges that people couldn’t solve on their own. Each profession became a gatekeeper for a unique body of knowledge.

Technology has been changing all that in recent years. Today, institutions are using technology to solve problems that were traditionally only solved by specific professionals. For example, in the case of law, three times as many disputes are resolved each year on remediation platforms without traditional lawyers than are filed in the legal system. Other technologies are similarly replacing hundreds of thousands of hours of traditionally billable time by addressing discrete legal tasks.

How Technology and AI Are Changing

There’s no finish line when it comes to technology. Today, technology is seeing exponential growth in prevalence, power, and capability, performing tasks that were once the sole province of humans. More and more people own devices, and both those devices and their owners are becoming increasingly connected. Over time, technology will only continue to improve.

Artificial intelligence has seen some of the most significant evolution. While AI once focused on copying human thinking and reasoning, today’s AI tools perform judgments that humans once exclusively performed and do so based on much larger volumes of data than humans could ever tackle.  (To see an example of how AI can quickly review, redline and edit all types of contracts including NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, purchase agreements, lease agreements, employment agreements, construction and sub-contracting agreements, visit here. You can also schedule a demo of Onit’s Review AI by filling out this quick form.)

The Future of Legal Work

We won’t be seeing robot lawyers any time soon, but we will see changes. Rather than eliminating entire jobs, technology will likely displace humans from particular tasks and activities, while making others more valuable and more important for humans to perform. Technology is a story not of mass unemployment, but of mass redeployment, changing the tasks and activities lawyers will be expected to perform in carrying out their work.

The Pandemic Effect

While the pandemic may have spurred recessions in some areas, recessions often lead to an increase in automation. Automation, in turn, tends to replace the tasks of middling-skilled workers, rather than lower-skilled or higher-skilled workers.

The pandemic has also created a unique incentive to automate work, since machines don’t have to worry about challenges like contagion or isolation. Some automation experiments necessitated by the pandemic are likely to become permanent fixtures of the profession, as there’s been a significant shift in the belief that most work needs to be performed face-to-face.

How This All Impacts You

Susskind closed with three pieces of advice for lawyers going forward:

  1. Explore new roles, skills and capabilities that might not be traditional in the profession.
  2. Learn from the pandemic. Understand what’s worked well and what hasn’t and apply that going forward.
  3. Imagine the future of the profession like a clean slate, figuring out how to solve problems in new and fundamentally different ways.

To learn more about Daniel Susskind, visit here.

To see how Onit’s AI solutions – including Precedent, ReviewAI and ExtractAI – schedule a demonstration here.

Empower Legal Operations Automation with the Best CLM Tools

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

The right legal contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution is a crucial component of your legal ops toolbox.

When you work in legal operations, you’re required to wear a lot of hats. On any given day, you’ll work closely with general counsel as well as business stakeholders at all levels of your company. Legal operations is key in creating processes and practices that improve the day-to-day efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s legal team and, in turn, the company as a whole. Contracts are the lifeblood of corporate legal departments, and having tools to manage them is critical to the efficiency legal ops is trying to achieve.

Contract Lifecycle Management in Day-to-Day Legal Operations

It’s nearly impossible to think about legal operations without thinking about contracts. On a daily basis, you’re requesting and drafting contracts, monitoring their progress and obtaining signatures. On top of that, you’re responsible for implementing tools to streamline your organization’s legal practices, developing and enforcing processes and policies to manage outside counsel usage and spend, assisting with budget matters and optimizing workflows within the legal department, and managing the design, rollout and training for new systems – just to name a few things.

With that many important roles on your plate, monitoring contracts doesn’t need to be taking up any more of your time than it has to. With the right tool for managing your contracts from start to finish, you’ll be freed up to focus on tasks that are more critical to boosting efficiency and creating value for the organization.

Finding the Right CLM Solution

As is the case with most legal technology these days, there’s no shortage of options when it comes to choosing a contract lifecycle management solution. In making your choice, it’s important to keep in mind the pain points you’re trying to address in legal operations and the functionalities you want to achieve from your new tool.

Among the biggest challenges that legal ops professionals tend to face when it comes to CLM are:

  • Having a lack of visibility into where your deals stand, who’s responsible for them and what the next steps are at any given time
  • Having no easy way to keep contract drafting and negotiation moving forward
  • Needing an effective way to reduce risk and improve governance
  • Needing to accelerate contract turnaround time while also reducing costs
  • Having no means of self-service, and instead having to rely on others to handle contracts

The ideal CLM tool will serve as a single point of truth for all your contract data, allowing you to standardize your processes and increase efficiency through automation. You’ll have real-time insight into where each contract stands and who might be holding it up, so you can nudge them along and keep everything moving smoothly. CLM solutions also allow you to easily find contracts and have visibility into your renewal and amendments cycles without overwhelming you with information – the best tools allow you to see only the information you need to see, when you need and want to see it.

Implementing CLM in Legal Ops

Legal operations professionals are no strangers to developing, implementing, and using today’s most cutting-edge legal tech solutions. Using technology to manage contracts should be no exception. CLM tools help bolster the practice of corporate law, streamlining the contractual processes that are so integral to the operation of every legal department, and, indeed, every organization operating today.

Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you with end-to-end automation of your entire contract management process.

January Digest: Current Legal Operations Trends and Industry News

Posted on January 19, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

From COVID to cost-cutting, here are some of the leading industry articles on legal operations trends. This blog post represents a new monthly feature that shares the latest industry news for corporate legal and legal operations professionals.

#1

Legal Ops May Still Struggle for a Seat at the Table in 2021

(source: Legaltech News)

COVID has forced many professions to pivot in how they approach their jobs. Legal operations is no exception. In this article, experts share how 2020 will shape legal operations trends in 2021. Nick Whitehouse, GM of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, discusses the importance of building smart processes and workflows to remove low-value work from in-house and the growing adoption of AI-enable contract lifecycle management, automated third-party contract reviews and document automation. Roycee Hasuko, director of product engagement for SimpleLegal, advocates for the importance of clean data and systems to convey business priorities and how remote working will require legal ops to continue investments in communications strategies and cross-functional collaboration. You can read the full article here.

#2

Legal departments cut outside spending, focus on managers and specialists, study shows

(source: ABA Journal)

Legal departments have always been under pressure to cut costs, but last year has taken this to unprecedented new levels. The current pandemic has been responsible for the largest part of this pressure. This article examines legal operations trends uncovered by a Gartner survey, highlighting the fact that more legal spending (57%) is staying in-house compared to previous years, participants are expecting reductions in their budgets and 94% say their headcount will remain the same or be reduced. Find the full article here.

#3

Forging Into The Unknown: How COVID-19 Has Already Changed Legal Department Budget Planning

(source: Corporate Counsel)

We always like to maintain a sense of optimism about getting back to normal after the pandemic, and rightfully so. But some believe that things in legal departments will get much more complicated before there’s a return to normalcy. Budgets are the topic of discussion in this article, from opinions on tweaking budgets from previous years,  the role of analytics and “giving smarter haircuts.” The full text of the article is published here.

#4

COVID-19 Proved the Value of Legal Operations In-House

(source: Corporate Counsel)

Despite COVID challenges, many forward-thinking legal ops professionals have made significant strides in finding ways to save money. This article looks at how these individuals have discovered new ways to use their existing technology instead of acquiring additional technology, as well as how they were able to smoothly transition from the office to home. You can read the article here.

#5

Artificial Intelligence Trends Impacting Corporate Legal Departments

(source: Reinventing Professionals)

After ringing in the New Year, it’s that time again to examine current trends in our industry. Ari Kaplan of Reinventing Professionals recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, general manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. In this thought-provoking interview, they cover several aspects of AI and legal operations trends and how they translate to efficiency and savings for corporate legal. You can listen to the podcast here.

Additional Resources for Legal Trends

If you’re interested in more resources related to legal operations trends, here are some recommendations:

  • To support our customers and colleagues in the legal operations field, Onit offers free Business Continuity Apps to support remote workers and their families that are sheltering at home.
  • Interested in hearing more about how to trim spend? In our Virtual Legal Resourcing Debate with Buying Legal Council, three teams of legal professionals debate different approaches and their pros and cons.
  • In this on-demand webinar, the legal operations team at Pearson shares how they radically transformed how they manage contracts, cutting costs annually by roughly 30%.

We hope you find these articles helpful. We’ll return in February with another industry update on legal operations trends.

Four Legal AI Trends Impacting Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Each day, the accomplishments of artificial intelligence multiply. AI recently solved Schrödinger’s equation in quantum chemistry. It regularly diagnoses medical conditions, pilots jets and fetches answers for our everyday queries. And now, it might dance better than you do.

The ever-improving abilities of AI are having marked positive impacts on a wide variety of industries and professions – especially corporate legal departments and the in-house counsel and legal operations professionals that run them. So, what can corporate legal departments expect from legal AI in 2021?

Ari Kaplan, attorney, legal industry analyst, author, technologist and host of the Reinventing Professionals podcast, recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Nick, who is the 2019 IDC DX Leader of the Year and Talent’s 2018 Most Disruptive Leader Award (as judged by Sir Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak), shared the legal AI trends that general counsel and legal operations professionals should keep an eye on for 2021, including:

  • Accelerated adoption – The pandemic has greatly affected the use of AI, spurring businesses and their corporate legal departments to recategorize it from curiosity to necessity. For example, 2020 saw many companies having to quickly reassess large numbers of contracts (such as leases). Legal AI allowed in-house teams to quickly assess their contracts and take action, helping their businesses survive and thrive.
  • Banishing the black box – Legal departments have historically been perceived as black boxes – work goes in and decisions come out slowly with little transparency. AI reduces the time spent on individual transactions, increasing transparency by enabling consistent use of playbooks and the ability for the business to self-serve.
  • Focus on solving in-house challenges  – The technology has shifted from a project-based law firm focus toward products that are centered on solving in-house problems like contract lifecycle management and AI legal contract review. With 71% of lawyers saying they are mired in manual tasks, these AI products can drive a massive amount of value for corporate legal.
  • AI in the near future – In addition to the shift from law firm focused AI services to more in-house based services, corporate legal can expect a greater blending of AI into contract lifecycle management and third-party review as well as AI-assisted document automation and billing management.

Visit the Reinventing Professionals website to listen to the podcast. You can also find it (and subscribe) on Apple podcasts.

What is Artificial Intelligence? The ABCs of What Is It and What it Does

Posted on January 5, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest buzzwords in legal technology today, but many people still don’t fully understand what it is and how it can impact their day-to-day legal work.

According to  Brookings Institution, AI generally refers to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention.” In other words, artificial intelligence is technology capable of making decisions that generally require a human level of expertise. It helps people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. (For example, here’s how AI greatly improves contract review.)

In this blog post and podcast (see below), we cover the ins and outs of AI in more detail. In this first installment of our new blog series, we’ll discuss what it is and its three main hallmarks.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

At the core of AI and machine learning are algorithms, or sequences of instructions that solve specific problems. In machine learning, the learning algorithms create the rules for the software, instead of computer programmers inputting them, as is the case with more traditional forms of technology. Artificial intelligence can learn from new data without additional step-by-step instructions.

This independence is crucial to our ability to use computers for new, more complex tasks that exceed the manual programming limitations – things like photo recognition apps for the visually impaired or translating pictures into speech. Even things we now take for granted, like Alexa and Siri, are prime examples of artificial intelligence technology that once seemed impossible. We already encounter in our day-to-day lives in numerous ways and that influence will continue to grow.

The excitement about this quickly evolving technology is understandable, mainly due to its impacts on data availability, computing power and innovation. The billions of devices connected to the internet generate large amounts of data and lower the cost of mass data storage. Machine learning can use all this data to train learning algorithms and accelerate the development of new rules for performing increasingly complex tasks. Furthermore, we can now process enormous amounts of data around machine learning. All of this is driving innovation, which has recently become a rallying cry among savvy legal departments worldwide. 

Once you understand the basics of AI, it’s also helpful to be familiar with the different types of learning that make it up.

The first is supervised learning, where a learning algorithm is given labeled data in order to generate a desired output. For example, if the software is given a picture of dogs labeled “dogs,” the algorithm will identify rules to classify pictures of dogs in the future.

The second is unsupervised learning, where the data input is unlabeled and the algorithm is asked to identify patterns on its own. A typical instance of unsupervised learning is when the algorithm behind an eCommerce site identifies similar items often bought by a consumer.

Finally, there’s the scenario where the algorithm interacts with a dynamic environment that provides both positive feedback (rewards) and negative feedback. An example of this would be a self-driving car where, if the driver stays within the lane, the software will receive points in order to reinforce that learning and reminders to stay in that lane.

The Hallmarks of AI

Even after understanding the basic elements and learning models of AI, the question often arises as to what the real essence of AI is. The Brookings Institution boils the answer down to three main qualities:

  1. Intentionality – AI algorithms are designed to make decisions. They’re not passive machines capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Rather, they’re designed by humans with intentionality to reach conclusions based on instant analysis.
  2. Intelligence – AI often is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics, and the resulting combination enables intelligent decision-making. Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and employ data analytics to understand specific issues.
  3. Adaptability – AI has the ability to learn and adapt as it compiles information and makes decisions. Effective AI must adjust as circumstances or conditions shift. This could involve changes in financial situations, road conditions, environmental considerations, military circumstances, and more. Artificial intelligence needs to integrate these changes into its algorithms and decide on how to adapt to the new circumstances.

For a more in-depth discussion of artificial intelligence, you can listen to the entire podcast below.

In the next installment of our blog series, we’ll discuss the benefits AI is already bringing to legal departments. We hope you’ll join us.