Category: Business Process Management

What the Future With AI Looks Like for Enterprise Legal Management: InvoiceAI Coming Soon

Posted on April 13, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Company News and Events

As technology continues to evolve, many in-house counsel and legal professionals wonder what their future with artificial intelligence (AI) looks like. Will legal AI technology replace lawyers? Will it make work easier or more complicated?

Fortunately, we already have indicators of legal AI success. It’s providing commendable results in contract lifecycle management, accelerating contract approvals by up to 70%. Now, AI is also enhancing enterprise legal management software.

InvoiceAI, the new, AI-enabled invoice review solution for enterprise legal management, is coming to Onit and SimpleLegal next month. It lets corporate legal departments leverage the power of AI to boost efficiency in invoice review drastically. When InvoiceAI does a first-pass invoice review, in-house counsel reset their activities to review only the invoices that genuinely need their attention. This frees them up to focus time on more critical, higher-value work that helps the company succeed.

The Future with Legal AI Technology for Legal Operations

More and more companies are incorporating the benefits of AI in their workflows every day. In their annual global survey on artificial intelligence, The State of AI in 2020, McKinsey & Company found that half of their respondents had adopted AI in at least one function in their organizations. The survey also found that companies were increasingly using AI as a tool for generating value, particularly in the form of revenues.

Recent research from Gartner agrees. According to Gartner, by 2023, having AI will be a substantial competitive advantage for companies, bringing a 30% increase in efficiency to document completion and contract negotiation processes via AI-enabled contract lifecycle management tools. They also predict that, by 2023, 90% of multinational global enterprises will be investing in those solutions, as will 50% of regional midsize businesses.

What do these AI advantages look like when quantified?

Onit conducted a study of its ReviewAI software to quantify the time and cost savings for its pre-signature contract review AI software. The study found that lawyers were 51.5% more productive when using ReviewAI than when working manually. The percentage of productivity increased the more proficient they became with the tool.

To illustrate this benefit, consider that a typical midsize company in the United States employs 28 lawyers and reviews 4,850 contracts annually. With ReviewAI, each of these lawyers can unlock capacity – 51.5% more – and that same team of 28 lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually.

That’s the same as adding nine lawyers to the team.

A Better Way to Review Invoices

The competitive advantage that AI has brought to functions like contract lifecycle management is now coming to invoice review. With InvoiceAI, general counsel and in-house counsel will finally be able to stop wasting precious time on tedious invoicing tasks. While legal AI technology handles your first-pass review, you can focus on more important things.

Onit’s founding principle is to help lawyers more effectively practice law, and InvoiceAI is a critical new tool to make that goal a reality.

AI-enabled legal invoice review from Onit and SimpleLegal will be available in May 2021. To learn more about InvoiceAI and how AI can improve your legal invoice review, contact Onit today or email [email protected].

What to Look For in Enterprise Legal Management Software

Posted on April 8, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Enterprise legal management software turboboosts legal operations and brings new levels of operational efficiency to corporate legal departments. A comprehensive solution that combines e-billing, matter management and legal service request intake into a single, streamlined platform provides a game-changing way to analyze legal spend, minimize company risk and drive process efficiency.

All these benefits are only possible, though, if you find the enterprise legal management software (ELM) that can support your corporate legal department and its unique needs. Finding ELM software that meets the following criteria will put you on the path to success.

  • Future-Proof Functionality: You don’t want your enterprise legal management software to run on a platform with limited capabilities. Look for an ELM that runs on its own business process automation and business intelligence platforms that can accommodate the department’s future technology needs for AI, contract lifecycle management and legal holds. The workflow integration between products will be native and much more robust this way, compared to multiple systems on different, poorly integrated platforms.
  • Good User Experience: You want your ELM solution to be easy to use, with a modern interface and experience that gets users up and going quickly. You also want it to be something people enjoy using. Look into your product or vendor’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a rating of how likely customers are to recommend a company, product or service on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the NPS, the better.
  • Enhanced collaboration: Prioritize no-code platforms for your enterprise legal management software, as they allow you to build whatever apps you need for your corporate legal department – even if you have little or no technical expertise. For example, the Onit Nation (our customers, partners, business analysts and developers who use Onit platforms) has developed more than 5,500 Apps. These Apps do everything from automating government regulation reporting to managing trade association approval to streamlining the trademark renewal process and beyond.
  • Flat Pricing: Speaking of collaboration, consider the pricing structure for ELM solutions. You want to avoid ELM solutions that are priced based on how many people use the software. Per-user pricing limits how you can use your solution, forcing the choice between cost and collaboration. When that choice is no longer needed, you can work across business units, automate requests and increase transparency and trust.
  • System of Engagement: Traditional ELM vendors take a data collection-minded approach to managing matters and legal operations. Their technology platforms act as a system of record but are rarely used by lawyers and legal operations managers to deliver any real strategic value. Look for a vendor that offers an ELM system of engagement. This process-driven solution integrates workflow and collaboration and allows you to define the legal business processes that are critical to your organization.
  • Partner Implementation Network: While your vendor is key to a smooth implementation, so is their partner network. Your ELM provider should have an experienced and professional partner implementation network made up of strategic alliances that will ensure success across your entire enterprise.

Interested in learning more about enterprise legal management software, platforms and optimizing technologies? Check out our guide to platforms or our breakdown on driving efficiency in a post-pandemic environment.

To learn more about how ELM from Onit can transform your law department operations, contact us or schedule a demo today.

NDA Automation: Get Better, Faster NDAs With the Help of Artificial Intelligence

Posted on April 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are some of the most commonly drafted agreements at any company. While they may be common, however, that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant – in fact, they’re critical to protecting a company’s business strategies and trade secrets.

Most companies use the same form NDA in almost every situation, changing only party names and the description of the confidential information involved, leaving the rest of the agreement to a series of standard terms. This means that, even though they’re important, NDAs are very repetitive and routine in terms of drafting.

Corporate legal departments have long been bogged down in routine contracts. Preparing NDAs can take up a significant amount of lawyers’ time, taking them away from other important work that can bring more value to the organization.

The routine nature of NDAs makes them a prime candidate for contract artificial intelligence. With the combination of AI and contracts, business users can engage in risk-free self-service to review and redline NDAs in less than two minutes. This frees up your legal staff to focus on higher-value work that helps support and grow the business.

Contract AI for NDAs and NDA Automation

AI is changing the game when it comes to routine contracts like NDAs. With AI, you can increase the speed of contract preparation and review while at the same time reducing your risk.

Onit’s ReviewAI software employs AI to quickly and accurately draft, review, redline, and edit all types of contracts, including NDAs, in a matter of minutes. ReviewAI isn’t just for those with legal training – non-legal business users can use ReviewAI to receive reviewed, redlined, and approved NDAs via email or a self-service portal in less than two minutes. This self-service option removes a huge burden from legal’s shoulders, freeing up valuable time for more complex legal matters.

For lawyers and contract professionals working on NDAs, ReviewAI offers a Word add-in that offers more hands-on functionality. The add-in automatically drafts, reviews, redlines and edits your NDAs against corporate standards. You’ve likely invested time in crafting standardized language for your NDAs and defining exactly what constitutes confidential information and how it’s to be treated. ReviewAI will learn those terms and customize them based on user feedback, making your NDA applicable to whatever scenario you’re addressing at a given moment.

ReviewAI is a game-changer because it contains NDA automation. The software empowers legal departments to review contracts 60-70% faster. It also leads to a 51.5% increase in user productivity, which is critical for making the most of your resources at a time when legal departments are under increased pressure to do more with less. With Review AI, it takes two minutes or less to review and redline a contract and also offers:

  • Contract summaries that identify a risk profile, issues, and recommendations after contract review
  • AI-assisted contract redlining that automatically generates track changes and commentary in either Word or PDF
  • Contract review templates for customizing contract review and ensuring corporate standards are being met
  • Automated alerts that use contract review templates to automatically flag key contract issues and suggest proper edits
  • Customizable clause library where you can create unique company clauses or leverage over 2,600 clauses created by legal experts
  • Enhanced navigation that helps you quickly jump to key legal concepts, clauses, and terms
  • Seamless integration with Onit’s Contract Lifecycle Management solution or third-party CLM tools

ReviewAI handles the entire pre-signature phase for NDAs. This dramatically reduces your contract lead time while decreasing your legal costs.

NDAs Made Simple

NDAs and other routine, repetitive contracts shouldn’t take attorney time and focus away from higher-value legal work. Tools that combine AI and contracts to produce NDA automation take these time-consuming tasks off your lawyers’ plates and also empower your business users to engage in self-service without increasing risk.

Contact Onit today to learn more about how ReviewAI can help with NDAs and other routine contracts.

Legal Industry News: Current News and Trends in Legal Operations, March 2021

Posted on March 31, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to our March industry run-down, where we share with you some of the most pertinent and timely articles on legal industry news. We hope this roundup of legal industry trends provides some useful takeaways.

In today’s lineup, we share insights about how Lenovo uses AI and automation for contract management, legal technology trends from Gartner and how leaning into communications and leadership traits exhibited by women can enhance collaboration between lawyers and clients.

#1

 An AI Checklist for Every Phase of Contract Lifecycle Management

Contracts are the main source of risk and obligations for corporate legal teams, and if not managed properly, they can lead to a whole host of complications and business failures. The right contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool allows you to modernize the way you deliver legal services, automating and standardizing processes to create a single point of truth for all your contracts.

Nick Whitehouse, general manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, tackles the latest in legal industry news by sharing a checklist for contract AI, covering all phases of CLM. The article includes considerations for both the pre-signature and post-signature contract management phases, including topics like the importance of pre-trained AI, how a CLM solution can turn contract data into actionable intelligence and the overall benefits of contract AI.

(Source: Lexology)

#2

Are You AI-Certified? According to Experts, You Might Want to Look Into that.

While AI solutions are often touted as the solution to human error and bias, the data underlying those tools can contain just as many biases. Problematic data means problematic results, and even potential liability.

One current initiative is trying to change all that by empowering attorneys to give their clients reliable and substantive advice about the AI tools they’re considering using. The University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society has partnered with AI Global, a nonprofit focusing on advancing responsible and ethical AI, to create a certification project for lawyers looking to help their firms implement AI tools or advise their clients about AI. The goal of the new program is to create an international framework of AI across a number of industries that is fair, ethical, and responsible, eliminating bias and privacy breaches.

(Source: ABA Journal)

#3

Five In-House Legal Tech Trends from Gartner

In recent years, automation and other technologies have emerged as the obvious solution for beleaguered legal departments that are under constant pressure to cut costs and boost efficiency. While the legal industry has historically been resistant to technology, things have slowly been changing. When the pandemic hit, legal departments shifted gears. As a result, they’ve been able to discover the many benefits of incorporating and embracing technology to achieve business outcomes.

The trend toward widespread technology adoption is only expected to continue. Gartner recently predicted five trends we should expect to see in legal tech in the coming years:

  • By 2024, 20% of generalist lawyers in corporate legal departments will be replaced by nonlawyer staff
  • By 2024, 50% of corporate legal departments’ work related to major corporate transactions will be automated
  • By 2025, corporate legal departments will triple their spending on legal technology
  • By 2025, at least 25% of corporate legal application spending will be on nonspecialist technology providers.
  • By 2025, corporate legal departments will have only captured 30% of the potential benefits of their CLM solutions

 (Source: Gartner)

#4

Look to Women to Advance Success and Collaboration in the Legal Industry

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Women’s Network of the Legal Value Network’s shined the spotlight on what makes women leaders successful and how adopting feminine leadership and communication styles can benefit law firms by advancing collaboration between lawyers and clients.

Female leadership has really risen to the occasion in the face of the pandemic’s challenges, largely because traditionally female leadership qualities – compassion, humility, and collaboration – have been what companies have needed to thrive despite uncertainty. “The qualities that make women great leaders through times of crisis are also what make them great leaders every day,” says Shelley Zalis, CEO of The Female Quotient and founder of The Equality Lounge.

(Source: Legal Value Network)

#5

The Future of Contracting: CLM Automation + AI Transformation at Lenovo

Every legal department can benefit from more efficient processes. Technology is the key to making that possible. The World Commerce and Contracting Association recently held a webinar that looked at the Lenovo legal department transformation journey, highlighting how Lenovo successfully built a strategy for an effective global rollout of contract lifecycle management technology that relied heavily on AI.

Key themes of the webinar included:

  • Lenovo’s CLM evolution and transformation roadmap
  • Multi-year goals related to their contract management technology
  • Why the culture must eat change management for breakfast
  • The benefits and ROI of a single CLM platform

You can watch the entire webinar to learn how AI is driving the future here.

(Source: World Commerce and Contracting Association)

Bonus Resource: Lean Into LegalOps

Get the inside track on corporate legal and operations trends, the very best events and helpful content from the legal community by joining Lean Into LegalOps today. The online forum lets Onit customers and other members of the legal community share and learn from one another with webinars, debates, weekly catch-up calls and more.

Ten Things to Look For When Choosing a Legal Platform

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

Legal platform technologies have proven invaluable for helping corporate legal departments adroitly navigate the ups and downs of the past year. Thanks to the flexibility, customization, unlimited scalability and limitless building opportunities they offer, no-code platforms have provided legal departments with the tools they need to innovate and adapt to meet change after change.

Perhaps you’ve already decided that a platform approach is right for your legal department. How do you know how to pick the right one?

What to Look for When Buying a Legal Platform

Here are ten things to consider when choosing a legal platform to meet the unique needs of your corporate legal department.

  1. Enterprise-wide solution development

The ideal online platform will give you the ability to create all the solutions you need for day-to-day operations, both within your legal department and in any department across the organization, allowing for cross-collaboration between all departments.

  1. Agile project management

The right platform will be able to adjust and evolve as your department’s and organization’s needs change. When considering a platform, make sure it continually releases updates, so you know you’re always incorporating the most up-to-date security standards and user feedback in the solutions you create.

  1. No-code technology

You shouldn’t have to be a technology or coding expert to reap the benefits of an online platform. Many platforms today are no-code, bridging the gap between business and technical users. This makes it simple for anyone in the legal department to build new workflows, even if they have little or no technical training.

  1. Quick realization of value

With any business change or new technology, the faster it can start creating value, the better. A legal platform that allows you to quickly build solutions from day one lets you start realizing value for your organization almost immediately.

  1. AI and automation

The platform you choose should ideally incorporate the power of automation and artificial intelligence to eliminate time-consuming and costly manual legal processes. You’ll also benefit from continuous learning, which automatically examines and adjusts business process rules and workflows over time, even predicting necessary changes before they arise.

  1. Third-party integration tools

While it’s critical that you’re able to build whatever solutions you need on your platform, it’s equally important that those solutions are able to connect to the other tools you use every day. The ideal platform will include a third-party integration tool that seamlessly moves data between all your systems and acts as a centralized hub for your operations.

  1. Robust business intelligence tools and analytics

Today’s legal departments are sitting on more data than ever before. It’s time to make that data useful. Your platform should integrate robust business intelligence tools and analytics capabilities that empower you to leverage your data to make valuable, informed business and legal decisions that will benefit the entire organization.

  1. A responsive user interface

For a long time, technology struggled to find a way to be suitable for viewing on all devices. Instead, what you saw varied depending on your screen size or resolution. Enter responsive user interfaces, which adjust your content according to the device that’s being used, so your users can always view the content as you intended it to be viewed.

  1. An adaptive end-user experience

Adaptive platforms offer multiple layouts in order to provide the best possible experience for your end users. An adaptive platform will detect where your user is accessing it and automatically provide the most appropriate layout for that user’s situation, role, or activity.

  1. Best-in-class partner programs

The best technology providers should be partnered with the best talent, resources, and experience in the industry. Your platform provider should give you access to a top-notch partner network where you can get whatever help you need with technology, implementation, or services in order to maximize your investment.

Onit’s legal platforms, business process automation platform Apptitude and AI-based business intelligence platform Precedent, help corporate legal departments adapt and innovate to meet whatever challenges arise. Contact us today to learn more about how a platform approach can benefit your corporate legal department.

For fmore information on how to choose the right platforms to benefit your corporate legal department, consider these resources:

How to Prepare Your Team for an Enterprise Legal Management Software Implementation

Posted on March 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

An enterprise legal management software implementation brings all-new operational efficiency levels to corporate legal departments. By combining e-billing, legal spend management, matter management and legal service request intake into a single, streamlined platform, corporate legal departments can gain visibility into legal operations, cut costs and automate manual processes. In fact, some estimate that enterprise legal management (ELM) helps save up to 10% on outside counsel spend.

While it’s critical to focus on the technologies and processes involved in the implementation, often the people component lacks the same level of attention and planning. We asked ELM implementation experts from Onit about best practices to manage the people side of implementation and here are the four actions they recommend.

1.   Get the right hands on deck for your enterprise legal management implementation.

To start, you want to establish internal governance over your ELM implementation. You should determine crucial involvement from the beginning, such as who will have a vote on decisions, who will have input into decisions, who will be involved in reviewing implementation progress and how often, and more.

At many corporate legal departments, this involves creating an internal steering committee responsible for overseeing the implementation and an internal project sponsor who is usually the business unit leader who’s receiving the implementation. You might also involve the PMO and someone from finance who can monitor whether you’re getting what you expect out of your investment. The software provider should also provide a steering committee on their side, but your essential players should still be involved in your internal governance.

Because you’re likely making a pretty significant investment in your ELM solution, you’ll want to establish a consistent cadence for reviewing the implementation progress. For example, set a weekly or monthly schedule for monitoring whether you’re on track to hit milestones and whether progress is dependent on anything else within your organization that needs to be addressed.

2.    Get your internal business partners on board.

Implementation will look different for every legal department depending on who is spearheading the effort. If your legal team is contracting with a provider, have you lined up the support of IT or other departments in your company? Many departments try to move forward without any internal consultation. Because implementing ELM will require integrations with other systems and migration of data from your old system, you’ll need to get all your internal partners on board and determine what agreements and resources need to be set up before your implementation.

You’ll also want to assess the impact of your implementation on the rest of the business. Who do you need to inform? Will you need to notify an internal change in the control board that your company’s data will be hosted in another system? Will your internal audit team or information security need to check project documents before going live?

To get the engagement you need, you should start working within your internal channels as early in the process as possible. That groundwork needs to be paved by your team before implementation starts.

3.    Get your users ready and excited for the enterprise legal management software implementation.

As with any change, it’s important to prepare your users. The more you can get buy-in across the organization, the more successful the implementation will be.

Determine who needs to know when the solution is going live and how you’re going to tell them. Getting them excited about the change will be easier if you can proactively address any concerns they might have about new processes or systems. Whether it’s a company-wide email, a newsletter, a town hall meeting, or something else, you want to generate buzz about your new enterprise legal management software implementation.

Also critical to overall implementation success is a well-defined user training program. The proper training will allow end-users to be comfortable with both the system and your change management efforts. The means they feel empowered and confident to complete their daily tasks with minimal interruption after the ELM system becomes part of their workflows. You can tailor the training program to be as formal or casual as you need. There are endless options to deliver the right information in the right way for your end-users.

4.   Help your ELM provider deliver the system you need.

Preparation and testing are key components that your department can provide to help your ELM provider deliver the best implementation possible. Invest some time analyzing your department’s current state before implementation kicks off, documenting your processes end to end. Process maps and use cases are valuable for requirements and design and can save a lot of time and minimize distraction during the ELM design phase.

After all, you know your business better than anyone. As you work with your provider to design your system, think about how you’ll test the system via User Acceptance Testing before it goes live.

If you take the proper steps in advance, you can make sure you’ll get the best enterprise legal management software implementation for your corporate legal department and the business units that work with you.

Contact Onit today to learn more about how Onit offerings can help you provide better service to your business while improving operational efficiency.

How Contract Automation Tools with Legal AI Reduce Processing Time by 60-70%

Posted on March 10, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

By some estimates, contract processing time can take up to 70% or more of an in-house counsel’s work hours. The often manual and collaborative process – if not properly managed – can lead to complications such as failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, regulatory breaches, inadequate delivery to customers, revenue leakage and more if not properly managed.

That’s where Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) comes in. Contract automation tools with legal AI can streamline all phases of the contract lifecycle from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management, often resulting in an average of 9% average cost savings and reducing the average sales cycle by 24%. It also offers a single source of truth for all contracts, whether buy-side, sell-side or corporate contracts.

Now, Onit is pleased to announce that contract processing times are shrinking even more, thanks to our enhanced integration between Contract Lifecycle Management and ReviewAI, which uses legal AI on legal contracts to review and redline documents in two minutes or less. The integration combines the power of contract automation and AI-based contract management into one tool that accelerates contracts at management phases. Plus, it ensures that corporate legal departments have everything in one CLM workflow.

Legal AI for Contract Automation and Lifecycle Management

With the newly enhanced, seamless integration, business users can submit contracts to corporate legal via an online intake form. ReviewAI handles the first-pass review, noting recommendations and offering a contract risk assessment – freeing corporate counsel from a highly manual process. In fact, when paired with Onit Contract Lifecycle Management, legal AI from Review AI increases productivity by 50% or more.

Onit’s Ongoing Commitment to AI

The robust integration of Onit CLM and ReviewAI is one of many AI product innovations. In November, we launched our AI Center of Excellence, the AI-powered business intelligence platform Precedent and ReviewAI. In May, we’ll release InvoiceAI, an AI-assisted invoice review for legal spend and enterprise legal management. Between now and then, you can also expect more AI and product announcements.

Reduce Contract Processing Time Now. Here’s How.

Deploy contract automation tools and leverage the power of legal AI to improve your contract lifecycle management. Free up legal counsel from a manual, time-intensive legal contract management process. Find out how you can use automated contract analysis tools and risk assessments with legal AI contract automation tools.

To learn more about contract lifecycle management, ReviewAI and Precedent, reach out to your account manager or schedule a demonstration here.

 

Platforms for Corporate Legal Departments: What They Are and How They Expand Influence

Posted on March 9, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Platforms for corporate legal departments have proven critical to digital transformation in the past year, as companies have worked hard to figure out how to meet the uncertainties and challenges stemming from the pandemic.

The right platforms will empower your corporate legal department to better manage the day-to-day aspects of any legal matter while also gaining better insight into operations and improving collaboration by offering real-time visibility into tasks and processes. Making the switch to a platform approach starts with understanding:

  1. What is a platform?
  2. How can platform technologies benefit a legal department?

What is a Platform?

At its core, a platform is an environment in which other pieces of software function and are executed. The term “platform,” however, is both overused and underrepresented by technology providers. In a market saturated with many different types of technology products, people all too often use terms like platform and solution interchangeably, even though they function very differently and serve different purposes.

Here’s the difference:

With the right platform, a corporate legal department can build any solution it needs for either internal use or cross-collaboration with other departments in the organization. Platforms allow you to take advantage of preexisting solutions that have already been built on the platform or build additional solutions as new needs arise.

For legal departments, platforms serve as the foundation for enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management solutions, intake forms and self-help portals, among other things. Basically, a platform is the best of both worlds in the solutions vs. platforms discussion.

Some platforms incorporate artificial intelligence for corporate legal departments. AI platforms help automate routine tasks and boost efficiency. In other words, they help legal departments meet the constantly mounting pressure to do more and do better with fewer resources and a shrinking budget.

How Platform for Corporate Legal Departments Enhance Efficiency and Collaboration

Adopting a platform approach to technology offers a wide range of benefits for today’s corporate legal departments. Some of the biggest include:

  • Limitless building opportunities – Platforms give you the greatest possible ability to support your department’s vision by building solutions to address nearly any need, from accounting to compliance to HR concerns and more.
  • Unlimited scalability – Platforms allow you to right-size your technology as needed because they can grow along with your company and adapt to meet whatever changes arise.
  • Customization – When you build solutions on a platform, you can customize them to work exactly how your corporate legal department needs them to work and continually adjust those customizations over time.
  • Flexibility – Legal departments learned the value of innovation this past year, and platforms offer the flexibility required to keep innovating in the future as needs continue to change.

Better yet, you get all these platform benefits regardless of your level of technical proficiency. While platforms were once the exclusive province of IT experts who knew how to code, things have evolved significantly with the rise of no-code platforms. Today, even those with little or no technical training can master platforms and use them to create new solutions. These no-code platforms allow corporate legal departments to engage in levels of technological self-service that were previously unheard of.

For further reading on how platforms benefit corporate legal departments, you can download The Power of a Platform: Building Corporate Legal Influence Across the Enterprise.

Onit’s Apptitude and Precedent platforms have helped countless businesses enhance efficiency with automation and AI. Contact us today to learn more about how a platform approach can benefit your corporate legal department.

Will AI Replace Lawyers & Other Myths: Legal AI Mythbusters

Posted on March 5, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

AI is a hot buzzword right now, but with buzz always comes a whole host of misconceptions about a technology’s capabilities. There’s considerable confusion about what artificial intelligence can do and widespread misinformation about how it works, particularly in the area of managing legal contracts and if AI will replace lawyers.

Onit recently hosted a webinar to debunk these common myths. Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, and Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, dispelled common misconceptions about everything from will AI replace lawyers to who can benefit from AI.

The goal is to help legal professionals decipher marketing-speak to determine what’s genuinely AI and what’s just software.

Here’s an overview of some of the common legal AI myths Nick and Jean debunked.

Myth 1: Will AI replace lawyers? No.

Lawyers being replaced by AI is the classic fear and, fortunately, it’s unfounded. Rather than replacing lawyers, AI will automate certain aspects of lawyers’ jobs, typically the most routine ones. As a result, lawyers will have more time to focus on other tasks and accomplishments. This means that lawyers’ jobs will continue to evolve and change as more AI capabilities are introduced, but those jobs will never be eliminated.

That’s not to say that lawyers should ignore legal AI. Yes, AI won’t replace them. However, lawyers using legal AI will replace those that don’t, thanks to increased productivity and efficiency provided by the transformative technology.

Myth 2: Is AI hard to implement? No.

AI learns, but to accomplish that it needs training. Typically, that is a monumental task that requires large pools of data, time and specialized technical skills.

The industry has matured now. Much of that work is done in advance by the vendor, meaning the technology is largely ready to implement and use right out of the box. For example, this AI for contract review comes loaded with a library of legal knowledge and can be up and running in a matter of days.

Myth 3: AI and machine learning can be used interchangeably. No.

Many people use the terms AI and machine learning interchangeably, but that’s not entirely accurate. AI is a technology that enables computers to learn and mimic human intelligence and it covers a wide range of techniques. Among those techniques are machine learning, natural language processing and more. The terms are used interchangeably, even though that’s incorrect, because machine learning is one of the AI techniques that we encounter most often in our day-to-day lives. Machine learning is integral to AI tools that make automated legal contract review possible.

Myth 4: AI is only for large legal departments. Not True.

While there may have been some barriers to entry in the early days of AI, we’re now at a point where AI solutions can be affordable for everyone – especially if your AI provider offers solutions capable of scaling to meet your needs for the size of your organization. The right AI solution will work just as well for the smallest legal department as it will for the largest global corporation.

Myth 5: AI will require too much training. No, AI will create less work, not more.

Many people worry that implementing AI will create more work for their department because they’ll frequently have to fix the technology or invest too much time learning how to use it.

Thankfully, we haven’t seen those fears play out.

Studies show that, on average, users are 51% more productive when they use AI for contract review. The more experienced they become with AI, the more their productivity improves. Additionally, as AI has become more mainstream, AI solutions require far less training, need far fewer corrections, and are much easier to use without extensive training.

But Wait – There are More Legal AI Myths to Expose

These are just some of the AI misunderstandings we dispel in the webinar. Our panel also talks about crucial issues like data security, retaining control over reviews and negotiations, why pre-built AI solutions are less effective, and why every team can benefit from AI. You can listen to the entire webinar 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.