Category: Artificial Intelligence

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.

 

The General Counsel’s Guide to AI Based Contract Management

Posted on December 29, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Essential Steps to Establish a Single Point of Truth

Contracts are the lifeblood of most businesses, yet too many companies lack a comprehensive and effective solution for contract lifecycle management (CLM). Legal departments looking to digitize their contracts will find the most success with a platform technology strategy that avoids creating data silos and serves as a single point of truth for all contract data. Increasingly, most enterprise businesses are looking to AI-based contract automation to help them set up automated legal contract management processes.

Prosus, a global consumer internet company and one of the largest technology investors in the world, recently implemented a new CLM system from Onit with the help of Cognia Law, an international company that helps law departments and law firms find cost-effective, process-optimized, and technology-enabled solutions. Steven Van Oss, Group Sr. Legal Council at Prosus and Tyson Ballard, Head of Legal Consulting at Cognia, recently spoke with Onit to share valuable insights on choosing and implementing the right legal AI and CLM system.

General Counsel Seeks Contract Lifecycle Management

Like many companies, Prosus initially had some technology in place for contract management, but for the most part those solutions relied on legal staff to know how everything operated. At a certain level, such an approach becomes infeasible, as employees leave or the business grows.

Other solutions proved ineffective as pain points developed after implementation. A lack of continued buy-in from colleagues in other departments quickly saw the company back at square one. They had to define their legal automation and contract management needs. They needed a solution that was easy to understand and would allow them to gain insights from the large amount of contract data they had.

The answer was to partner with Cognia to workshop a strategy for legal operations, and it immediately became clear that the legal contract management process was a major pain point. Prosus needed to get a single source of truth for contracts while standardizing processes at the same time. Cognia’s job was to help Prosus navigate the vast jungle of legal tech that exists on the market today to find the right AI-based contract management tool.

Choosing the Right AI-Based Contract Management Tool

It’s critical to understand your people and the legal contract management processes before choosing your technology. You can have the best tool on the market, but if no one actually uses it, it’s essentially worthless.

Prosus had scoured the market and gotten lost in the legal tech jungle. Cognia helped them identify their needs, creating a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves, then guided Prosus through the possibilities and potential solutions.

The right AI-based contract management tool will provide the basic foundations of contract management every legal department needs – a good repository for searching and finding contracts, the ability to import and harness data to help with decision-making and understanding risk, and the ability to generate workflows. Too many solutions focus on a lot of bells and whistles, rather than providing the necessary base functionality for CLM.

Integrations were essential to the general counsel at Prosus. While the company initially focused on their need for CLM, they quickly realized that they needed to manage their vendor compliance efforts as well. The best place to capture vendor data is in your CLM tool, since it serves as a single source of truth for that data. Prosus needed its CLM solution to integrate with ethiXbase, it’s preferred third-party compliance screening tool.

In the end, Prosus got not only its must-haves, but its nice-to-haves, too, with contract lifecycle management from Onit.

Advice for General Counsel Implementing AI-Based Contract Automation

Choosing the right CLM solution isn’t the end of the story – in reality, you’re really only halfway to the contract management goal at that point. Implementing that solution always comes with a few hurdles.

  • The first is timing. Implementation of your AI-based contract automation will almost always take longer than you think it will, since it relies on a large number of internal and external resources to complete. Add more time to your expectations. In other words, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
  • You should also be prepared to take a deep dive into all your legal contract management processes. Even day-to-day processes that may seem simple to you require an extreme level of detail to implement into your CLM tool. Chances are you’ll be thinking about the processes at a level you never even considered before.
  • Finally, it can be hard to maintain the excitement you had when you first choose your AI-based contract management solution. Throughout the implementation process, it’s important to remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing and stick with it. By keeping to a simple implementation approach, you’ll end up with both your must-haves and your nice-to-haves.

The right contract management solution can change everything for general counsel. Visit here to hear the entire discussion between Prosus, Cognia and Onit on creating a single point of truth for your legal contracts.

Legal ReviewAI and Drafting with AI Improves Productivity

Posted on December 8, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract review and drafting can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. The process is often painfully tedious and repetitive – especially if it is paper-based or spread across multiple systems like emails and private drives. Without a more effective digital enablement, the process to review and draft legal contracts is slow and inconsistent, requires enormous attention to detail and continues to be prone to costly errors. These challenges directly impact a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes and achieve business objectives.

With ever-increasing pressure on legal teams to do more with less, enhancing contract efficiency through automation and the latest technologies represent a significant opportunity to improve business performance.

Artificial intelligence, specifically legal contract AI, has the power to deliver significant productivity gains and allow lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives. Onit undertook a study of its AI for the pre-signature contract phase, ReviewAI, to determine just how much it can help and found commendable results (you can read more about them here.)

Key takeaways from the contract AI study include:

  • Testers found that ReviewAI accelerated legal contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increased legal team productivity by more than 50%.
  • New users were immediately 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive. The average midsize company employs 28 lawyers who review 4,850 contracts annually. Unlocking more capacity – up to 51.5% – means those same lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually. It’s like adding nine lawyers to your team.
  • The team leader, a senior lawyer, was able to reallocate 15% of his time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities.
  • The efficiency and productivity gains from using ReviewAI increased over time, allowing corporate legal departments to optimize team performance, reallocate resources to engage the business better and reduce the amount of contract work handled by external counsel.

To learn more about legal contract AI software, contract review and drafting, read about the study’s results.

 

Five Ways Artificial Intelligence Accelerates Pre-Signature ReviewAI

Posted on November 24, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that its participants don’t realize how manual it actually is. This is commonly the case for contract management review.

Many corporations rely on vastly manual processes to handle contracts, such as cutting and pasting into templates, emailing, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. However, a manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks such as inadequate delivery to customers, failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, time lost from disorganization and errors and additional work due to inefficient processes.

One area of particular concern is contract review. When combined with highly manual or ineffective processes, it has the potential to hinder the execution of powerful agreements that lead to increased revenue, enhanced partnerships and valuable purchases. In short, a nickel – albeit a necessary nickel for legal review – is holding up a dollar.

ReviewAI and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Legal teams have long been asked to do more with fewer resources and a shrinking budget – all while taking on more work. This is not a scalable process without technology. Artificial intelligence and advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning are evolving the legal profession as we know it.

While legal professionals’ expertise and judgment will always be the core of legal processes, AI can provide pre-work much in the same way that a paralegal or junior lawyer might mark up a document or run a checklist before a partner’s final review. As a result, corporate legal departments can use AI to decrease the time it takes to review contracts, increase productivity, reduce risk and save time.

Here are five ways AI can accelerate the pre-signature contract review process.

  1. Self-Service ReviewAI

With AI, legal professionals can slash the time for a first-pass review from days or hours to mere minutes. A business user can request a standard contract or submit a third-party contract for initial review via email or a web portal. AI learns corporate standards from transaction histories and feedback and then reviews and redlines contracts and returns them in Microsoft Word – often within two minutes.

  1. High-Volume/Low-Edit ReviewAI

Some contracts, like nondisclosure agreements, require near real-time turnaround and often do not depart from standard terms. They’re high-volume and low-edit documents – prime candidates for AI review. Instead of an attorney handling contracts like this, AI can review the contract and suggest revisions to bring it to corporate standards if necessary. From there, the NDA or similar contract can be tendered directly to the other party or undergo one last round of internal review if deemed necessary. Lawyers can spend time on projects that bring more value to the company.

  1. Complex Contract Drafting and Negotiation

Master service agreements, statements of works and other complex sales or purchase agreements can also benefit from AI. It leverages the full company playbook and clause library to guide the contract drafter and reviewer along the negotiation at agreement pass.

  1. Third-Party Contract Risk Review

AI assesses the risk of contracts during the pre-signature review phase by reviewing third-party paper against corporate standards and checklists. It then summarizes the risks, flags key issues using contract review templates and unique company clauses and suggests proper edits.

  1. Playbook Management

Combined with a user-friendly AI platform, AI-driven contract review allows legal teams to manage, collaborate and use AI to apply corporate playbooks and precedents automatically. Legal professionals can then use the real-time data and insight provided by the platform to improve playbook standards and understand enforcement across the business.

Conclusion

Businesses want as many agreements on their contract terms and paper as possible. When a contract is on “other party paper,” it is difficult to adhere to a company’s playbook and enforce guidelines. Ultimately, it slows down contract execution. However, by relying on AI, corporate legal departments are aptly equipped to pave a rapid path to contract closure and signature and accelerate business while increasing contract compliance.

To learn more about AI and tools for contract management, read a recent study that details how AI and contract review increases corporate legal productivity by more than 50%.

Be Among The First to See Onit’s Legal AI Technology Including a Platform and ReviewAI Software

Posted on November 19, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

You might have heard our big news earlier this week: Onit has acquired legal AI contract review software company McCarthyFinch. Besides welcoming some of the brightest AI technologies and minds, we’ve also launched the next generation of Onit for legal operations professionals.

Onit is Artificial Intelligence

Onit is building its future on legal AI technology, with a vision to include it in our entire product portfolio.

Onit Precedent represents our first AI legal technology, an artificial intelligence platform that automates existing mundane, manual and costly legal processes and empowers continuous learning and workflow. It has a single mission: to help business professionals get more work done faster.

The first release on Onit Precedent, ReviewAI, reads, writes and reasons like a lawyer. It provides a review of any contract and automatically redlines, annotates and provides a risk rating based on your company’s playbook. Its AI learns based on user feedback and can be applied to many different use cases, including NDAs, MSAs, purchase agreements and third-party contract review.

ReviewAI delivers impressive results by:

  • Improving productivity by more than 50%
  • Accelerating contract approvals by 60-70%
  • Reviewing and redlining a contract in less than two minutes

Learn More about Onit’s AI ReviewAI

Visit here to request a demonstration of ReviewAI, including its Microsoft Word add-in, contract review summary, email and portal review, contract review templates, customizable clause library and automated alerts.

Building a Future on Artificial Intelligence in Contracts: Onit Acquires McCarthyFinch

Posted on November 17, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

Hear Onit’s CEO and the GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence Discuss the Acquisition of McCarthyFinch and the Evolution of the Company in Our Latest Podcast

Today, we launched the next generation of Onit – one powered by artificial intelligence in contracts and a plaftorm.

Onit has acquired McCarthyFinch, a New Zealand-based company with an artificial intelligence platform. With this technology, legal professionals can accelerate contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increase productivity by more than 50%.

According to Onit’s CEO and co-founder, Eric M. Elfman, “AI is a natural extension of our evolution. Our vision is to build AI into our workflow platform and every product across the Onit and SimpleLegal product portfolios. In addition to acquiring award-winning technology, we have gained some of the brightest minds in the AI space.”

The Next Generation of Onit

McCarthyFinch is now the Onit AI Center of Excellence dedicated to AI innovation for contract lifecycle management, enterprise legal management and more.

Nick Whitehouse, CEO and co-founder of McCarthyFinch, will serve as General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. For more than 15 years, he has consistently delivered technological innovation with extensive experience in artificial intelligence and digital transformation. He is joined by Jean Yang, who is now Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence.

Introducing Precedent and ReviewAI

The technology from the McCarthyFinch acquisition powers two new AI-based products from Onit.

Precedent is Onit’s intelligence platform that reads, writes and reasons like a lawyer. It joins Onit’s workflow automation platform Apptitude, making Onit the first in its space with two platforms.

ReviewAI is the first release on Precedent. It brings AI to pre-signature contract review, streamlining intelligent activities like contract creation, redlining, complex negotiations and risk rating contracts.

“Drafting contracts and redlining documents shouldn’t take up 70% of a lawyer’s time, as statistics suggest. There’s a better way to work,” says Whitehouse. “With AI, we’ve dramatically changed the contract management lifecycle and enabled businesses to move faster, provide higher-quality services and lower the cost of legal services. We are excited to join the Onit team and apply AI to Onit’s contract lifecycle management solution and expansive product offerings.”

Listen to the Podcast

In this podcast, Elfman and Whitehouse discuss the acquisition, the new platform and products and their vision for Onit and artificial intelligence in contracts.

Register for the Webinar and Find More Information

If you would like additional ways to learn more about the acquisition, consider these options:

  1. View the launch video.
  2. Read more about Precedent and ReviewAI.
  3. Read the press release.
  4. Register for the webinar on December 10 to see a demo of the AI Precedent platform and ReviewAI.

More Data and New Legal Technology Will Force Lawyers to Expand their Digital Skillsets

Posted on September 22, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Data proficiency has become a “must-have” for law firms, as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) continue to change the legal profession forever. Categorizing the sheer amount of data housed in legal databases, automating standard tasks such as due diligence and contract reviews are all much easier and more accurate with legal AI solutions.

It’s also important to understand how these advances in legal technology and increasing adoption will impact junior legal workers, whether it be the latest class of incoming lawyers fresh off the bar exam, or graduates outside of law school being recruited to man the new legal data infrastructure.

As Alex Smith of Reed Smith points out, not being equipped with skillsets in data analysis will soon be a barrier to getting legal jobs at all, as will the lack of core technical knowledge. This alone should be enough to convince today’s law students to seek technical training as part of their curriculum, but there’s more to it.

As Smith notes, the demand for graduates in STEM fields, as opposed to traditional law school graduates, will only increase as firms and legal divisions look to stay ahead of the curve and meet market demand. It won’t be unheard of for math, science and engineering graduates to be brought in to help develop and maintain legal databases and technology tools.

That being said, the junior legal class of today still has time to build up their digital proficiencies and better understand where the market is going. Part of this is understanding what legal advising means in this digital day and age. At the very least, anyone in a legal role will need to know the legal and privacy implications of technology.

You might look at this picture and assume it means far less junior-level positions will be in the mix due to automation, but that’s not the case at all. A recent report by consultancy firm AlphaBeta says only 15% of work conducted by legal professionals will be automated by 2030, much less than fields like mining or construction. The Law Society of England and Wales even points to an increase in hiring of junior legal staff members, largely as a means to parse through all the data being generated by digital tools.

Jean Yang, our VP of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, had a proof point earlier in her career that demonstrated the importance of automating tasks through technology. One of her assignments in her first year as a junior lawyer was repetitive, manual and time consuming, so as an experiment she asked a developer she knew to write some code to automatically complete parts of the tasks, which she then went back and manually reviewed.

This test turned a five-day task into a two-day task and left her ample time to consider the substantive issues in the case, and tackle things from a more strategic level. Having this time to work on client needs was beneficial for her growth, which is something junior legal team members are always hungry for.

It’s only a matter of time before law firms start to search for graduates who can help them merge technology and the law, both putting the pressure on law schools to train their students in a broader range of skills and opening opportunities for grads who are tech-savvy and adaptive. Keep in mind, this marriage of worlds goes the other way too, with STEM jobs increasingly needing soft skills like good judgment, decision making, deductive reasoning, critical thinking and problem solving that legal graduates have in spades. In short, it’s time to bridge law and STEM and take advantage of them, before the field gets too crowded.

Interested in learning more about legal automation? Hear how Pearson used automation to transform legal service delivery.