Category: Contract Lifecycle Management

Onit’s AI for eBilling Review Takes Home an Innovation Award

Posted on February 8, 2022 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

We’re excited to announce that Onit has won a prestigious Business Intelligence Group (BIG) 2022 Innovation Award for our AI-enabled eBilling validation and processing technology, InvoiceAI. The awards program recognizes organizations, products and people bringing new ideas to life in innovative ways.

InvoiceAI debuted to customers in May of 2021 and then launched publicly four months later in September. It works with Onit’s enterprise legal management solution and traditional billing rules to conduct a first-pass review of outside counsel and vendor ebills submitted to corporate legal departments. Since AI and machine learning power it, it understands context, learns and can identify additional potentially noncompliant charges on top of what billing rules have already found.

This is the next evolution of eBilling review. Traditional billing rules rely on set parameters to identify invoices containing noncompliant line items, such as a specific word or series of words. Suppose a law firm or legal vendor uses billing descriptions that are similar but differ from what is outlined in the billing rules. In that case, an invoice may be automatically approved for payment.

How InvoiceAI Addresses eBilling Review Challenges

The review of a high number of invoices and their collective dollar total have challenged large corporate legal departments for decades. They’re often pressed to accomplish more in less time with fewer resources and lack the bandwidth to chase corrections or parse a large number of warnings. And they’re faced with invoice issues that include vague or insufficient details, block billing, improper coding of invoices and work being done by the wrong staff class. All of these issues are difficult for traditional billing rules to uncover and sort.

InvoiceAI finds issues such as administrative tasks and improper billing for time during travel and then integrates these findings with ELM and existing rules engines for a more intelligent eBilling review that continuously learns. As a result:

  • Attorneys can quickly review invoices
  • Legal operations can identify noncompliant billing guidelines and harvest early savings
  • General counsel can gain greater visibility into law firm performance and legal spend metrics.

As one customer commented:

“Now, our invoice review team doesn’t have to feel like the bad guy. The machine catches these issues (and does it better) so that we can focus on the relationships and let the system drive the needed action.”

Historical and Real-Time eBilling Review – Results

Before its public launch, InvoiceAI combed through the eBilling from 2020 for a set of Fortune 500 customers. It identified an average of six figures of savings in travel-related billed time and expenses submitted to the customers during the onset of COVID-19 when travel was severely restricted. These were invoices previously sent through traditional billing rules, meaning these savings surpassed what had already been found.

InvoiceAI yields positive results for real-time invoice review as well. When it is used with ELM and billing rules, some Onit customers have found up to 20% in savings.

Continuing AI Excellence

InvoiceAI is one of the latest AI innovations Onit has introduced since the founding of its AI Center of Excellence in 2020. Since then, we have released four other AI offerings in addition to InvoiceAI:

  • Precedent, an AI platform that automates and improves both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals and procurement teams.
  • ReviewAI, which quickly drafts, reviews, redlines and edits all types of contracts.
  • ExtractAI, AI which extracts and obtains usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.
  • Automate NDA, an easy-to-implement, best practice AI solution that helps you manage and automate the end-to-end non-disclosure agreement process.

How to Learn More About InvoiceAI

Interested in learning more about InvoiceAI and how it helps eBilling? Start here or request a demonstration.  You can also learn more about AI and corporate legal with these blog posts:

Current Legal News for Corporate Counsel (February 2022 Edition)

Posted on February 1, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Once more, we offer current legal news for corporate legal departments. This month’s edition includes a chipmunk lawyer, what the global legal market has in common with Apple, rethinking the title “in-house counsel,” associate pay raises and how better contract management can increase revenue.

1. The Global Legal Market On Track to Join the Trillionaire’s Club

Is the value of the global legal market joining the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet? These companies have famously broken the billion-dollar mark, cresting into the trillions in market value. A new report places the current global legal market at almost $900 billion and predicts a 4.4% compound annual growth rate through 2028 – meaning it will hit more than a trillion dollars by that time. Artificial Lawyer looks into why legal is snowballing and what it can mean for legal technology.

Source: Artificial Lawyer

2. Introducing the Chipmunk Lawyer

First, we got the lawyer cat, when an attorney had an incredibly adorable (and hard to remove) furry filter during a virtual hearing. We now have another video conferencing mishap in current legal news. This time, a faulty microphone converted a lawyer’s voice into a frequency and speed that Alvin, Simon and Theodore would appreciate. Fortunately, Judge Roy Ferguson – who also presided during the lawyer cat case – quickly identified the glitch and helped fix it.

Source: Above The Law

3. Is It Time to Ditch the Term “In-House Counsel”?

What are you called if you are an attorney working in a corporate legal department? Some may jump to “in-house counsel.” It’s long been an industry term. But corporate counsel may want to reset it. A CLO sparks a spirited debate about the title on LinkedIn. Spoiler alert: He isn’t a fan. Others in the same profession jumped into the conversation, talking about its pros and cons and offering alternative titles like “house counsel,” “internal counsel” and “crisis and strategy counsel.”

Source: Corporate Counsel

4. More Associate Pay Hikes for Law Firms, According to Current Legal News Outlets

International law firm Milbank announced an increase of up to $20,000 in pay for associates, creating a new salary range of $215,000 to $385,000. Many other firms, including Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper and Goodwin are following suit, according to the ABA Journal (who also relied on Above The Law, Law.com and Reuters). This follows a similar pattern from last year as law firms focus on staying competitive and retaining top talent. Corporate legal departments may feel conflicted about the raise since higher salaries can contribute to higher law firm bills. This blog post has a few pointers for those looking for tips to contain legal spend.

Source: ABA Journal

5. How Improved Contract Management Increases Revenue 9%

Improving how your company manages the lifecycle of contracts can bring impressive bottom-line benefits. The World Commerce & Contracting organization estimates that enhanced contract development and management can increase profitability to the tune of 9% of a company’s annual revenue. Here’s how technology like AI and automation replaces manual processes to create stronger contract management.

Source: Onit

We hope you enjoyed this digest of current legal news for corporate counsel. If you’re interested in learning more about how corporate legal departments use technologies like enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, AI and more, schedule an Onit demo today or email [email protected].

Onit Acquires SecureDocs, Extending Contract Management to New and Rapidly Growing Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 11, 2022 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

SecureDocs - ContractWorks - ReadySignA little over two years ago, Onit launched its contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, helping Fortune 500 companies streamline the complex processes of buy-side, sell-side and corporate contract administration. The solution quickly gained popularity with enterprises who found that they could shorten sales cycles, speed up revenue generation, improve risk mitigation and strengthen collaboration across departments.

Since the launch, Onit has continued on the path of innovation by introducing new CLM products, including:

  • ReviewAI, technology that uses AI to review and redline contracts in two minutes or less, resulting in a productivity increase of up to 52%.
  • Smart Checklists, which creates checklists made up of concrete, task-based actions that are generated from your company playbook.
  • ExtractAI, software that obtains usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts and turns it into actionable information.
  • Automate NDA, which removes manual work from high-volume and often low-value NDAs, resulting in faster agreement execution and a significant reduction in end-to-end processing time.

The Next Phase of CLM Expansion

Now, we’re excited to announce that we have expanded our CLM market reach with the acquisition of SecureDocs. SecureDocs augments Onit’s portfolio with a contract management solution ideally suited for companies that have new or rapidly scaling corporate legal departments.

SecureDocs, based in Santa Barbara, California, is a software company specializing in contract management software that can be set up in minutes (ContractWorks), a data room that streamlines the entire deal process (SecureDocs), and secure, legally binding electronic signatures (ReadySign). Its solutions have helped customers effectively manage more than 13 million contracts and documents across 96 countries.

Many midsize companies rely on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails to manage legal obligations. While these tools are readily available, they limit transparency and efficiency when it comes to contract management. ContractWorks from SecureDocs dramatically increases contract visibility, minimizes risk and ensures customers don’t miss renewal dates. Since it can be set up in minutes, it provides an effective and easy-to-deploy solution with a fast time-to-value.

SecureDocs and SimpleLegal

SecureDocs will integrate with SimpleLegal, Onit’s legal operations management software subsidiary.The companies share a similar approach to building simple, intuitive software. Together, they will provide solutions to streamline operations and offer greater efficiency for scaling legal departments.

As with all of Onit’s acquisitions, we are investing in SecureDocs, its employees and its products. We are excited to welcome the entire SecureDocs team to Onit and will continue to develop all of the company’s products.

Onit’s Growth and Expanded Market Reach

SecureDocs joins Onit at a time of exponential growth. In addition to SecureDocs, Onit has acquired four other companies in the past 15 months, including:

  • BusyLamp, a premier provider of legal spend and matter management software for European corporate legal departments.
  • Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking, and market intelligence company.
  • AXDRAFT, a document automation provider.
  • McCarthyFinch, a legal AI innovator.

These acquisitions follow Onit’s first acquisition, SimpleLegal, which closed in May 2019.

To learn more about our acquisitions and products, customers are invited to reach out to their account managers or customer success managers.

The State of Law Department Operations, According to the Professionals Who Run Them

Posted on January 4, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Running the legal department like a business is the norm now. One of the most interesting surveys exploring this concept is the Blickstein Group’s Annual Law Department Operations Survey. Its 14th annual edition showcases the evolution of law department operations and shares insights from the operations professionals themselves as they rank their challenges, effectiveness and technologies.

Not surprisingly, one of the most significant themes is doing more with less. Lean legal continues to be a top priority in many corporate legal departments, as they work to drive efficiencies and control costs.

Let’s explore some of the most intriguing takeaways.

Top Law Department Operations Challenges

Law department operations professionals identified their three top challenges, which include business process improvements (59.7%), cost containment and savings/managing the budget (49.3%) and staying abreast of law department technology/managing and handling IT issues (35.8%).

Considering how LDOs spend their time, business process improvements – powered by automation – can play a crucial role in improving what they can accomplish. According to the report, the average survey participant devotes more than a quarter of their time to three areas:

  1. Cost savings, cost efficiency, cost management
  2. Outside counsel management
  3. Vendor management

(FYI: You can read about how ADM conquered vendor management challenges with their App. It  addressed three problems hindering efficiency: standardizing vendor approval,  automating engagement letter creation and execution, and streamlining the RFP process.)

For outside counsel management, most of the participants said they directly handle tracking legal spend, managing billing/audits and negotiating discounts and alternative billing arrangements. These directly link to what respondents said was their top key performance indicator: Actual spend vs. the law department’s total budget.

What Law Departments Are Most Effective At, According to LDOs

While there are always challenges, LDOs indicated that law departments are doing well on the operations front. When asked to rate their law department’s effectiveness, several areas took the lead. Eighty percent said their overall law department operations were “very effective” or “somewhat effective.” Sixty-five percent said the same for financial management and business client engagement and strategic partnering, and more than 60% responded likewise for legal technology.

On the flip side, 60.8% said they were either very ineffective or somewhat ineffective at document management, 48% said the same for alternative fee arrangements and 41.5% agreed that they lacked effectiveness around contract management.

Legal Technology Purchases for 2022

What impact did the pandemic have on digital transformation? According to the LDOs who answered the survey, it accelerated it. Twenty-six percent said it sped up digital transformation substantially, and another 46% agreed that it sped it up marginally.

With that in mind, what legal technologies are LDOs interested in evaluating or implementing this year?

 

34.5% Pre-execution contract management
34.5% Post-execution contract management
32.8% Document/contract assembly
29.8% Workflow/business process automation tools
29.8% Legal service intake/work intake
29.3% Matter management
28.1% Legal spend management

Legal operations are all about optimizing the law department’s ability to help grow the company. This requires a higher level of operational excellence, as evidenced by the embracing and reliance on innovation, increasing demand for automation of repetitive tasks and a workflow-centric approach. For legal departments still in their early stage of tech implementation, Onit’s Senior VP of Strategy and Growth, Brad Rogers, wrote a great article (in the survey) that offers valuable tips on creating digital transformation. Included are his “top five ideas” for companies pursuing such change.

You can read all the LDO survey results here.

Other resources that might interest you include:

 

Having Contract Management Issues? Here’s How CLM and AI Can Help.

Posted on December 14, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

Many sales, procurement and corporate legal departments struggle with contract management issues. The issues may seem mundane – too much manual work, a lack of visibility or slow responses – but together, the issues collectively (and quickly) slow down valuable revenue-generating efforts or can lead to regulatory breaches.

Comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions can defeat contract management issues by automating and standardizing processes and decreasing risk and manual work. They streamline the entire contract lifecycle and provide ease of use for all parties. With the ability to have unlimited users and an intuitive, user-friendly interface, these solutions dramatically improve supplier and vendor relationships and overall customer satisfaction.

How Your CLM Defeats Contract Management Issues

What should you look for in a CLM solution to overcome contract management issues? Consider this list of necessities.

  • Automatically generate contracts – The CLM software should allow you to save time and reduce risk by automatically creating a contract with the appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Work where you want to work – Most lawyers rely on Microsoft Word for contracts. An MS Word integration maintains seamless version control and secure links to the CLM software.
  • Let stakeholders help themselves – With a self-service portal, partners and clients can quickly request, submit or create contracts. Contracts can be automatically assigned and tracked, increasing visibility and improving turnaround time.
  • Reduce risks with less work – Manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance via a dedicated dashboard and reporting. Likewise, automated risk mitigation in a CLM identifies clauses and terms which add risk to your agreement and scores your contract repository to assist you in both negotiations and renegotiations.
  • A quick time to value – A CLM solution on an advanced cloud platform means your CLM solution can be deployed in 30 days or less.

The Role of AI in Contract Lifecycle Management – And How it Helps You

In recent years, AI has taken businesses by storm, gaining recognition for its rapid evolution and considerable accomplishments. From driving cars to diagnosing illnesses, it continues to prove its value to all industries.

Contract management is no different. Sales, procurement and corporate legal departments have the opportunity to benefit from AI during the contract lifecycle, realizing increased efficiency from technology that not only understands their organization but learns and continually improves.

As you look for AI-based CLM tools, here is what you should expect in your chosen technology.

  • Out-of-the-box functionality from day one – Your CLM AI should work for you from day one by being pretrained and coming with thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts.
  • Faster review – Need a first-pass contract review in two minutes or less? Your CLM AI can do this, quashing some common contract management issues.
  • Easy edit tracking –Open a contract in Word or PDF to view AI redlines with track changes and commentary.
  • Checklists to streamline review – AI tracks and assigns alerts for reviewers with interactive, automated tasks within Microsoft Word.
  • Identify negotiation positions – Obtain suggested primary and fallback positions directly connected to your checklists with AI.
  • Empower users – Business professionals can get an AI-assisted review of standard contracts like NDAs through email or a self-service portal.
  • Review in batches – AI can extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts. You can also automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value M&A tasks.
  • Accelerate repapering – AI will amend or redline contract details and key terms due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes or M&A activities.
  • Quick analysis and management – Your CLM AI will identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents. It can also analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.
  • Large-scale contract review – Audit compliance with AI during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.

The Results

How much of an impact can AI and CLM have on contract management issues? CLM solutions can help you save 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20% or more.

A study of how legal AI contract review software affects in-house lawyers’ productivity showed that new users were immediately 51.5% more productive and 34% more efficient. And with post-signature contract AI, you improve efficiency by increasing the amount of data analyzed while reviewing and exporting data in five seconds or less.

As an example, consider what CLM AI can do for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). NDAs are the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today, with our customers telling us that they process anywhere between 500 and 100,000 NDAs every year. Processing that volume of contracts, no matter how standardized or routine, quickly adds up in cost and creates a real risk of spreading your legal department employees too thin. However, applying AI and CLM best practices can automate NDA management and cut time spent on them by up to 70%. This blog post shows you how this works.

Reach out to us to learn more or schedule a demonstration of our contract lifecycle management and contract AI, including ReviewAI, ExtractAI and Automate NDA.

 

How to Find the Latest Updates in the Legal Operations Software Market

Posted on September 30, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The legal operations software market is rapidly evolving, thanks to technologies such as AI and the ever-growing operational sophistication of corporate legal departments.

Fortunately, a slew of resources are available for those interested in legal operations and the technology that turbocharges it, including:

  • The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) – A community of legal operations experts focused on redefining the business of law. In addition to releasing its yearly State of the Industry Report, it offers programming worldwide, educational resources and online connections for its membership.
  • The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) – Founded in 1981, this legal organization represents, guides and supports the global in-house counsel community in over 85 countries. In addition to valuable programming and online resources, it hosts the annual ACC Value Champions awards program, which highlights leaders in improving costs, predictability and outcomes.
  • Corporate Counsel – This magazine explores corporate legal department trends and challenges and how innovative legal leaders respond to them.

These are only a few of the resources available. And now, there’s one more.

A Podcast for the Legal Operations Software Market

Over the past several years, we’ve been tackling some of the most significant issues in legal ops, automation and more through a series of podcasts. Now, we’ve collected them all in one place, so that anyone in corporate legal can hear candid discussions on some of the latest news and advances in the legal operations software market.

Podcast highlights include:

  • How BT Enacted its Award-Winning Digital Transformation – In less than a year, BT transformed its global legal department, creating award-winning operations that judges described as admirable “not only due to the speed of their roll-out of the platform, but by taking an existing process and migrating it into a streamlined, efficient platform.” In less than three months, the company has been awarded the Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and joined the shortlist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law awards. In this episode, David Griffin, Head of Legal Technology and Change at BT, shares how this happened.
  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Reviewing and managing NDAs is a pain in the neck for in-house counsel. They’re the highest-volume contracts handled by businesses today. In fact, some corporate legal departments tell us they process between 500 and 100,000 a year. That’s a lot of time and cost that can be redirected to other contributions. Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how AI and automation are transforming the NDA process – in some cases shaving the time spent on NDA processing by 70%.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, former Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune 100 global financial services company with more than $1 trillion in assets under management and 14,000 employees globally (and now SVP of Strategy and Growth for Onit), shares his insights into what goes into creating world-class legal ops. While budget is an essential factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Everyone from tech companies to industry influencers tells lawyers what they need from AI. And, if there’s one thing about lawyers, they don’t generally like being told what they like. Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, a lawyer and technologist, talks about ways legal and contract AI technologies are actually giving lawyers what they need.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Surveys – both formal and informal – show a rising interest in contract lifecycle management (CLM). As interest grows in this technology, how can legal operations professionals cut through the hype to find ROI? Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses unique ways to find CLM ROI.
  • Ten Years of Onit: Stories from the Companies’ Co-Founders – How do four very different and strong-minded people come together to create one of the leading companies in the legal operations software market? Well, there’s success in dysfunction. In this podcast, Onit’s co-founders share their journey from startup to scaleup.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here. Be sure to like our podcast LinkedIn page to get the latest episodes. You can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal ops through AI and automation, schedule a demo or reach out to [email protected].

Onit Acquires BusyLamp, a Premier Provider of Enterprise Legal Management Software in Europe

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

The Onit family of enterprise legal management software providers has grown today with our acquisition of BusyLamp. We are now one of the largest enterprise legal management conglomerates globally, with more than 600 implementations completed worldwide by Onit and its subsidiaries.

Who Is BusyLamp?

BusyLamp, based in Frankfurt, Germany, serves in-house counsel with the information, data, trust and tools they need so they can focus on the strategic tasks that matter most. Founded in 2012 by co-CEO Dr. Michael Tal, co-CEO Dr. Manuel Meder and CTO Konstantin Tadrowski, the company has been recognized by Hyperion Research as “highly innovative” and a “market leader.” Corporate legal leaders across sectors including automotive, telecommunications and banking rely on its award-winning eBilling.Space and recently launched matter management solution Matter.Space every day.

BusyLamp joins Onit as an independent subsidiary.

What Does This Mean for Onit and Enterprise Legal Management Software?

The acquisition of BusyLamp makes Onit one of the largest ELM software providers in the world, capable of meeting the requirements of any corporate legal department.

It also aligns with several of Onit’s top strategic priorities, including continuing to innovate through disruption, expanding our presence worldwide and pursuing rapid growth. This acquisition, along with the acquisitions of SimpleLegal and Bodhala, positions Onit as one of the largest global conglomerates of ELM software providers and offers an even broader pool of best practices and best-of-breed technologies to help us serve customers around the world.

BusyLamp expands Onit’s existing presence in Europe with some of the brightest minds in legal technology abroad – experts deeply embedded in the local community who understand the challenges and complexities of the business of law in Europe and beyond. To complement the expertise, BusyLamp also brings an industry-leading offering well-equipped for considerations such as VAT, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and regional tax policies.

Continued Legal Technology Disruption and Product Innovation

Onit is continually looking to innovate and expand our offerings for our customers and throughout the legal space. Acquisitions play a pivotal role in our commitment to this.

The BusyLamp acquisition is the fourth for Onit in less than 12 months and the fifth overall.

In 2019, Onit acquired SimpleLegal, modern legal operations software provider. Onit acquired legal AI innovator McCarthyFinch in 2020, establishing its AI Center of Excellence. Thirty days later, document automation provider AXDRAFT joined the Onit family of companies. Most recently, Onit announced the acquisition of Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence company.

Like BusyLamp, SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT and Bodhala all operate as independent subsidiaries of Onit.

In addition to acquiring disruptive companies, Onit also continues to innovate its product offerings – especially for AI. In less than 12 months, Onit has introduced five AI-based offerings to optimize critical business processes for corporate legal departments.

Onit’s InvoiceAI, which debuted to customers in May, uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments increase potential savings and reduce time reviewing invoices from outside counsel and legal vendors. Onit released the news in this video announcement. On average, InvoiceAI identifies an extra 10-20% in potential savings in addition to enterprise legal management and bill review savings.

In addition to InvoiceAI, Onit also offers:

  • Precedent, an AI-based business intelligence platform
  • ReviewAI, AI technology that reviews and redlines contracts in less than two minutes
  • ExtractAI, which analyzes, reviews and exports contract data in seconds
  • Automate NDA, a best practice solution that helps automate and manage the NDA process, reducing end-to-end processing time by 70%

Learn More about BusyLamp and Onit

To learn more about BusyLamp, visit www.BusyLamp.com, or you can request a demo here.

You can request a demo of Onit’s highly configurable platforms and solutions here.

Customers of Onit and BusyLamp can reach out to their account managers to find out more about the acquisition.

Four Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Contract Management Platform

Posted on September 21, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Has your corporate legal department been struggling to figure out ways to cut down time spent on contracts, reduce the average sales cycle and find a better way to manage buy-side, sell-side and corporate contracts? Contract management platforms offer the ideal technology to help on all counts.

You may be at the stage where you’re considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to help you reach these goals, but are unsure about how to proceed. You’ve likely already heard and read about all the benefits of using a premier CLM solution. After all, it’s a technology many corporate legal departments have prioritized, and you’ve probably already reviewed resources or spoken with vendors. We’d like to take a different angle here and tell you about four common mistakes to avoid when evaluating a CLM solution.

Four Common Mistakes Encountered When Considering A Contract Management Platform

  1. Believing That A Cutting-Edge CLM Solution Is Not Worth The Cost Of Investment.

For several years, the new paradigm has been to do more with less money and fewer resources. Technology has increasingly played a prominent role as legal operations focus on achieving objectives with “less.”

Driving efficiencies and controlling costs in the legal department are being borne, to a significant degree, by well-chosen technology solutions and legal operations managers who understand this are taking action. For example, Onit’s contract management platform streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk in the process and enables departments to save an average of 9% annually, reduce the average sales cycle by 24% and reduce by 20% the average hours spent on contracts.

  1. Assuming That Staff Reduction Will Be Possible With Your CLM Implementation

It’s true that a good CLM offering streamlines the entire contract lifecycle. It provides ease of use for all parties involved while reducing risk and enabling departments to save valuable time. The ideal contract management platform also makes quick work of many processes, relieving staff of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Having said that, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can save even more money with staff reductions. It’s a better strategy to remember that while you’re automating many processes and some staff functions may change or even be eliminated, staff reductions are usually not the best option in many cases.

  1. Forgetting About AI When Selecting Your Solution

Many legal departments already know how well CLM products empower legal and business teams with an enhanced contract management process. Some key benefits are conditional contract generation, MS Word integration, document management, secure collaboration and eSignature integrations.

With all that, what could be missing? Integrated artificial intelligence.

For example, in the pre-signature contract phase, the AI engine provides a first-pass review of the contract and annotates it based on your company’s checklist, playbook and information learned from AI models. By allowing a lawyer to focus on the medium- to high-risk areas, your legal team can reduce contract lead times, automate guidance and proactively address common pain points in the legal workflow.

In the post-signature contract phase, AI-driven data extraction allows you to complete projects at scale and at a fraction of the time manual processes take. Additionally, you can gain powerful insight from your contracts in real-time when coupled with a contract lifecycle management solution.

  1. Implementing a CLM Solution That Doesn’t Have All The Bells And Whistles

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process and are ready to implement your new CLM technology. It’s zero hour, and one of the staff asks you if the solution provides for automated risk mitigation – which somehow didn’t come up during the selection process. You learn that this system doesn’t have that feature, and now you’re wondering what other vital elements may be missing. Depending on your specific needs, here are five other features that are must-haves:

  • Conditional Contract Generation: Automatically generate a contract with appropriate clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata.
  • Routing and Approval Workflow: The ability to design and build simple to complex workflows to generate and route your contracts.
  • Obligation Management: Give your users the power to manage and measure tasks or milestones related to compliance.
  • Clause/Template Library: Manage and maintain contract clauses and templates in a centralized and secure cloud-based location.
  • Partner and Client Self-Service: Provide partners and clients an easy-to-use portal to request, submit, or create contracts.

It can undoubtedly be overwhelming trying to determine the best route to take in your digital transformation project. There are contract management platforms out there for practically every budget – meaning there is no longer a good reason not to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Still, the best advice is to go into your implementation with realistic expectations, a good understanding of exactly what your department needs and a plan to avoid common mistakes.

If you’d like to learn more about contract lifecycle management, here are some additional resources:

Creating Custom Legal Software: The Apps and Solutions Legal Operations Pros Are Building Themselves

Posted on September 9, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

To meet the needs of today’s modern corporate legal department, many legal operations professionals are creating their own custom legal software. And here’s what they’re building.

But first, let’s take a look at the past year and a half.

Corporate legal departments completed many nimble adjustments as they’ve faced new challenges and demands. Legal operations professionals play a vital role in this success, finding ways to make it easier for lawyers to work while bringing in more efficiency, cost savings and other benefits of operational excellence.

Technology undoubtedly plays a role in supporting these endeavors, bringing automation and AI to systems like enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. However, even the most customized solutions must have the flexibility to evolve with a corporate legal department’s needs – especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise.

Building Your Own Custom Legal Software

Custom-built software for legal traditionally seems like a luxury, requiring precise planning, contributors across multiple departments and a good piece of the budget. But now, with technology innovations, legal operations pros can create Apps (and combine Apps into solutions) quickly and efficiently. They do this with tools that simplify the process and offer no-code-needed interfaces.

Business automation platforms and App builders with drag-and-drop visual interfaces make the creation process more accessible for those unfamiliar with coding. Instead of relying on developers, they can use a platform and its simplified interface to program the software. The key is indeed the underlying business process automation platform, which acts as a blank canvas. While it supports large solutions for legal spend, contract management and matter management, it also supplies the flexibility to enhance those solutions with complementary Apps, create new Apps altogether and combine Apps into solutions to tackle more complex challenges.

A perfect example of this in action is Hack the House, our inaugural virtual hackathon. Five teams comprised of in-house legal professionals, consultants and business analysts identified business cases and built Apps to solve complex workflow challenges in less than three weeks. They created solutions for data breach incident reporting, career development, diversity and pro bono program management. The winning team took it a step further by creating multiple Apps and combining them into a solution to streamline trademark renewal decisions and track trade secrets.

As impressive as that sounds, we’ve seen custom legal software built even faster – with Apps up and running in as little as an hour.

What Legal Operations Is Building

To date, the Onit Nation – Onit’s master App builders, customers and strategic partners – have used the Apptitude platform to build more than 5,500 Apps to solve everyday business problems. Among them are several custom legal software solutions that are helping to automate and accelerate nearly all aspects of legal operations, and we’ve collected many of them in our new App Catalog.

Our corporate legal customers have been prolific in building Apps and solutions. In addition to the Apps mentioned for Hack the House, other Apps have been created to handle:

  • Board Kit Distribution: Centralizes board of director information and notifies board members of new or revised documents while giving them access to the most current information
  • Ethics Violations: Provides intake and oversight for ethics violations and consolidates all ethics cases in one place for better oversight, collaboration and management
  • Gifts and Business Entertainment: Provides robust workflows and automation on gift and business entertainment requests company-wide to improve compliance with relevant policies
  • Settlement Authority Request and Approval: Provides a workflow for approving documents that detail settlement authority requests
  • Task Assignment: Handles task assignments made to non-departmental resources
  • Whistleblower: Provides anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought to you by employees and allows you to organize, assess and manage whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized, workflow-driven solution

These are examples of just some of what our customers have created to automate processes and solve pressing issues. In fact, the Apps work across the enterprise, automating processes with HR, marketing, risk and compliance, accounting, finance, procurement and more. Peruse the App Catalog now to find even more inspiration to revolutionize workflows and increase efficiency.

To get started with building custom legal software on Onit’s no-code business process automation platform Apptitude, schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.