Category: Business Process Management

Contract Status?

Posted on April 20, 2016 by - Business Process Management

Swimming in hundreds of contracts but can’t manage to wade through them all? Is your manual contract management method slowing you down? It’s time to simplify your review and approval process with Onit’s ReviewAI & Approval App.

Check out the video below to learn more about how to streamline your contract management process:

Now that Onit’s ReviewAI & Approval App has all of your comments and revisions in one convenient place – what about the documents themselves? Are you still digging through files to locate years old contracts? Take the headache out of contract administration with an App that’s easily accessible at the click of button.

For more about how Onit’s Contract Administration App can help you get organized and put your contracts right at your fingertips – Check out the video below:

To learn more about improving your contract management and contract review processes, download our white paper – “Simple Contract Management: Apps That Improve Efficiency, Reduce Cycle Times and Help Legal Departments Run Like a Business” or schedule a demo.

4 Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) Code Phrases to Fear

Posted on January 29, 2016 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

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.”

The New Technology Curve

Posted on January 29, 2016 by - Business Process Management

Preparing Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) for the SaaS model

Over the last two decades, the software industry has rapidly evolved. Vendors across all industries have come to see the benefit of the Software as a Service (Saas) model, drastically changing the way individuals and companies interact with software.

A high level of end user support has become integral to almost every serious enterprise software solution, and user interfaces and UX design have received the serious attention they deserved. People have become accustomed to certain design philosophies that support usability and efficiency.

The same can’t be said for the majority of enterprise legal management vendors, though. Regardless, it is inevitable that the database-centric philosophy of ELM will be supplanted by intuitive, user-centric solutions that have already become the norm in many other business areas.

Indicators of the Future

Cloud-based solutions are coming to increasing dominate various marketplaces, but SaaS means more than the just taking an existing enterprise App and porting it to a cloud-based platform. Salesforce has revolutionized the CRM by thinking about CRM in a far different way than Siebel systems and others did. Companies such as Box and Dropbox provide convenient storage and sharing capabilities, making collaboration within organizations easier than ever believed possible. Amazon’s cloud web service provides on-demand content distribution with incredible scalability at a price point that was completely impossible a few decades ago.

And how did these companies do this? One common theme is that they abandoned the concept that the server, data, or document lies at the center of the process. They replaced them with the user.

Challengers Appear

In the ELM space, the challenge to the database-centric status quo comes in the form of enterprise solutions that, instead of boasting long feature lists and long implementation times, are simple to configure, easy to deploy, and address complex everyday problems.

Where the old market wants to “serve the data,” these new solutions learn from other new success stories in the enterprise software market and instead strive to make it easier for lawyers and other law department to successfully support business staff and get their work done.

Functionality, adaptability and adoptability supplant endless lists of out-of-touch features. Simple accessibility is made obsolete by tools that allow users to collaborate simply, easily and as part of their normal work streams.

Enterprise Apps can be built to serve both large and small companies, while the older ELM solutions are simply too complex and costly for law departments of all sizes — large and small. For this same reason, deployments can also be executed very quickly — typically in weeks (instead of up to or more than a year as is required of many traditional ELM systems).

A Different Architectural Philosophy

The biggest differences between traditional ELM systems reflect greater generational changes in how the discipline has evolved, as explored in the previous post. Some nice side effects of that are compatibility, labor savings, customizability, and quick deployment.

Compatibility

Many modern ELM solutions (such as those from Onit) are designed to be able to work alongside and together with systems that are already in place, allowing legal departments to both supplement the capabilities of what they have or to ease their transition to a more modern system.

Minimal IT Involvement

While traditional ELM systems require constant IT maintenance and attention, modern ELM solutions are lean and nimble and tend to work in a more straightforward manner. In many cases, users can configure, deploy, and support Onit solutions with no corporate IT involvement. This is because they are designed and built in an intuitive, “no code” environment that can be learned without even the need for a training session.

A Solution for Every Workflow

Solutions for standard processes like contract review and approval, NDAs, alternative fee arrangements, and matter or legal spend management are offered prebuilt. For more esoteric needs particular to a business, solutions can be created from scratch with minimal delay in deployment.

Drive Operational Improvements Easily

Unlike the development and implementation process for a large enterprise legal management system, which can take several months or years, the average time it takes to implement an Onit solution is less than 20 days. While the most complex implementations can take up to 90 days, this still beats the average for ELM systems by months.

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

Enterprise Legal Management Needs to Grow Up

Posted on January 29, 2016 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To justify the bold assertion of this article’s subtitle, it is first necessary to understand how today’s traditional enterprise legal management (ELM) systems were born.

The ELM market as it exists today can be traced back to 1978, when Equitable Life’s law department saw the potential for their new WANG VS word processing system to do more. It could be used to manage the details of each legal matter, details regarding outside counsel, and many other things that Equitable Life needed to monitor about their day-to-day legal operations.

Matter Management

Partnering with CompInfo, Equitable developed a matter management system that ultimately became a product called Corporate LawPack. Over the next two decades, Corporate LawPack was ported to a variety of hardware and software platforms, leading to its eventual adoption by the legal departments of many Fortune 100 companies, as well as within many governmental and financial institutions.

The 1980s through the mid-1990s saw the broad adoption of matter management software, designed to facilitate the administration of corporate legal practices. These solutions, while providing a robust matter database, did not affect lawyers or law department efficiency. Primarily, they served as reporting tools.

These databases required a tremendous amount of data to be manually entered if it was expected to drive any meaningful value. For this reason, these systems were not widely used by lawyers themselves and instead relied heavily on support staff to operate.

Spend Management

In the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2000s, matter management’s twin sister, legal spend management, made its entrance — driven, in great part, by DuPont’s implementation of the DuPont Legal Model in 1992. DuPont helped embed the notion that focusing on partnering with outside counsel and managing the rich data provided on legal invoices would lead to significant operational efficiencies and reduced legal spend. This led to the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) initiative and spawned the new class of spend management software.

Legal spend management systems gave clients visibility into the details of what law firms were billing and it became the primary means of exercising more control over how matters were managed by outside counsel. This transparency initiated a shift in the way legal business is conducted that continues today, with clients having more power to require alternative fee arrangements, enforce billing guidelines, affect cost reduction.

The Beginning of the End

The inevitable followed: spend and matter management provided by different vendors required costly and complex integrations. Customers found themselves managing one vendor relationship for matter management and another for spend management. Ultimately, a number of spend management vendors were acquired by matter management vendors or vice-versa, along with the development of spend management capabilities being built into existing matter management systems.

In either case, the new integrated matter and spend management systems created even more complexity and even steeper learning curves. So much time figuring out how to build an integrated matter and spend management platform was invested during this period that innovation — particularly around the user experience and actual legal department work process — essentially stalled.

When coupled with migrating their platforms from multiple operating systems, databases and supporting the introduction of cloud-based or Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and other more agile technologies, vendors now find themselves struggling under the weight of their legacy technologies with little focus on real innovation in supporting the broader notion of legal operations and process management. Customers wrestle with software built upon a decades old concept that ELM is essentially a database problem.

But what if that is only half of the equation?

According to Gartner, that’s exactly the case: ELM is no longer just about matter and spend management. In addition to the responsibility of managing documents, e-billing, matters and outside counsel, it’s equally important for corporate legal departments to be involved in business processes themselves.

Gartner states: “In an enterprise legal management context, BPM [business process management] includes the automation of manual processes through methods such as workflow and collaboration functionality. Examples of these include the distribution and approval of legal documents, assignment of tasks and legal resources, as well as the monitoring of alternative fee agreements.”

These are roles that existing ELM vendors were neither built nor prepared for.

Learn more about the modern solutions to ELM stagnation in our next blog post (hint: it’s SaaS)! Or get the full story now from our free white paper.

Hierarchies, Holocracies, and Horizontal Thinking

Posted on August 31, 2015 by - Business Process Management

In a 2015 study conducted by Bain & Company on management tools and trends, 75% of executives feel that the ability to adapt to change is a significant competitive advantage. Innovation is also high on most executive’s priority lists, with 74% believing that it’s more important than cost reduction for long-term success.

How are businesses building more adaptable, innovative, customer-centric organizations? Many are rethinking management structure, getting rid of the physical and psychological silos, and investing in technology that both reduces complexity and empowers contributors from all levels of the organization.

Perhaps the most extreme example is illustrated by Zappos. Fast Company recently did a fascinating profile on the online retailer, the poster company for its new “holocratic” management style. What the heck is a holocracy? According to holocracy.org, it’s a flexible organization structure that brings discipline to the peer-to-peer workplace. Holocracies are organized around self-governing teams focused on action versus over-analyzing, empowering individual contributors to solve problems, and clarity around roles and responsibilities. Holocracies are a counterpoint to the old top-down industrial age business hierarchy, which favors accountability and productivity around repeated tasks. The goal of this more fluid management ethos is to remove the bureaucracy that hampers the collaboration and creative problem solving that this current age demands.

While that is one end of the extreme, businesses don’t need to go full “holocracy”; simply flattening your management structure can have profound effects. CEO and co-founder of ShortStack.com, Jim Belosic, explained the benefits of thinking horizontally in a post on OpenForum. One main benefit of less hierarchy in your business, according to Belosic, is that more democracy leads to better communication within the team. Being flat also leads to more visibility into what’s happening across the board and enables quicker decision-making. Less hierarchy leads to a more engaged team, and the ability to take ownership and try new ways of doing things. More people have strategic skin in the game, illustrated nicely by what Belosic looks for when hiring people, “with a manager’s mentality and a producer’s work ethic.”

The term “flattening” perfectly describes what we’re trying to accomplish through technology-enabled workflows. We can’t blame all of the rigidity and bureaucracy in business on management. The complexity of critical business workflows can have the effect of sapping your teams’ autonomy and ability to creatively solve problems – no management needed. We’re big believers in empowering individual contributors through technology. By automating much of the administrative quicksand that otherwise talented, creative people get stuck doing on a daily basis, and by removing the opacity around workflows, you enable the individual worker to contribute in a more meaningful way. Less administrative red tape and more visibility into roles and responsibilities around your critical workflows brings more autonomy to individuals and teams alike, leading to less bureaucracy overall and more innovative problem solving.

To learn more about Onit and how Enterprise Apps can help your business adapt, innovate, and better serve your customers, schedule a demo.

For more on innovation, technology and business, check out our recent blog post:

Collaborative Economy, Meet Enterprise Legal Management

Considering an Enterprise Legal Management System? Four Phrases to Fear

Posted on August 28, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Much of the software labeled as enterprise legal management (ELM) are simply souped-up matter and spend management systems that only effectively tackle one side of the problem: the database. What’s important to note is that these systems don’t address the other side of the problem, what Gartner defines as “the automation of manual processes through methods such as workflow and collaboration functionality.”1 Moreover, how the software addresses workflow and collaboration determines the software’s long-term benefits to your team, department, and larger business.

The database-centric philosophy of enterprise legal management will inevitably be supplanted by intuitive, process-centric Apps that have already become the norm in many other markets. Enterprise Apps address both sides of the enterprise legal management need (matter management and spend management), are simple to deploy, intuitive to use, and evolve with your changing business needs at a fraction of the cost of the “old” ELM systems.

How can you determine if your software is a truly holistic enterprise legal management solution versus a repackaged matter and spend management system?

Here are four key phrases that should make you wary:

1. “Senior management has to champion the idea.”

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

2. “Change management is essential for success.”

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

3. “Strong training program is critical to adoption.”

Translation: This software is exceptionally hard to use.

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

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

More is not always better when it comes to feature-rich ELM systems. Adding new tools and functionalities onto existing database architectures achieves little more than to complicate the implementation and does not support the reality of the way lawyers and law departments work and support their business. This architecture also comes up short in supporting the transactional kinds of legal services requests and processes that are the primary focus of corporate legal departments.

Traditional matter management and spend management solutions, repackaged by marketing departments as “ELM solutions,” simply can’t support the integrated, collaborative workstreams that law departments increasingly are required to achieve their goals and support the overall enterprise’s business goals.

To learn more about the future of spend and matter management, download our new whitepaper: A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management.

More about enterprise legal management on our blog:

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Ten Things You Need to Know about Enterprise Apps and How They Relate to Enterprise Legal Management 

1 Gartner: “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Legal Management,” 23 Oct 2013

Collaborative Economy, Meet Enterprise Legal Management

Posted on August 6, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you will no doubt have heard the term, ‘collaborative economy.’ Our day-to-day lives have slowly evolved into this shared existence, sometimes without realizing it. So, what exactly is the collaborative, or sharing, economy? Jacob Morgan summarizes Wikipedia’s definition in a Forbes article, 

“The sharing economy (sometimes also referred to as the peer-to-peer economy, mesh, collaborative economy, collaborative consumption) is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human and physical resources.” 

This idea, while mainly applied to consumer applications such as AirBnB, Uber, or Netflix, has wide-ranging ramifications for every facet of our personal and professional lives. 

It’s about access, without the burden of ownership 

Take the legal industry for example; the days of legal departments investing in large, cumbersome, database-centric enterprise systems is over. No longer do companies want to own a product outright, as the cloud has made it easy to gain the benefits of much more nimble and cutting-edge products without the price of ownership. Our businesses change at break-neck speed. Therefore, the tools and technology we depend on to run those companies cannot be slow to change. Just like the Zip Car driver isn’t responsible for fixing that flat tire or maintaining the oil, Onit’s Enterprise App customers don’t have the burden of making sure that the technology they use to run their legal department is fully up-to-date. 

It’s about collaboration, transparency

However, the benefits of access with ownership extend way beyond your legal operations team directly purchasing a cloud-based App over a traditional enterprise software solution. The sharing, or collaborative, economy reaches far into our peer-to-peer tasks and inter-department dealings. No longer do you have to depend on someone “owning” and maintaining the database or centralized repository. The newer cloud-based Apps depend on a democratic and collaborative way of working. Everyone has visibility, everyone has ownership, everyone contributes, everyone benefits.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Tina Rosenberg, author of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, had a great quote about the sharing economy as it relates to business innovation. Rosenberg said, “Innovation happens best when people from different disciplines collaborate.” We think that is true in cross-disciplinary environments, but also in cross-departmental applications. Onit’s Enterprise Apps help legal departments manage and streamline their operations, but also provide easy access to information to help drive strategic initiatives for the larger business. Because of their inherent transparency, Enterprise Apps allow a great opportunity for ideas from all levels of the organization to get visibility and traction. This is in direct contrast to the walled-in, ownership approach of old, making it much harder to nurture ideas between those rigid structures.

It’s about the user, and ultimately, the consumer 

This type of service model places the customer at the forefront of this economy. When transparency and collaboration collide for users on the business-side, customers stand to benefit from faster response times, greater accountability, and a much better end product. Companies such as Salesforce, Dropbox, and Amazon’s content distribution service have made it easier for users on the business side to access information quickly and collaborate effectively to meet customer demand. A common thread among these companies, and of those at the center of the sharing economy is their commitment to success by devising solutions that are accessible, perform well, and are designed with the needs of the user at the forefront.

Mark Gilbreath, CEO of LiquidSpace, talked about this new customer-centricity in a blog for the Wall Street Journal, saying, “Sharing at work is not a new disruption — rather, it’s just the next chapter in a continuing consumerization trend that last brought us the consumerization of IT.” Here at Onit, we believe nimble, cloud-based business applications are firmly rooted in this collaborative economy, and have upended what Gilbreath aptly called the “command and control business culture that has defined the Industrial Age.”

To learn more about how our enterprise Apps can improve the collaboration economy in your business, download our new whitepaper: A New Approach to Enterprise Legal Management (ELM).

The New Enterprise Legal Management Technology: Driving Strategic Innovation in Your Law Department

Posted on July 8, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Want to move your law department beyond just cost cutting and operational efficiency into a role of strategic leadership in your business? Join us as we present a panel discussion at Legaltech West Coast about how new enterprise legal management technology can help your in-house team drive firm-wide innovation. Our panel is part of the emerging technology series at Legaltech West Coast in San Francisco on July 13 – 14th. For the fifth year, Legaltech West Coast will bring together law firms, in-house counsel, and technology providers to discuss the pressing issues and challenges of the practice and business of law today. Over the two-day conference, attendees can learn trends and discuss strategies across five tracks: Corporate Legal Operations, Information Governance, Advanced IT, Cloud and Mobile Technology, and Disruptive Trends in eDiscovery.

Stasha Jain, In-house Counsel and Account Manager, Onit, Inc., and Kirsten Taitelbaum, Director, Finance and Operations at DaVita will discuss best practices for using technology to drive stronger collaboration between law departments and the business they support to produce better outcomes. Entitled, “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” the discussion is designed to give you a roadmap on how to use data to develop metrics in order to understand how work gets done and how to streamline that work from end-to-end in order to improve service overall. Learn tactics and best practices from leaders at the forefront of this important shift in thinking, from a focus on cost cutting and improving efficiency, towards using predictive and actionable analytics to drive future strategic initiatives.

Join us for “Innovation and the Law Department of the Future,” on Monday, July 13th at 10:15 am. Connect and continue the discussion with us in the conference exhibition hall at booth #409 to learn about our customizable enterprise legal management solutions.

To learn more about, and register for, Legaltech West Coast 2015 and view the full agenda, click here.

Find out how Onit can help your law department operations team innovate to meet today’s and tomorrow’s strategic challenges. Schedule a demo or contact us today!

Read more about Enterprise Legal Management on our blog:

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Pioneering a New Legal Technology Curve and Modernizing Enterprise Legal Management

Posted on June 26, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Put people at the center… not databases.

The relationship between technology and the workplace is a very dynamic thing, and technology is more important than ever to corporate legal department operations. As computer processing capabilities grow and programming languages evolve to allow for ever-increasing levels of complexity, businesses must be vigilant to read the trends and ensure that they are responsive to technological advancement and the market demands that those advancements birth. With the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud services, people in all kinds of businesses and industries must choose to pursue new ways of doing things or else find themselves in an unsustainable position as their current standard of practice becomes obsolete. This is especially true for legal departments facing the daunting challenge of managing the enterprise’s legal affairs.

Software as a Service:

Traditionally, software has been offered as a “product:” an instance of intellectual property licensed to an organization and deployed and supported internally. This model is based on the idea that software is a tool similar to hardware: a virtual property that a business can employ to achieve its ends.

This is, at first glance, a logically sound position—after all, it is the same structure we use when acquiring computer hardware. Why should software be any different? The short answer is that it doesn’t have to stop there. Operations can be much more efficient.

When the Internet appeared in the 1990s, some software vendors envisioned a different approach. Inspired in part by the mainframe computing of the 1950’s, they saw the potential for a system that not only provided a software product, but also treated the maintenance, hosting, and support of that product as a service.

By combining the idea of a software product that achieves a function with a support system that makes the use of that product inherently simple and trustworthy, they changed the nature of the industry, and slowly but surely turned “the cloud” into a buzzword. So… what have business gained from cloud services?

Industry Response

Some industries were more ready for to the change than others. Consumer offerings, such as YouTube and eBay, provided centralized access to video entertainment and a global marketplace respectively, and served as positive use cases for the applicability of this concept.

Other industries, especially those in the notoriously rigid B2B sector, were less prepared to adapt, instead continuing to offer independent instances and letting the purchaser handle the rest (support, service, troubleshooting, and all of the headaches that come along with it.) This structure forces organizations to foot the bill and even hire their own support staffs for the most complex and unwieldy software. Many of these offerings require organizations to license the product on a per-employee basis, rendering employee adoption and use an increasingly cost-prohibitive option. As efficiency needs grow and margins shrink, one-size-fits-all tools begin to appear to be very wasteful.

Lag Behind or Race Ahead: It’s Your Choice.

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for Enterprise Legal Management aim to directly address these issues for legal departments that desire more than the “old way” can offer. Whether they desire to fill the gaps between the tools they already use or to design a new workflow from the ground up, Onit’s App design philosophy makes it all possible.

Instead of cobbling together features into existing (and many times outdated) ebilling, matter management or enterprise legal management packages and interfaces, Onit seeks to answer the question: how does this legal department’s business work, and how can we help it work better?

Onit and other SaaS providers strive to facilitate success by being responsive to how app users actually use apps instead of treating the database as the center of all things and building out, as traditional all-things-to-all-people Enterprise Legal Management systems do. By approaching the problem of success in business and legal departments holistically, solutions can be designed as opposed to just applied.

The Way of the Future

Though it sounds trite, it’s unassailably true. Subscription-based models are becoming the norm. Netflix killed Blockbuster, just as SharePoint obsoletes FTP and email attachments. By moving Creative Suite to the cloud, Adobe both took steps to combat its long-term piracy problem and made its product exponentially more affordable. Nowadays, video rental shops are few and far between, business information can be easily accessed without having to navigate confusing file structures, and virtually anyone can have access the world’s most advanced design and digital arts suite.

So the question is: will your legal department adopt a smarter business process now, or will you wait until you have no other choice?

The 4 Axioms of Enterprise Legal Management

Posted on June 9, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Enterprise Legal Management (ELM), or the integrated administration of legal matter and spend management systems, is quickly becoming the standard in the way that legal departments are managed. By unifying these historically independent areas, management strives to delegate more effectively and develop a holistic view of how resources are put to use to maximize departmental efficiency and make educated, informed business decisions.

As these silos combine, certain truths about how ELM works are becoming self-evident. These axioms can be used to guide your legal department’s transition to a more intelligent set of best practices for legal operations management.

1: Change is good for growth

The history of legal department management software stretches back four decades, and one thing has remained consistent: as software solutions mature and grow along with the legal departments they help manage, those departments must be able to change to keep up with evolving standards. Matter management solutions, which began to gain popularity in the early 1980s, grew in scope and functionality over the subsequent two decades, enabling legal departments to make better decisions about resource deployment. Likewise, the spend management systems of the 1990s introduced new features to enhance the efficiency of financial dispositions.

When these new features entered the market, legal departments were forced to acknowledge that, especially in light of the exponential rate of technological advancement, adaptability is an essential quality for a legal department that values efficiency. Legal should be set up in such a manner that is responsive to change, and to some degree anticipates the technological curve of the near future.

2: Communicate your successes to develop better best practices

Experimentation has always been key to innovation, and this logic holds true in ELM as well. But when success is met, much is also lost if the insight gained is not applied broadly. A policy change that shows success in IP should be considered for other areas if it is applicable. Inversely, if a policy change has unforeseen negative consequences after being applied to an area, there is no reason to sustain that effort simply because it works elsewhere.

The common key to this point is communication. Good ELM requires a constant dialogue so that management has a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. Without healthy, honest communication between sections of your legal department (and those outside it who interact with its policies,) any Enterprise Legal Management best practice guidelines that your business develops will be threatened.

3: Invest in technology to automate the minutiae and facilitate “smarter” work

In spite of these theoretical considerations, the amount of actionable changes that can be achieved are limited without a software solution that strives to take some of the drudgery and frivolous costs out of ELM. Paper invoices, human error in data entry, and misplaced information are constant hazards for legal, and by adopting a Enterprise Legal Management software solution, a business can drastically improve its overhead and efficiency. 

Onit’s Enterprise Apps for ELM, in contrast with typical, often bloated offerings, are uniquely designed to serve specialized business needs and promote adoption rates, sidestepping the pitfalls of steep learning curves and esoteric user interfaces that plague many other “comprehensive” solutions and limit actual ROIs.

4: Standardize pricing to develop a coherent billing framework

Deciding how best to bill clients can be a challenging question for legal. When precedents conflict and the facts of a business relationship are not stored centrally, ambiguities can present that can lead to lost profits. This will also take some pressure off where it comes to maintaining customer relationships by mitigating the risk of billing errors or inconsistencies.

In tandem with a software solution as discussed above, a clear, consistent guide that drives commodity pricing will go a long way towards increasing efficiency and predictability within legal.

Results

By accepting and internalizing these four truths, legal will provide itself with opportunities to increase value and efficiency while promoting collaboration and minimizing error. By choosing Onit Apps for Enterprise Legal Management, legal departments can achieve those ends to a greater degree while also saving money versus the established “all-in-one” solutions. With Onit Apps, a business can design a solution that perfectly fits with how its legal department is managed and how it interfaces with the rest of the business. 

To schedule a demonstration of Onit’s ELM Apps, email [email protected].