Category: Business Process Management

For quite a few years, enterprise legal management (ELM) has focused on matter management and spend management. It’s fair to say that effective ELM platforms were, and still are, good at what they do best – only matter and spend management. But many of these platforms were designed solely for the storage and access of data; not a whole lot more than that. This is the problem and these systems need to be laid to rest.

Now for the good news. Onit has spent decades studying what’s worked for other legal corporate legal departments to develop enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions that are flexible and easy-to-use. In our eBook, “Matter and Spend Are Just the Beginning: A Guide to the Enterprise Legal Management Paradigm Shift” we outline the evolution of these solutions.

There has been a distinct paradigm shift and evolutionary branching off from those older ELM systems. Nowadays, the best ELM platforms facilitate engagement, are focused on process, offer an environment where the user experience is crucial and can be augmented to manage other legal processes.

While matter management tracks various details in a centralized database and spend management gives good visibility into financial information, it would hardly be accurate to say that these areas make up the totality of what law departments need to track and manage. In truth—there is so much more. Today’s definition of ELM includes all of the following tasks:

• Contract management
• Legal service requests
• Legal holds
• Knowledge management
• NDAs
• Compliance
• Settlement requests
• Ethics violations
• 10-Q/K reporting
• Invention disclosure

There are solutions available that are highly focused on each of these tasks. Many innovative legal departments have acknowledged the evolutionary ELM paradigm shift and have augmented their matter and spend management arsenal with this cutting-edge technology.

With clients like ADM, The Home Depot and Under Armour – Onit is one of the most trusted names in the industry. Check out our customer success stories and learn more about bringing your legal department into the future with Onit’s ELM solutions.

Schedule a demo today for more information about the many benefits of ELM.

1. Efficiency – Enterprise legal management (ELM) from Onit are flexible, lightweight, and easy-to-use. To us, ELM is more than just matter and spend Management. Our ELM platform that lets you solve the “whole” of your legal department’s needs, whether that is for contract management, NDA creation and distribution, Legal Holds, SEC filings, eDiscovery or IP issues.

2. Quick Setup – In today’s environment, most ELM initiatives take between nine to 12 months for scoping, implementation and final execution — if not longer. ROI is typically not measured for months after completion. Our implementation process is unique in that no other ELM vendor can offer such quick deployments. Our typical ELM implementation beats the average implementation process by months.

3. Highly Regarded Solutions – From Gartner to Legaltech News, the legal industry is talking about Onit. It’s big news in the industry that no other ELM solution provider approaches legal department operations with “process” as its foundation.

4. Be Ahead of the Curve – Gartner predictions from the February 2016 Market Guide Report suggest that the adoption of ELM solutions will increase from 20 to 50% by 2020. Save your legal team some time by implementing early on.

Onit’s configurable solutions can help corporate legal departments of all sizes. Schedule a demo with us today to learn more. You can also check out our blog for additional articles to learn more about ELM.

Onit’s had a very busy summer so far. We’ve been attending conferences and tradeshows all over the country to educate corporate legal departments about the benefits of enterprise legal management. Last month we hosted a session at the CLOC Corporate Legal Institute, “Process Matters: ELM Redefined – Beyond Traditional Legal and Spend Management – Law Department Operations for the 21st Century.

Lead by Onit founder and CEO, Eric M. Elfman and David Cambria, Global Director of Operations – Law, Compliance and Government Relations, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the two thought leaders discussed trends in the Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) space and highlighted how “process” is redefining how legal department operation managers provide “continuous” value to their company.

Brad Blickstein, a contributor to Legaltech News attended and wrote an awesome article inspired by our session titled, “Next Generation ELM Must Be About Process, Collaboration, Automation.” Below are some of our favorite excerpts from the piece:

“Last month, I spent the better part of a week at the inaugural CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations) Institute in San Francisco. CLOC is a grassroots organization of law department operations professionals, and the Corporate Legal Operations Institute was their first effort at a conference. It was a big success, with legal operations leaders from more than 130 companies getting together for three days of networking and education.

One of the sessions I was most interested in was one of those forward-looking sessions, titled “ELM Redefined: Beyond Traditional Legal & Spend Management—Law Department Operations for the 21st Century.” The main speaker on the session was David Cambria, global director of operations, law, compliance and government relations at Archer Daniels Midland Company. David and I collaborate on the annual Law Department Operations Survey, and he’s about as knowledgeable as they come in this area…

…So what should a “next generation” ELM system look like? For starters, managing a legal enterprise in today’s environment requires a lot more than just information about matters and spend. “Of all the things we spend time on, 80 percent are not supported by the tools that supposedly provide enterprise legal management,” says Cambria. According to the 2015 Law Department Operations survey, an LDO’s time is split quite evenly (between 5 and 17 percent of their day) among seven different areas: outside counsel management, technology, law department strategy, law department administration, vendor management, financial reporting/forecasting and electronic discovery. If a system is going to call itself an “enterprise” system, it needs to help the department manage all those areas, and more.

Read the complete article here.

Thank you to everyone who attended our sessions over the past few months. Your presence and eagerness to learn more about ELM means the world to us. We appreciate your time and hope that if you’ll be able to join us again soon. If you have not had a chance to attend one of our sessions, check out our calendar of upcoming events. We’d love to see you this fall!

For more information about how ELM can help your corporate legal department, check out The Plain and Simple Facts about ELM.

Our previous two posts discussed – Enterprise Legal Management Needs to Grow Up and The Beginning of the ELM SaaS Revolution. This will address some of the ways traditional ELM vendors may try to shift the blame for problems introduced by overcomplicated, underpowered solutions to the customer.

If you hear the following four phrases when evaluating an ELM offering, consider the following translations before you make your decision:

“Senior management has to champion the idea.”

Translation: People won’t use this unless they are forced.

This is something you’ll hear if user experience (UX) isn’t considered an integral part of the design process. Onit ELM solutions are designed to be configured to existing workflows, making adaptability and user adoption simple.

“Change Management is essential for success.”

Translation: The benefit to your business and legal users is illusory.

If a solution claims to offer a significant benefit, that benefit shouldn’t be negated by the amount of effort required to enforce compliance with a new process. Change management is entirely unnecessary when a solution is designed with the user and workflow in mind.

“A strong training program is critical to adoption.”

Translation: This software is incredibly hard to use.

It’s 2016. The vast majority of us have daily interactions with multiple pieces of software. We know our way around a computer. If we still need to attend multiple training sessions to learn how to operate a user interface, that is not a failure on our end. It is a failure in design.

Business software should work and be designed with the same expectations of usability as consumer software.

“We release new versions once or twice a year.”

Translation: Prepare to spend a lot of time and money staying current.

With already lengthy implementation times, frequent version updates can make keeping an application current a full time job. You shouldn’t pay someone a salary to maintain minor changes and oversee the addition of features you never asked for and don’t need.

Case Study: Transforming the Way Legal Works

Now, let’s look at what you can expect from a standard Onit solution implementation.

Onit partnered with a large Fortune 500 client to deploy an NDA App. The company’s in-house legal department processed upwards of 10,000 NDAs annually, with an average turnaround time of 16 days.

Onit developed and deployed a prototype solution within a month to handle global submission, negotiation, and electronic signature of NDAs that supported the existing demand.

The company processed over one thousand NDAs within the first month of deployment, with the completion time reduced to just 24 hours (that’s a 95% reduction from the previous average.) 90% of the NDAs were processed without lawyer involvement.

Modern ELM solutions from Onit are cheaper, quicker to deploy, and more responsive to your actual business needs.

Learn more about what Onit brings to Enterprise Legal Management in our free white paper“ A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management.”