Category: Business Process Management

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

The Global Legal Post: Law firms Still ‘Don’t Get’ Legal Operations
Since we’ve started the Highlight Blog series we’ve been talking about how important we think having dedicated legal operations staff is, and we’re happy we have another opportunity to beat that drum. At CLOC London, most of day two was spent bringing this point home with legal ops professionals and GCs running an open dialogue. CLOC London attendees now have a better understanding about what makes the most effective legal operations partnerships and are now more equipped than ever to move their organizations toward the future. We would expect to see legal operations become ever more important in Europe as more discussions like these happen. Spoiler alert…Onit and our partner Duff & Phelps might even host a few! Stay tuned.

Asian Legal Business: Alibaba Legal Tech Summit 2019: 5 Key Takeaways
Lawyers have been hearing the same line over and over for the last few years: legal technology will make your operations more efficient so you can deliver better service for clients. Speakers at the Alibaba Legal Tech Summit also conveyed how deep legal technology runs as it affects many business units outside of legal that are still integral to service delivery. The main point being driven home was how technology enhances lawyers’ abilities to tackle complex matters and how they should be looking at these technologies as a revitalizer rather than a replacer. This idea of incorporating business units outside of just legal in order to make all legal processes more efficient is foundational to Onit’s approach to our customers’ challenges.

Law.com: The New Legal Tech Leaders: 8 Big Industry Moves From 2019
2019 was a big year for technology, and an especially big year for the legal tech sector. The eight people listed in this article made colossal waves during a year crammed full of M&As and tectonic technology shifts. These industry shifts were in the news throughout 2019, but this summary shows some of the biggest news in one of the biggest legal tech sectors – eDiscovery.

Law.com: As Legal Tech Incubators Multiply, Past Entrants Reveal What Makes a Successful Engagement
It’s well known at this juncture that the process of creating and selling new legal tech products has about as many similarities to starting up a regular tech company as it does differences, and one of those differences shows through the incubator experience. Victoria Hudgens from Legaltech News shares this difference that mostly comes from Big Four and Biglaw organizations running the incubators as well as how the experience can differ once companies have been accepted. Respondents share that while incubators that provide support in a wide range of business areas are the most helpful, accelerators and incubators for legal tech often don’t have as much investment experience as the companies being incubated have much less effect on their bottom line. These insights are especially interesting to us since Onit started in a “regular tech” incubator. My how far we’ve come!

Above the Law: The 2019 Legal Department Operations Survey Report
In case you missed it, the LDO Survey Report is back. The 12th edition of this report, produced in association with Morae Global and sponsored by Onit, comes to us on the heels of another year of impressive growth, but even the mightiest can still fall. This year’s report covers professional assessments of legal project management, contract lifecycle management, formal metrics programs, AI and other emerging technologies.

Law.com: Women Hold Editor-in-Chief Positions at the 16 Most Elite Law Reviews
We’ve heard a lot about workplace equity and diversity for the last couple years now, but one lesser talked about cornerstone of legal culture among professionals is literature. Among the top 16 law schools’ law review publications, all 16 of them have women as editor in chief for the first time in their history. This is part of an upward trend over the last decade with women only making up 29% of the editors at these top institutions in 2012. This milestone is a strong victory for lawyers and institutions trying to cultivate a more hospitable environment for women, people of color, and first-generation law students.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Law.com: 2020 Vision: A Look Into What In-House Counsel Need to Know for the New Year
Corporate Counsel magazine reporters spoke to several general counsel about what they say will impact their work and the legal industry. From outside counsel merging with other law firms to the use of artificial intelligence to keep down legal department costs, this article outlines some of the trends in-house counsel may find themselves dealing with in the new year.

Above the Law: First 90 Days Game Plan To Building A Legal Operations Function
Olga V. Mack has interviewed Twitter’s Legal Operations director Colin McCarthy and this week they’re sharing a comprehensive take on what employing a legal operations function should look like. According to McCarthy, the main goals of this deployment should be good decision making, future-proof technology solutions, proper spend and scaling and all of this should be recorded for future analysis. These 90 days are critical to a successful legal ops function as they will determine whether your relationships with key stakeholders are solid, which inefficiencies can be eliminated and how to implement your plan under what timeframe.

Law.com: Could a Legal Operations Role Benefit Your Organization? Here’s How to Decide
Legal operations has been rapidly cementing itself as a cornerstone role in legal departments across the world, but the decision of whether you want to dedicate the resources to that position is a tough one. In the last few years as corporate counsel have noticed their workflows becoming more demanding and requiring more business knowledge, the legal operations position has helped companies like Liberty Mutual, Google and The Gap meet demands with stringent budgets and extensive administrative hurdles. If you’re a general counsel and you feel like you’ve been bogged down by all of business-related tasks you need to tackle, employing a dedicated legal operations role might help you and your department get back to the legal work you’re more specialized in, while also driving efficiencies in critical business-focused areas.

Above the Law: Who’s Afraid Of Machine Learning?
Many legal professionals are becoming increasingly nervous about AI and machine learning because of the unknown nature or inherent bias that surrounds them. However, machine learning in its current state is designed to do one ley thing: recognize patterns. These tools are driving serious efficiency in administrative tasks and can help legal professionals gain a deeper understanding of the matters they are assigned.

Law.com: The Top 9 Legal Tech Investments of 2019
Onit was included in the top nine investments in Legal Tech in 2019, a year that marked significant capital infusion into the legal technology space. This article highlights the investments that were deemed significant enough to reshape the legal tech market. Onit was a recipient of one of the largest capital investments, at $200 million, in the list. That strategic investment is contributing to more robust features in our existing products like Enterprise Legal Management, as well as new product lines like Contract Lifecycle Management. It is also helping to grow the company through acquisition, starting with the addition of SimpleLegal as a subsidiary.

Law.com: Lawyers Want ‘Easier’ Technology. But Providers Aren’t Sure What That Means
In technology (and especially legal technology), feedback is critical as developers are trying to make their user experiences more friendly for the professionals that rely on them. Everyone wants the tools they use to be intuitive, and bridging the gap between legalese and tech talk might be the key to developing better legal technology. Even though legal is a fast-paced world, legal tech companies would like to see lawyers dwell on their previous matters for just a little longer and give developers proper feedback to hone their tools for what is coming next.

Above the Law: 5 Legal Technologies You Thought Were Dead But Aren’t
There are good reasons to be wary of adopting cutting edge technologies early before all the kinks are worked out, but at some point you just have to rip the bandage off. According to the ABA 2019 Legal Technology Survey Report, books, CDs, fax machines, BlackBerrys and even WordPerfect are still being used by lawyers all over the country for one reason or another. Even though there have been massive leaps in technology available to lawyers, sometimes the old methods are gold and it’s not worth the billable hour to teach new tricks.

Law.com: Legal Departments Use ‘Moneyball’ Approach to Pick Lawyers and Fight Mega Verdicts
For anyone that hasn’t seen the film or are unfamiliar with the Oakland A’s of the early 2000s, the “moneyball” approach entails using predictive analytics to show what methods and tools are undervalued in order to reduce spend and stay ahead of the curve. More law organizations and corporate counsel are employing these predictive measures to get critical information that might completely change the way they choose to run their case. New predictive technologies are giving lawyers information about spend, strategy and personnel. Some lawyers believe these tools will be necessary for practicing law within the next 20 years.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Law.com: Enthusiasm Gap Persists Between Law Firms and In-House Counsel
While law firms are reminiscing about a year of increased demand during this bonus season, corporate legal department numbers show they are looking toward a future recession and having to cut spending back. Even though law department spend is a concern even outside of the prospect of hard times on the horizon, only 40% of law departments responded to an Altman Weil survey saying they increased their budgets, with 38% of departments saying they’ve cut their budgets in the past year (up from 27%). Despite 2019 being a demanding year for law firms and corporate legal departments, Gretta Rusanow of Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group mentions that legal matters will still need to be attended to regardless of how departments and firms configure their budgets.

Above the Law: The Insider Guide To What In-House Lawyers Want
As we have mentioned in this blog series before, legal matters are becoming more business-centric and corporate legal departments are increasingly selecting solutions and ALSPs based on how much they fit in with their business’ needs. This Above the Law column says that in-house lawyers don’t just want a service provider that can do the work but want a more full-blown partnership that act on their client’s needs rather than reacting to them. It also asserts that this type of partnership ends up being mutually beneficial as the work providers might be doing could open up whole new revenue streams from previously unknown capabilities. We couldn’t agree more!

Law.com: In-House Counsel Say They Have Higher Workloads Than Last Year
According to a report released by alternative legal services provider Konexo, 63% of in-house lawyers report feeling more stressed about their workloads than they did last year, with common pressures being costs, lack of resources and team culture. Even though legal technology has been helping law departments work more efficiently, respondents also cited issues with technology onboarding and the need for them to serve as business partners within their companies. It probably won’t come as a surprise that respondents recommended more holistic approaches than the use of point solutions to make departments more efficient and better equipped for their growing demands. Again, we couldn’t agree more!

Bloomberg Law: Permanent Verification — The Best Blockchain Use Case for Lawyers
We’ve been hearing about blockchain technology and the hype around it since the Bitcoin boom a couple of years ago, but it would be unwise to completely dismiss blockchain as a hype machine without addressing how it can be used for legal contract management. This article says that because blockchain ledgers are especially strong at maintaining authentication the technology has great applications for contract management software and allows lawyers to spend less time on clerical aspects of their contracts. This article contends that as data gets more valuable, blockchain has proven itself to be especially useful for legal records management, and blockchain contract management solutions should definitely be on every lawyer’s radar in the years to come. See what you think!

Law.com: ‘Penn Law’ Keeps Its Name — For Now
In an earlier edition of the LegalOps Highlight Blog, we shared an article about how Penn Law students voiced concerns over the swift change in name to Carey Law. Since then, University of Pennsylvania’s law school has agreed to gradually rebrand to Penn Carey Law by 2022 in efforts to recognize the recent large contribution by the W.P. Carey Foundation. This return from the earlier name change shows that the school’s administration has listened to the hundreds of student and alumni voices and recognizes the prestige of Penn Law.

TechCrunch: California’s New Data Privacy Law Bring U.S. closer to GDPR
We’ve been covering the CCPA for a little while now because of its implications on data collection and management. It’s also important to note that the CCPA has different language on what it considers personal information under the law, and the writing also shows what companies could be fined for violations. The new law (and others being proposed by other states) shows that the US is on its way to meeting the standard of privacy legislation set by GDPR and gives lawyers an idea of the information management matters they may have coming to them.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Law.com: The California Consumer Privacy Act: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask – 100 Days Out, Part Two
The CCPA is on its way like a bat out of hell, and just like during the time between GDPR’s enaction and implementation, the uncertainties about the legislation are causing lawyers and law organizations quite a bit of anxiety. In 2019, 15 other states also proposed similar privacy laws, and American companies across the board will have to overhaul their web policies to make it easier for users to obtain an audit from companies about what of their data has been collected and opt out of having their data sold. Just like with GDPR, this new regulation will require companies to get a better understanding of the personal information they’re collecting, and over time this understanding should help any American company employ a more effective and valuable data collection design.

Law.com: What In-House Legal Looks Like in Russia’s 3rd-Largest Bank: A Q&A With Gazprombank General Counsel Elena Borisenko
Running the legal department for the third largest Russian bank (by assets) is no easy task, especially because there are countless ingress points where customers’ personal information might be at risk. Leading a department of nearly 300 lawyers, Elena Borishenko has been monumental in integrating her exceptionally solution-oriented department with other business units. Borisenko also expands on her role in creating the International Legal Forum, which has helped departments all over the world collaborate to build the best standards for compliance and regulation.

Bloomberg Law: INSIGHT: An Open Letter to In-House Counsel and Legal Ops Managers—Work With Procurement
Dr. Silvia Hodges Silverstein (executive director of Buying Legal Council) and Dr. Evelyn Paetsch (Deutsch Bahn AG) are back again with another open letter, detailing how working with procurement department specialists might help your department save more than 15% in legal services and technology costs. The authors assert that even though lawyers are more well versed in exactly the solutions they need, procurement officers can help negotiate rates and save departments millions of dollars. Even though you shouldn’t count on procurement personnel to make the final decision on what products and services to buy, they are trained negotiators and their tactics can save corporate counsel a lot of time and energy that can be better spent managing their departments.

Law.com | Legaltech News: 5 Considerations to Make When Shopping for AI Legal Technology
As we’ve spoken about before, AI has more than its fair share of hype around the tools that employ it, and there are some important things to consider. Victoria Hudgens at LegalTechNews shares some insights from Brad Blickstein (author of the Legal AI Efficacy Report) and Deloitte’s AI Ethics survey report which address some of the most formidable concerns any legal operations professional would have about employing an AI solution in their workflow. These tips can prepare any legal organization for the change management that comes with deploying AI solutions and provide a solid roadmap for how AI tools can be used to achieve best results.

Above the Law: 2 Recent Publications For Legal Operations Professionals
This week, Mike Quartararo from Above the Law is recommending two recent releases for all legal technology professionals. The first is a paper on processing electronically stored information written by Craig Bell, and the essay is an expertly written piece on the types of data that get processed, the personnel leading the process and the tools used to make the process easy for the everyman in e-discovery. The second is ILTA’s 2019 Technology Survey report, which details legal operations’ shift from on-premises solutions to cloud point solutions and elaborates on some hardware and services used most predominantly by the legal operations industry. Both pieces provide in-depth perspectives on legal technology, and reading both might help professionals get a better handle on industry trends.

The Daily Pennsylvanian: Hundreds Sign Petition Calling to Change New Carey Law Name Back to Penn Law
In the legal community, prestige is a large concern as the name of the law school on a resume might signal to employers that a recent grad is not an ideal candidate for a job. This concern has come into view as student at University of Pennsylvania’s law school, now named the Carey School of Law after a $125 million donation from the W.P. Carey Foundation, worry that this name change won’t give their education the name brand they believe it deserves. Nearly 500 students and alumni have signed the petition, criticizing the school administration’s lack of transparency and rapid onset of the name change that they feel takes away from their attendance at a highly ranked law school.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Law.com | The Recorder: Most Innovative In-House Operations Team of the Year: Pure Storage
Pure Storage has found the keys to scaling efficiency while staying within budget constraints, and that’s why they are the Most Innovative In-House Operations Team of the Year as part of The Recorder’s California Leaders in Tech Law and Innovation Awards. In The Recorder’s interview with Michael Moore and Niki Armstrong from Pure Storage’s Legal Operations team, Moore and Armstrong address how their tools help provide efficient service on a lean budget. Moore and Armstrong also detail their recipe for success and how each of the tools they use are keeping them on top.

Law.com | Legaltech News: There’s an Emerging RFP Market and Corporate Legal Is Riding Shotgun
The wide adoption of RFP software is inevitable, believes Frank Ready at ALM’s tech desk. Even though lawyers have traditionally approached new technologies with extreme caution, RFP tools have proven themselves to be excellent tools to help lawyers move away from spreadsheets and towards automated solutions that will ultimately make their lives easier. Even though this sector of the legal tech sphere is still in the early adopter stages, RFP software companies have already proven their worth with their reporting and process automation capabilities.

Law.com: Uninformed or Underwhelming? Most Lawyers Aren’t Seeing AI’s Value
While there is a lot of hype surrounding AI in legal tech, AI solutions are quickly becoming a more viable solution across the legal industry for big data ingestion. According to a new ABA report, lawyers’ top concern about AI is how accurate it completes processes, with some legal organizations being let down by their AI experiences. However, automation and deep learning solutions are proving their worth as they plow through tasks that would normally take extensive resources and manpower to complete. As a result, firms of all sizes have reported adopting AI solutions, proving that the technology should at least be given a deeper look before being cast aside.

Forbes: Are We There Yet? Reconciling The Hype And Reality Of Legal Transformation
Service delivery has become a pillar of business development for any successful customer-facing company, and that ideal has put the legal business at odd with the generally inward focused legal profession. While legal professionals set their sights on practicing law and setting the price for their services fairly, the legal industry is metamorphosizing into a multi-disciplinary field that is clearly in touch with its customer service and technological capabilities. According to Mark A. Cohen from Forbes, the business of law is currently surfing a mammoth wave of industry transformation that’s improving customers’ relationships with the legal system.

Big Law Business: Penn Law Announces New Future of Legal Profession Initiative
Law organizations have been clamoring for law schools to improve their JD programs to prepare new attorneys for the multifaceted challenges they are likely to face after they get hired, and Penn Law’s new Future of Legal Profession Initiative is a major leap forward. Penn Law now joins other elite law schools such as Stanford Law, Duke Law and Harvard Law with a program that takes budding lawyers through an innovation and entrepreneurship focused curriculum. The new program seeks to answer top professionals’ prayers to guide new lawyers through the enterprise aspects of legal matters and prepare them to better deliver legal services.

Law.com | Legaltech News: Think You’re Done Your M&A Deal? Not Until You Can Answer These Data Breach Questions
Mergers and acquisitions are already complex matters that take extensive amounts of time to finalize, but data breaches can immensely set these types of deals back. In this article, Phillip Bantz from Legaltech News provides detailed analysis of the risk assessments done by the most data secure companies during their mergers, serving as vital insight for any legal department that’s about to undertake the data of another enterprise. Even if mergers and acquisitions can lead to impressive service delivery improvements, the risk of insider threat is still immense. Use these data breach questions to help your department assess readiness for that risk.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Legaltech News: 5 Ways Law Departments Can Drive Organizational Change
Change is constant, but managing that change, be it innovation, mergers and acquisitions, or budget cuts is possible and necessary. Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer at HBR Consulting reports his analysis on a recent survey taken at ACCXchange, and his insights can help organizations keep their leadership, communication and goal setting strong in the face of major shakeups. HBR Consulting is one of Onit’s industry partners and we believe these tips can help any company facing major law department changes.

CLOC: 3 Reasons RFPs are the Secret Answer to Your Law Department’s AFA Woes
Law departments have been reluctant to run RFPs because they believe that engaging outside counsel is best for easier and more repeatable matters and not suitable for their more complicated commercial litigation matters. David Falstein, Director of Client Strategy and Success at PERSUIT (an Onit industry partner) argues that part of the reason why firms engage in competitive bidding for these matters is because firms are hungry for them and believe they can produce the most competitive rate, which is ultimately easier than dealing with complex AFAs later in the engagement. At the very least, running an RFP process gives the client important insights about the ambiguity of their projects and has the potential to give clients important leverage on billing to help them save millions on their largest and most complex matters.

Corporate Counnsel: Expert Says New European Whistleblower Protections ‘Leave the US in the Dust’
While whistleblowers in the US have come under attack for their recent reporting of alleged political corruption, the EU parliament passed sweeping new protections for whistleblowers, which must now be taken back to member countries to adopt into their own laws. The highlights of the new protections include strengthened protections against retaliation, more support from the EU in legal actions and a shift in the burden of proof to the employer. These new EU laws are reportedly much stronger than any protections or laws set in place in the US and aim to much more effectively protect those working to uncover crime and abuse of power within their organizations.

Law.com: More Than 100 Law Firms Have Reported Data Breaches. And the Problem Is Getting Worse
If there’s anything your IT departments try to drill into every employee’s head, it’s that anybody is at risk for a data breach, and everyone should be extra careful because malicious actors have a number of ways to compromise your security. In the first entry in a series on data breaches, Law.com staff writers Christine Simmons, Xiumei Dong and Ben Hancock detail how the rising reported number of data breaches signals a much larger data security issue. Hackers are only getting better at identifying which ingress points are the easiest targets for breaching. This article can help you and your personnel wise up on the most common methods hackers employ to break down your information security measures.

Above the Law: The Legal AI Efficacy Interview Series: Jim Michalowicz of TE Connectivity
AI has been thrown around as a feature of a lot of products made to make lawyers’ lives easier, but if the consumer tech industries have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes the product doesn’t match the hype. In this first entry in a series of abridged interviews presented on Above the Law, Brad Blickstein, publisher of the Legal AI Efficacy Report, interviews Senior Manager of Legal Operations at TE Connectivity about how implementing AI at TE Connectivity helped them reduce cycle time by 67%. The full interview, linked in the article, details TE’s selection process, how they dealt with issues and change management and their next steps in their process.

ABA Journal: The Secret to Successful Lawyer Leadership
Leadership is a skill most won’t learn through schooling alone, but it’s no secret that the most successful attorneys and business people have taken a crash course or two. Author Liam J. Montgomery details how feedback is one of the keys to successful leadership and lends us experiences from his days in the US Navy that pinpoint the best ways to give feedback. Ultimately, giving people in your organization the feedback they need when they need it is the most certain way to get the best performance from your whole organization.