Category: Company News and Events

Top 5 Takeaways from CLOC 2025: AI Agents, Real Conversations & Legal Ops in Its Prime

Posted on May 14, 2025 by - Company News and Events

CLOC 2025 was more than just another industry event. It was a reunion, a reality check, and a roadmap for where legal operations is heading. From agentic AI hype to real-world results, the energy was high, the demos were packed, and the conversations were refreshingly honest.

Here are five key takeaways that stood out from the Onit team and beyond.

1. AI Isn’t Just a Buzzword. It’s an Agent Now.

This year wasn’t about theoretical AI. It was about AI agents, intelligent, task-executing, purpose-built digital workers designed to streamline legal workflows in real time.

Everyone was talking about agentic design, native AI platforms, and how these new agents can do more than analyze—they can act. From invoice approvals to contract data extraction, the future of legal ops looks less like dashboards and more like delegation.

If your AI can’t do the work? It’s already behind. Onit is proud to be bringing its own suite of AI agents to market this summer. Stay tuned! 

2. Relationships Still Rule in the Age of AI

While automation dominated the tech talk, the human connection was just as powerful. Onit’s customer happy hour at Zuma and CAB brunch brought together clients, partners, and team members in all the right ways.

The best conversations didn’t just happen at the booth—they happened over sashimi and strong coffee. Legal ops is still, at its core, a relationship-driven business and it showed.

3. Onit’s CounselMatch Reveal Was a Crowd Magnet

On day one at the Exchange Stage, Onit unveiled CounselMatch, a powerful new solution developed in partnership with SharePoint Leopard Solutions. Think of it as a next-gen Rolodex for law firm intelligence.

CounselMatch gives legal teams instant access to a rich database of law firm data, enabling faster, smarter decisions when sourcing outside counsel. The reaction? Immediate interest.

📰 Read the full announcement here

4. Real AI in Action: Corteva’s ReviewAI Story

Forget the fluff. Corteva’s breakout session showed what happens when AI agents go from concept to execution.

Michele Compasso, Global Deployment & Analytics Leader of Legal Operations at Corteva, shared how her team tackled a mountain of legacy contracts using Onit’s AI-first ReviewAI.

“We had 4,000 contracts that needed to be input into our CLM system. A task like that would’ve taken a lawyer two to three hours per contract—and I don’t speak Portuguese and I’m not a lawyer,” said Compasso.

“Instead, we used digital workers to read, extract, and enter the necessary data. What would’ve been impossible manually was done in minutes per contract.”

The session ended with a two-and-a-half-minute demo video showing the full end-to-end process. The room was hooked and the follow-up conversations proved it.

5. Change Champions Are the Secret to Legal Ops Scale

One of the most insightful sessions at CLOC 2025 wasn’t about tech, it was about people. In a standing-room-only “fishbowl” discussion, legal ops leaders opened up about what really moves transformation forward: cultural buy-in.

The lesson? Start with the team that’s ready. One company shared how they consolidated 29 templates into 8, cutting contract turnaround from a month to 1–2 weeks—not with fancy tools, but by piloting change with a group open to new ways of working.

That small success became a case study. That team became internal champions. And that momentum earned executive buy-in.

If legal ops wants to scale AI, ELM, CLM, or any major shift, the strategy is clear: start small, prove impact, and build an army of change ambassadors.

Wrapping It Up

From AI agents to relationship building, CLOC 2025 proved one thing: legal operations isn’t just evolving—it’s leading. And Onit is proud to be right in the middle of that momentum.

What’s New! Onit’s Winter 2025 Release

Posted on February 12, 2025 by - Company News and Events

Smarter Contracts, Seamless Integrations: Meet Onit’s Winter 2025 Enhancements

At Onit, we’re redefining legal operations with AI-driven automation and seamless integrations. The Winter 2025 Release introduces smarter contract workflows, streamlined invoicing, and powerful API enhancements to help legal teams work faster and more efficiently.

What’s New?

AI Contract Extract: Smarter Contract Tagging

Revolutionize contract management with generative AI-powered auto-tagging in ContractWorks.
✔ Automate clause identification for faster document analysis.
✔ Enhance accuracy and visibility by ensuring consistent tagging.
✔ Save time by eliminating manual data entry.

Contracts API: Seamless Integration & Automation

Effortlessly connect ContractWorks with your existing tech stack. Contracts API enables:
✔ Automated document uploads and report retrieval.
✔ Seamless CRM integration for optimized workflows.
✔ Scalable data management to reduce manual effort.

Pro Forma Invoices: Streamline VAT Compliance

Eliminate billing disputes with Pro Forma Invoices, designed for VAT-regulated regions. Benefits include:
✔ Draft invoices for accuracy before VAT liability applies.
✔ Automated reconciliation to reduce errors.
✔ Clear audit tracking for improved compliance.

Contract Hierarchy: Better Organization & Visibility

Gain greater visibility into contract relationships with this new feature, allowing you to:
✔ Visualize links between master agreements, amendments, and subcontracts.
✔ Streamline workflows to minimize risk and save time.
✔ Centralize contract data for improved transparency.

Looking Ahead

This release is just the beginning—stay tuned for our Spring Q2 update featuring even more enhancements across Onit, SimpleLegal, and DocuSign integrations.

Ready to experience the future of legal operations? These features are live as of February 12, 2025!

Current customers – Contact your CSM to learn how to enable these enhancements.  New to Onit? Book a demo today!

Perceptions of Legal: A Conversation with PwC

Posted on August 28, 2023 by - Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

PwC US Legal Business Solutions Consulting Leader and Global Oversight Board Member Jane Allen recently sat down with Onit for an in-depth conversation about the insights gained from 2023’s Enterprise Legal Reputation Report. Here are some key takeaways from the discussion (view the webinar in its entirety here).

For the second year in a row, Onit’s holistic Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) report helped deliver keen insight into just how Legal can be perceived by internal clients — surveying over 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals around the globe. In this episode of “A Conversation”, PwC US Legal Business Solutions Leader Jane Allen shared her thoughts on some of the conclusions from the Report.

Here are some key takeaways from the discussion:

The overall corporate image of the Legal function remains positive across the globe. Legal is viewed as “protectors of the business, assets, and people” across the United States (55%), France (48%), the United Kingdom (41%), and Germany (33%). This positive image remains even as the current environment can make the job of Legal far more complicated.

“Legal is there to protect the people, the business, the IP, all of it,” Allen says. “I also think that doing this foundational piece has become far more complex and difficult, especially if you look at geopolitical issues and the evolving regulatory landscape – which can resemble a game of whack-a-mole in some places.”

Over the span of one year, the percentage of corporate employees that believe Legal works well with their internal function has declined across all areas:

Allen believes that as companies need to rapidly shift strategies due to changing business conditions and technologies – significant transformations all around – Legal’s responsibilities can become overwhelming.

“Again, everything has become more complex,” Allen says. “Teams have less and less capacity to try to respond to their internal constituents. There is more on the legal function, and frankly, they are not getting much more headcount or budget. I think these numbers are the result of that.”

The first two takeaways can deliver both good and bad news: Legal does have a positive reputation as the protector of the business — however, relationships with other departments across the organization are strained. The next point directs us to where Legal needs to go: 56% of respondents said that Legal can have a “positive effect” on revenue operations.

Allen points to three key takeaways from this statistic:

  • It’s indicative of leadership turnover. “Over the past year, we’ve noticed more turnover in the CLO / GC community,” Allen says. “These new folks want to set strategy, and they are doing a great job about being strategic — not only managing the bottom line but adding to the top line revenue and making sure that the rest of the company sees and feels their efforts.
  • It’s indicative of new Legal organizational leadership. “Another trend is seeing more GCs and CLOs move into C-suite roles,” Allen says. “That cites just how much of the business they know and how companies can see Legal as a revenue driver that knows the organization inside and out.”
  • It’s indicative of Legal’s work in contracting. “Legal helps drive improvements in the contracting process — leveraging data tools, looking at trends, increasing efficiency, and boosting the speed- to market,” Allen says. “The business feels it immediately. They are helping the top line and hopefully leveraging data and insights to see who they should collaborate with — and who they should not. I think that top-of-the-house legal leaders, if they think strategically in that direction, will change the name of the game of how Legal is viewed within the organization.”

Click here to view the rest of the interview.

Empowering Legal Departments: Onit Named as a Leader in IDC MarketScape for Enterprise Legal Management Software 

Posted on August 11, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

In a world where businesses face macroeconomic pressures to demonstrate value in new and visible ways, Onit is a dedicated partner in the journey. Legal’s impact is now, and Onit is at the forefront of ensuring that impact is transformative, efficient, and growth oriented. 

As a longstanding provider of enterprise legal management (ELM), contract lifecycle management (CLM), and business process automation tools, Onit is proud to announce its recognition as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Legal Management Software (Doc #US49842023, August 2023).  

“We are honored to be named a leader in enterprise legal management solutions,” commented Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit. “At Onit, our mission has always been to empower legal professionals to do their best work through more intelligent and efficient workflows. We will continue to invest in innovation to deliver leading solutions that help legal departments drive material impact.” 

A Portfolio of Solutions for Legal Departments of All Sizes  

With solutions for businesses of all sizes, Onit enables legal departments to modernize workflows, improve operational and cost efficiency, and contribute to faster revenue generation and business growth.

Onit’s commitment to empowering legal professionals is reflected in its diverse portfolio of solutions designed to cater to legal departments of all sizes. Onit has continued to enhance its portfolio to include the following: 

  • OnitX: The next generation of Onit’s highly configurable platform for automating complex legal workflows for enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management  
  • Onit Catalyst: A family of AI-enabled products purpose-built to elevate the impact of ELM and CLM solutions  
  • SimpleLegal: Tailored for the mid-market, this ELM solution brings transparency and management to e-Billing, matters, vendors, and reporting 
  • ContractWorks: A modular, out-of-the-box solution to manage contracts and legal documents at specific contracting stages or across the entire contract lifecycle 

Customer-Driven Innovation 

Onit’s mission extends beyond technology – it’s an organization that values the voice of customers. The naming as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape report follows a period of customer-driven innovation, including: 

  • Smarter spend management: OnitX Spend Management’s integration with Onit Catalyst empowers legal operations teams with external benchmarks for quicker, data-informed decisions on timekeeper rate approvals. 
  • Complete European ELM solution: OnitX Matter Management’s integration with Onit BusyLamp offers European corporate legal departments a flexible and configurable means to manage legal matter workflows, addressing specific currency, regulatory, and tax requirements. 
  • Seamless litigation compliance: OnitX Legal Holds Management streamlines litigation compliance management and reduces the risks associated with pending litigation. 
  • Visual forms builder: Build custom applications powered by the OnitX workflow engine to address simple legal-related requests like invention disclosures, trademark or logo usage and data breach incident reporting. 
  • Smarter contract lifecycle management: Onit Catalyst ReviewAI and Catalyst Contract Extraction help streamline the contract lifecycle pre- and post-signature processes by using AI to review contracts and extract essential data — such as key terms and obligations, dates and other relevant information — to quickly identify contract risks and opportunities. 
  • Application and data integrations: OnitX leverages scalable technology from Workato, an industry-leading iPaaS technology provider, to integrate with applications such as Salesforce, SAP Ariba and Microsoft 365 so users can work in their preferred tools while data flows into other critical business systems that support revenue and operating expense management. 

Elevating Legal’s Role Within the Enterprise  

Legal is most often viewed as a stellar guardian of the enterprise and outstanding advisor — yet its perception as a business partner is not quite as golden. In the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report, four in five (78%) corporate employees perceive Legal’s enduring image as a trustworthy protector of the business that imparts sage advice. Yet even though respondents view Legal as an authority figure and business protector, nearly three in four (73%) do not consider Legal an approachable business partner. In fact, many view Legal as a “bottleneck,” as “adding unnecessary roadblocks,” or “simply expect to experience holdups” when interacting with legal teams. As a result, relationships between Legal and its internal clients have declined year-over-year (YoY) in every department — by almost 10% in HR, 18% in Finance, 30% in Sales, 27% in Marketing, and 41% in Procurement. 

Onit’s mission is to elevate Legal’s stature within the enterprise by automating business-critical workflows that drive material impact,” said Scott Wallingford, President of Onit’s Enterprise Business. “With the next generation of our platform in OnitX and key product updates from Onit Catalyst, customers can optimize legal workflows across their entire enterprise — from ELM functions like matter and spend management to CLM functions like contract management and review. Macroeconomic pressure influences enterprise functions to show value in new and visible ways, and we’re partnering with our customers to do just that. Legal’s moment of impact is now.” 

Additional Resources 

For more company news, industry trends and best practices from corporate legal innovators, read the Onit blog and follow us on LinkedIn. 

Bringing Workflows and AI to Life for Legal Ops: A Conversation with Harbor  

Posted on June 19, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Jean Yang, co-founder and vice president of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, recently chatted with Amy Good, vice president of client engagement at Harbor Consulting, about the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence to provide an ecosystem of workflow solutions — and what they can do for you. (You can view the entire video here).

Generative AI has become a modern-age gold rush, taking this brave new world — and its collective imagination — by storm. Legal operations is no exception. Integrating workflows with artificial intelligence (AI) can unlock a new level of efficiency for legal departments, especially at a time when any definition of success extends to driving innovation while containing costs.

According to Amy Good, the adoption of AI-powered workflows tends to follow three stages:

  1. A corporate legal department notices an abundance of manual tasks can be automated.
  2. As legal service requests (LSRs) pour in, legal leaders realize more connectivity to other parts of the organization is warranted and they implement a matter management system.
  3. Others build upon that foundation, continuing to improve legal tech throughout the organization’s journey.

Still, customers often wonder: What can AI do for us? Where — how — do we begin? Good’s advice? “Look for a place of demand.”

A Game-Changer for Efficiency

Chartered principally as protector of the business, it is Legal’s purpose to examine every detail of a deal for compliance and risk mitigation. However, the need to respond faster is paramount in this macroeconomic climate. The 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report uncovered that only a third (35%) of enterprise employees perceive their legal team as very responsive. Jean Yang noted that this is an area of opportunity to do more work in an efficient manner.

“Some clients have multiple places of requests from outside law departments routing to the center of excellence (COE) or administrative pools,” elaborated Good. These might include outside counsel vendor onboarding, approval requests, or information collection, such as structured reporting on diversity or vendor performance. “Often they are looking for self-service — any processes to fully automate, like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).” These might include outside counsel vendor onboarding, approval requests, or information collection, such as structured reporting on diversity or vendor performance.

“We hear that, too. Attorneys don’t want to spend time on low-level contracts, but they need to get done,” Yang concurred.

This is where workflow automation and AI step in. With contract management an essential aspect of legal operations, constant demands, requests, and “fire drills” land on attorneys’ desks.

When there is too much important work to do and not enough time, AI adds intelligence to workflow by automatically populating LSR fields. According to Yang, “AI can remove friction and engage with processes and tools by really knowing how to route things to the appropriate person at the appropriate time with the appropriate level of priority.”

Being able to extract metadata on a mass basis to understand the information in contracts reduces time-consuming, manual, and not particularly invigorating tasks, Good agreed. In turn, this significantly streamlines workflows and elevates efficiency, freeing up Legal’s valuable time for more strategic, visionary, and materially impactful work.

Connecting Workflows and AI

At the 2023 CLOC Global Institute, Yang — along with a distinguished panel — demonstrated three practical and impactful ways of how the legal space can optimize AI: reviewing invoices for compliance and value with spend management, using AI as a co-pilot to run playbooks and perform legacy agreement extraction for contract review, and auto-generating LSRs from plain text communications like emails.

Following the standing-room-only presentation, seven in 10 (70%) legal professionals admitted to feeling positive about AI. And in Harbor’s latest Law Department Survey, 29% of respondents state they already implement workflow automation, while 26% use AI for at least one use case — up 10 and 11 percentage points, respectively, from the previous year.

This revolution may have been sparked by ChatGPT and other AI language models, such as Google’s Bard, truly bringing AI to the mainstream.

“Generative AI has strong legal comprehension and can generate billions of interactions,” Yang said, pointing out that GPT-4, the latest version, even passed the Uniform Bar Exam. Though some legal practitioners remain terrified this means AI will usurp jobs, there are limitations to the technology — including ‘hallucinations,’ the term for factually incorrect or meaningless information generated because of encoding and decoding errors.

Yang acknowledges that while generative AI will never be 100%, by understanding legal challenges and pain points AI can now feasibly and realistically assist with a range of processes — from leveraging immediate insights from spend and contract data to building apps more quickly.

“In the past year, AI seems to be coming together in a way it hasn’t before,” Good marveled. This includes data sets and tech infrastructure to make workflows faster, smarter, and more transformational.

The Future is Now

As a subject matter expert (SME) herself, Yang suggested exploring various use cases when asked about the best way to approach AI.

Good seconded experimentation, sharing that ChatGPT has often helped her transcend writer’s block and describing it like a conversation with a nonjudgmental friend to move you to the next step.

“Start small and gain momentum,” she advised.

Similarly, both emphasized the importance of working with vendors who are continuously future-proofing. One caveat? Always work with vendors with commercial licenses.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter where your organization is today — some companies are already ‘there’ with AI, while others are still being cautious, watching and learning.

“The key,” Yang said, “is to learn and engage with what this tech means: Get demos, play along, see what’s coming. Because the hype is real. AI is here, and it will be impactful in many ways.”

Learn more about how Onit’s AI-enabled products digitally transform the contract lifecycle.

Introducing OnitX – A Modern Platform for Transforming Legal-Related Workflows

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

We previously shared how 2023 is the year for every legal department to optimize their operations to deliver critical business outcomes with fewer resources and budget. It is our opinion that Legal needs to adopt a platform model approach to serve the internal demand for legal-related services more efficiently, so the legal team can spend more substantial time on initiatives impacting the entire enterprise.

To usher in the era of optimized legal operations, Onit is proud to announce OnitX, the smart workflow platform for sophisticated legal matters and contract solutions that speeds the business. The “X” represents the innovative nature of Onit and signifies how the platform is highly configurable to customers’ unique needs, provides integrations with a broad range of technologies and business applications, and ensures a path to the future with extensibility to support new features and capabilities.

OnitX delivers several key customer benefits. First, it provides better visibility to legal services demand, which can feed an internal quarterly “report card” and give the data needed to forecast future needs. It supports greater operational efficiency for the legal department through user self-service, more seamless collaboration, and intelligent automation of legal workflows. Finally, OnitX enables better management of all legal resources, such as a deeper awareness of the “what and who” of legal operation, an improved ability to balance work done internally versus by outside counsel, and a greater understanding of outside counsel activity and spending so you can proactively manage outside law firm work.

OnitX is the evolution of the Onit Apptitude workflow platform that forms the foundation to many of Onit’s products. It includes the critical layers of a modern SaaS platform and adds several innovations:

  • Smart new rate approval through embedded visibility to rate benchmarking data that includes $47.6B+ in legal billings, 200,000+ timekeepers, and 8,900 law firms.
  • An integrated ELM solution tailored for European legal departments
  • Actionable contract insights provided by risk dashboards and mining contract language
  • An easy-to-use Legal Holds Management capability that streamlines compliance and reduces risk
  • A visual forms builder for the workflow engine that makes it easier to build applications.
  • A new, scalable capability to build third-party application integrations powered by Workato, an industry-leading iPaaS technology provider, as well as better and scalable data integration capabilities with Data-as-a-Service

OnitX also seamlessly integrates with the Onit Catalyst family of AI-enabled products to provide smart solutions for ELM and CLM.

The following products are available within the OnitX platform:

Contact us today to learn how OnitX can be your modern matter and contract solutions platform.

Introducing the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report

Posted on March 15, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

This multinational study uncovers the power of legal departments to influence material growth, business value, and every aspect in between, even during periods of economic uncertainty — through better communication, efficient workflows, and more positive interactions with Legal’s internal clients.

The basis of all relationships lies in their interactions. In quantum physics, all properties are relational. Subatomic particles whirl through space, acquiring new properties only when they integrate with other particles.

When it comes to legal operations, interactions are just as fundamental. They are the underlying atomic units that permit Legal to collaborate and directly impact materiality and operational efficiency, even within our current macroeconomic climate.

The 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report, a study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals spanning the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, focuses on the year-over-year (YoY) impressions of Legal’s brand image and its ability to influence every corner of its businesses, from revenue generation and EBITDA to corporate culture.

We are living in challenging economic times. The mantra everywhere, it seems, is “do more with less.” Yet just as there are clues to solving cosmic mysteries, the ELR Report discloses ways in which Legal can repair the energy and dynamics within its own systems: via better interactions.

THE PEOPLE, PROCESS & TECHNOLOGY OF LEGAL

Many organizations have long embraced a business framework called people, process, and technology (PPT). Designed to optimize efficiency and maintain balance, PPT is common across numerous disciplines, from HR and operations to IT and cybersecurity.

People are necessary to provide talent, wisdom, and insight.

Processes are required to accomplish work with productivity, scale, and efficiency.

Technology assists people in executing processes to achieve innovation.

So much has changed across the corporate landscape — and the world — since the 2022 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report debuted. Last January’s boom economy is now a bust, besieged by geopolitical conflict, inflation, and devastating layoffs. Cost containment and EBITDA have emerged as major business priorities. However, the principal finding in 2022’s ELR Report continues to echo and is, in reality, magnified now in 2023: Legal can, and should, play a meaningful part in generating and elevating business materiality and growth.

In times like these, managing people, process, and technologies in triangulated fashion enables legal professionals to materially impact their businesses more than they ever have, or have ever been expected to, before. PPT transforms the way Legal is valued, evolving the department’s brand image from a back-office, tactical function to a front-office business driver, material influence, and cultural champion.

The first chapter of the 2023 ELR Report delves into perceptions of Legal’s brand image through the lens of corporate employees. It reveals that while almost four in five (78%) respondents acknowledge the enduring image of the legal department as a trustworthy protector of the business that offers sage advice, less than one in three (27%) considers Legal a good business partner.

Further, relationships with Legal have declined in every department in less than a year. Even interactions with “Legal-friendly” allies, like HR and Finance, have fallen from 62% to 56% and 62% to 51%, respectively. Functions that traditionally mesh less well with Legal — those that perhaps push the proverbial envelope and blur the metaphorical lines — like Sales and Procurement have plummeted even more, from 43% to only 30%, and 37% to just 22%.

That said, functions that interact most with Legal still experience the best relationships. The more Legal collaborates with a department, the stronger its relationship tends to be. And when it comes to measures of materiality, like sales and revenue generation, Legal truly stands out. More than half (56%) of employees acknowledge that Legal positively impacts sales and revenue operations. A similar number (53%) say Legal accelerates deal cycles –- a YoY increase of five percentage points.

LEGAL’S QUANTUM LEAP

A jump between energy levels by electrons orbiting within an atom is known, in the world of physics, as a quantum leap.

As enterprises control costs and overhaul operations, Legal needs to take a true quantum leap into the role of direct material influencer by becoming a more interactive partner that communicates effectively and responds efficiently. In fact, nearly half (43%) of ELR corporate employees specifically state that greater communication and collaboration is the most essential way Legal can support its internal clients, especially amid economic uncertainty.

Fission and fusion are quantum processes by which atoms change. Fission occurs when a neutron smashes into another atom, causing it to split. Fusion occurs when atoms amalgamate and merge. Vast amounts of energy are released by both, but fusion creates the most long-term impact –- as well as greater safety, stability, and sustainablity.

The same can be said of Legal, its internal clients, and executive teams as they continue to search for new strategies to achieve greater EBITDA and drive profitability in a positive and meaningful material way.

People. Process. Technology.

Interacting and collaborating with people.

Streamlining efficient processes.

Bringing people and process together with modern, innovative technology.

This is Legal’s moment of impact. It’s time for Legal to stand out as a business protector and partner in the eyes of its clients –- and these three elements can fuse to create a game-changing, materially successful, and future-proof legal department of tomorrow.

Read Chapter 1 of the 2023 ELR Report to discover new and enduring perceptions of the legal department, how corporate employees view their interactions and relationships with Legal, and ways in which Legal can evolve its brand image to more directly impact revenue generation, growth, and operational efficiency.

Onit Employees Support Ukraine War Charity Effort 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Company News and Events

Several Onit employees took time out of their calendars last week to help organize medical supplies for the war in Ukraine. The group — featuring members from Onit’s research and development, professional services, and administrative departments — volunteered at Medical Bridges in Houston. Medical Bridges is a nonprofit organization that collects medical donations from around the United States for distribution to healthcare workers worldwide. 

Onit donated $50,000 to Medical Bridges, sponsoring two crates full of critical medical supplies — everything from bandages and field trauma blankets to boot covers, hairnets, and gloves — to aid healthcare workers on the ground in Ukraine. Five Onit employees spent three hours sorting and boxing the crates at the Medical Bridges warehouse on Magnet Street in Houston. The team returned to the site this week to help assist with final shipment of the materials.

Sorting the supplies at Medical Bridges. From left to right: Joseph Jefferson, Jana Barlow, David Goldfarb, Meredith Page, and Abhi Rao of Onit.

For the volunteers, the effort hit home; AXDRAFT, one of the businesses in Onit’s family of companies, is headquartered in Ukraine.  

“The team in Ukraine is amazing,” Meredith Page, office manager and one of the volunteers, said. “They’re so positive and optimistic, even with everything happening over there. They’re really good people, and we’re proud to do anything we can to help out.” 

The final shipment ready to go. From left to right: Walter Ulrich, CEO of Medical Bridges; Trevonna Hendrix, Director of Global Health at Medical Bridges; Meredith Page, Tiffany Nguyen, and Nick Whitehouse of Onit.

“Donating to Medical Bridges is an honor, and we look forward to partnering with the organization again in the future to help care for those in need around the world,” Onit Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Eric Elfman said. 

ABOUT MEDICAL BRIDGES 

Medical Bridges is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to procuring medical and surgical supplies and equipment for donation to qualified providers of charitable medical care in developing countries. Medical Bridges was established in 1997 in Houston, TX. 

For more information on Medical Bridges, visit https://www.medicalbridges.org.  

Onit and its Family of Companies Earn Honors Through the First Half of 2022

Posted on June 30, 2022 by - Company News and Events

Onit is proud to announce that the Onit family of companies has received several prestigious awards through the first two quarters of 2022. These honors illustrate Onit’s rapid growth and commitment to innovation in the field of enterprise workflow solutions, underscoring its place as one of the industry’s leading providers. 

In just 18 months Onit made four acquisitions, boosted revenue and expanded its portfolio of AI-enabled software products as part of a commitment to product innovation. These efforts were made to ensure Onit continues to help customers modernize workflows that directly impact the operational efficiency of legal departments and, ultimately, the speed of revenue generation.

Onit’s awards this year include: 

  • American Best in Business, Grand Globee winner: Onit was named Grand Globee winner — ABB’s highest award, reserved for only ten companies each year — for its overall innovative expertise, rapid growth, and other factors.
  • Inc. Regionals, #53: Onit placed #53 on the Inc. Regionals list, the most distinguished ranking of the fastest-growing private companies based throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. 
  • HBJ Vet Owned Business, #1: Onit was named the Houston area’s #1 veteran-owned business (to qualify, companies must be at least 51% veteran-owned and certified, privately held and headquartered in the Houston area). 
  • American Best in Business, Gold Award for Best Research/Survey Report: Onit was recognized for its ELR (Enterprise Legal Reputation) Report exploring how the relationship between enterprise employees and legal departments affects their businesses.
  • American Best in Business, Bronze for Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year: Recognizing Onit’s successful integration of AI with existing products. 
  • Vet100 List, Collaboration between Inc. 5000 and Syracuse University: Onit was named to the annual Vet100, a placement collaboration between Inc. Magazine and Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families. 
  • Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Lifetime Achievement, Eric Elfman: The award recognizes Onit Founder and CEO’s Eric Elfman’s career achievements in the development and adoption of legal technologies and legal technology companies. 
  • Business Intelligence Group (BIG) Awards, AI Excellence: Awarded for Onit’s InvoiceAI software. Recognizes organizations, products and people who bring AI to life and apply it to solve real problems
  • Business Intelligence Group (BIG) Awards, Innovation: Awarded for Onit’s InvoiceAI software. Recognizes organizations, products, and people bringing new ideas to life in innovative ways. 
  • Houston Business Journal Middle Market 50, #10: Onit was named as one of the top 50 fastest growing companies in Houston (with revenue of $28 million to $1 billion). 
  • Houston Business Journal Fire Awards: Onit was recognized for overall growth, innovative ways of doing things, funding rounds, product launches and social impact. 
  • Austin Business Journal Best Tech Employer, #75: Onit earned placement on this list ranked by the number of direct local jobs provided.

Onit’s family of companies also earned honors through the first half of 2022:

  • CIO Review named SimpleLegal to its list of Top 30 Fastest Growing Tech Companies 2022. 
  • SimpleLegal’s Anggie Ramirez Perea, Head of Client Support, was named Manager of the Year in Business Intelligence Group (BIG)’s 2022 Excellence in Customer Service Awards for her work in leading a customer-centric support organization.
  • SimpleLegal’s Shri Iyer, Vice President, Products & Design, was recognized by The Software Report as one of its Top 25 Product Executives.
  • AXDRAFT was awarded American Best in Business Gold for Best Product, Service and Solution (small company category).

Leading from the Front: The Transformative Landscape of Legal Operations (CLOC 2022 Recap)

Posted on May 22, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The annual Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute 2022 just wrapped up in Las Vegas, gathering the most innovative and disruptive legal professionals from around the world for the event of the year. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to meet everyone in person and an absolute honor to sponsor the first in-person CLOC in two years. The networking was amazing and the learnings were invaluable. Here’s a recap of our week at CLOC.

CLOC 2022 in 5 key takeaways: There opportunity for meaningful change is here

  1. Embrace the connected enterprise. Legal departments do not operate in a silo. While it’s no secret that they are well-positioned to operationalize efficiencies, investing in relationships with other departments can have a significant impact on enterprises at large. Legal operations professionals benefit from learning the importance of building trust and relationships cross-departmentally, especially with IT, to deliver value and use that value as currency.
  2. Plan for workshop efficiency in your department. Legal is seeing many of the same trends that other departments face (increased costs, higher workloads, effects of inflation / post-Covid world) and need to be nimble in order to scale. Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons legal operations is important and growing so quickly. Its impact now and in the future is almost like a tidal wave hitting legal departments across the industry, but in the best of ways.
  3. Think of legal as a value creation center in the company. We’ve all heard about “running legal like a business.” Legal departments, great and small, no longer have the option of saying “no” to the concept of cutting-edge legal operations. We need to connect processes and the tech stack in a way that drives value rather than just reducing spend. When technology solution providers are aligned with core competencies, the legal department’s success already has a running head start.
  4. Meaningful change is needed in DE&I, CSR and ESG. Legal operations should be leading from the front on these programs. We need to infuse competence, compassion, courage, and tools to help each individual drive this transformation. Early diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts create a richer candidate pool of potential employees and result in significantly more diverse hires, but more work needs to be done in this area to get it right.
  5.  Defend your spend with data. Innovative legal operations leaders are pivoting their approach to managing outside counsel spend by using data to validate their spend and drive efficiency and savings. AI and machine learning present new opportunities to help corporate legal teams make better strategic decisions. Using legal business intelligence like comparative analytics and benchmarking, they are going beyond basic reporting to put spend in context with market insights. Market and panel benchmarking, firm report cards and comparative analytics can help strategically manage spend – and expectations from both firms and internal stakeholders.

CLOC 2022 in 5 quotes: Celebrating the resilience of the legal ops community

Quote 1

 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) has been a hot topic of conversation since last year and we’re not surprised to see it come up in this year’s CLOC Institute. Consilio’s session on how law firms and in-house teams can work collaboratively to measure, report, and improve law firm diversity showed that it’s no longer just a talking point; it’s also an action point.

Data is crucial to inform our conversations with law firms on their diversity. It’s harder to backtrack from a promise if it can be measured. However, measurability arose in question across many DE&I metric panels: How does legal ops handle the situation when attorneys choose not to disclose diversity status? The answer? “That’s a conversation you need to have with them. Why don’t they?”

It’s all about having these intentional conversations early on. While it may seem uncomfortable, legal operations has the power and flexibility to ask probing questions about underrepresented attorneys as clients of outside counsel. Legal ops also has the unique ability to share best practices they see their organization and other outside counsel practicing. “We don’t want to ask anything of our outside counsel firms that we’re not committed to doing ourselves.”

The takeaway? Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. To enact lasting change in the industry, we’re all working together to improve and support DE&I objectives with clear visibility into the data.

Quote 2

Working collaboratively has shown to be of great importance, especially when remote and hybrid workplaces are a lot more commonplace for legal ops now. In this session, we partnered with our parent company Onit to show how the foundation of communication begins with trust. Trust that your team will deliver value to the individuals you work with, to other departments, and to the overall business. That trust will pay off unexpected dividends, whether your team is part of a scaling business or a well-established enterprise.

That trust also connects back to any initiatives you bring up to the wider organization. Connecting back to our previous quote on DE&I, having that trust means that legal is at a prime position to mold the department and organization goals. Legal already has a reputation for being an unapproachable authority figure in the organization. When we meet, connect, and share some humanity, stopping and listening allows us to better meet the needs of the people we’re working with.

The takeaway? Make establishing a good working relationship with other departments a priority. We’re all here to ensure the business flourishes. You protect the business from external risks better when you’re not facing avoidable internal strife.

Quote 3

 

While this specific session may have been addressing contract legal management (CLM) users, we can apply this mindset to any technology solution. Like this attendee said, technology will never solve your problems if you don’t have a clear understanding of how it will improve your processes. And it seems like at least half of legal ops professionals are missing that essential understanding part if we take this audience as a microcosm of the larger community.

Would you use a screwdriver to hammer down a nail? Probably not (unless you’re desperate and don’t have anything better on hand at the moment). Likewise, technology is a tool at the end of the day. Whether or not it’s being used effectively all depends on the user. In legal speak, that’s you and your team. Having fancy technology to address your pain points might seem great at first, but it’s a bandage solution in the end. Kind of like forcing a circular peg into a square hole.

You wouldn’t start building a house without understanding exactly how loose wood, stone, and metal end up becoming a solid structure capable of withstanding wear and tear. So why shouldn’t your approach to bringing on new legal technology be the same?

The takeaway? Understanding your processes is key. From there, you and your team have the ability to convince others on why you need technology to improve them and how you will go about doing it.

Quote 4

 

On the topic of technology, we think we can accurately predict the trend for the rest of the year. The top priority for current and future transformative legal ops initiatives is digitizing their processes. That dominated every other topic at a whopping 54% in this panel, beating out the next emphasis on spend management by 34%. The need for technology has continued to increase in the face of a changing workforce and work environment.

This is fantastic news, especially in an industry that has traditionally been slow to embrace change. It’s not an exaggeration to say that law firms are still using spreadsheets to track their data even if many law firms are phasing into more secure tech solutions. However, what exactly does digitization of processes mean? An audience member raised an excellent counterpoint. What are the outcomes you want to drive by digitizing processes? And which processes? We know that one legal team’s answers will differ from another legal team. After all, no journey is exactly the same. But wanting to digitize processes is a great sign that many legal departments are ready to take the next step of maturing their legal operations function.

The takeaway? Legal technology is not a fad.

Quote 5

Why do we as in-house legal professionals do what we do? We’re here to facilitate risk for sure. But another powerful ability we have is enacting change on a scale beyond our departments. With spending power over outside counsel and protection over the business from external risk, in-house legal teams are in a unique position to become agents of change.

And how do we do that? As this session shows, we flip the script. We’re not here to be the heroes of the story. We’re here to ensure the end user is the hero. The end user can be anyone: the finance department your team is collaborating with to manage outside counsel, the wider organization you’re serving and its goals, or even the clients of whatever your organization provides. We’re the special tool they leverage. By empowering the end user, we enact change.

The takeaway? The legal operations community continues to innovate. Our ability to enact change as legal ops professionals are only limited by our imagination. You can always try again with a new perspective.