Category: Digital Transformation

The Latest in Corporate Counsel and Legal Technology News (January 2022 Edition)

Posted on January 20, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

Welcome to the January digest of leading legal technology news and resources for in-house counsel and legal operations professionals. In this edition, you’ll read about the issues shaping legal and legal technology as we enter the new year, including an expected increase in legal disputes, the legal technology that’s helping GCs succeed and the possibility that the elusive sabbatical may come to the in-house world.

1. Almost a Third of Global Companies Expect Disputes To Increase In 2022, Study Finds

According to a recent report from global law firm Baker McKenzie, almost one-third of the world’s companies expect to see an increase in disputes in 2022. Not surprisingly, issues related to COVID-19 and cybersecurity – two of the most significant challenges in the past year – are expected to be the biggest threats. Specifically, 57% of respondents said cybersecurity disputes were most concerning for their companies, while 48% saw the pandemic as creating the greatest exposure to potential legal disputes. As we move forward in the coming year, companies should be braced for an uptick in court filings.

Source: The Global Legal Post

2. The Software That Lets GCs Showcase Their Value

In recent years, legal technology has played a significant role in helping in-house counsel juggle the competing demands of getting more done for their companies while keeping costs to a minimum. Jared Correia recently sat down with guests (including Matt DenOuden, SVP of Global Sales for Onit) in the latest episode of his Above the Law’s Non-Eventcast podcast to discuss just that. The episode focuses on how in-house counsel can best leverage matter management and legal spend management software to help lower overhead and improve operations. You can listen to the full podcast on Apple and Spotify.

Source: Above The Law

3. The Latest Perk for In-House Lawyers: Sabbaticals

Here’s an interesting trend for those keeping up on legal technology news: Time off! We all know a lawyer or two who could use a break, especially after the past couple of years. The good news is that more might soon get one. Sabbaticals have not often been included in in-house counsel compensation packages. However, a record number of attorneys left the workforce in 2021, mainly due to burnout, increased personal demands, a need for more flexibility and other concerns prompted by the pandemic. This has some corporations rethinking their stance on sabbaticals. Many recruiters are positing that employers might start using sabbaticals as a means of attempting to retain top talent in a competitive legal market.

Source: Law.com

4. The Top Legal Technology News Stories of 2021

There’s no question that 2021 was a year of ups, downs and everything in between for legal technology news. Here, technology evangelist and lawyer Nicole Black lays out the top five legal tech news stories that dominated headlines last year for the ABA Journal. The stories include the evolution of remote work, the uptick in cybersecurity risks, the significant increase in resignations in the legal industry at the associate level, the prevalence of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations in the legal tech space (including Onit’s acquisitions of Bodhala and BusyLamp), and significant legal tech IPOs that occurred in 2021.

Source: ABA Journal

(PS: Onit recently announced its latest acquisition, SecureDocs, which brings contract management to SMB customers. You can read more about it here.)

5.  Legalweek Conference Shifts to March

COVID-19 continues to disrupt conference season. This time, Omicron concerns have pushed  Legalweek. One of the leading conferences for legal technology news and advances is moving from the last week of January to March 8-11. If you’re registered, you don’t have to change a thing except  your hotel reservations. The conference, which legal thought leader Bob Ambrogi estimates to be in its 40th year, welcomes thousands of lawyers, in-house counsel, legal operations leaders and legal IT professionals each year.

Source: LawSites

We look forward to bringing you more news and insights as the new year progresses. As always, if you want to learn more about our legal business solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, AI and more, schedule a demo today or email [email protected].

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:

 

How Legal Hold Products Help Your Company Preserve Electronically Stored Information

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

At a time when the amount of worldwide electronic data approaches hundreds and hundreds of zettabytes, preserving data represents a sizeable challenge for many companies. Many turn to legal hold products to accomplish this.

Companies have a duty to demonstrate that they have exercised the proper care to preserve and collect digital evidence and ensure that the entire organization is not at risk. This duty arises at the point in time when litigation is reasonably anticipated, whether the organization is the initiator or the target of litigation.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e) states that when “electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery,” the court may take certain actions. The actions may include sanctions or fines totaling millions of dollars for companies who fail to act.

A legal hold, or litigation hold, is a notification to a company or individuals that material or data regarding an active or anticipated legal proceeding shouldn’t be destroyed. However, it doesn’t guarantee that the material will be preserved. Actual preservation is the responsibility of the notified organization’s leadership and employees involved. Legal hold products can help alleviate the worry and help you sleep well knowing that all bases are covered.

Old Software, More Challenges

Using software that does not simplify the legal hold process is counterproductive and, unfortunately, more common than one may think. Some companies rely on outdated legal hold software or using software that isn’t even designed to handle legal holds. For example, consider programs such as Outlook and Excel. They’re valuable tools used daily in companies worldwide. But using them to manage legal holds would result in a highly manual process that is difficult to track and probably does not meet the necessary level of ESI preservation.

How a Legal Hold Product Preserves ESI

Keeping employees trained and aware of their responsibility in protecting and preserving data is a must. However, legal hold software should be an integral part of the equation. It lets you quickly issue legal hold notifications and manage custodian acknowledgments. Well-chosen legal hold software will also help you:

  • Easily track the status of legal holds to know where they stand
  • Collect and store custodian acknowledgments and questions
  • Send automated notifications and reminders to help track compliance
  • Preserve notices and custodian data in a secure location
  • Gain a complete audit trail of all legal hold activity

When the legal hold product is built on a business process automation platform, workflows can be easily configured and tasks automatically assigned to the appropriate in-house team members.

More Information on Legal Holds and Legal Hold Products

Companies must have a well-documented process for executing legal holds and exercising proper care to preserve and collect ESI. The financial and legal risks of doing anything less are vast and would likely fuel damaging repercussions across the entire organization.

If you want to learn more about legal holds and legal hold products, here are three resources.

You can also reach out to us to learn more about our legal hold software.

Digital Transformation in the Legal Industry: Inspiration and Advice

Posted on December 7, 2021 by - Digital Transformation

In recent years, digital transformation in the legal industry has been sweeping through companies of all sizes. Legal ops professionals have been tasked with boosting efficiency while decreasing costs. As new challenges continue to arise, many have embraced agility, constantly adapting and optimizing processes.

For many in-house business visionaries and legal operations professionals, the answer to facing down constant change has been technology and innovation. By capitalizing on these new advances, digital transformation has not just changed how legal works, but has brought value across organizations.

To inspire your own digital transformation in the legal industry, we’ve compiled our latest Quick Start Guide, which shares valuable advice on legal digital transformation from the leaders who created it.

Inspiration from the Best

The Quick Start Guide offers insight from some of the most successful digital transformation stories in the legal market – Onit customers BT, ADM and VMware. In their stories, we hope you’ll find inspiration for your own intentionally designed change.

  • BT’s Award-Winning Digital Transformation: BT, one of the largest global communications service providers, needed to reconceptualize their processes to optimize the delivery of legal services. Technology served as the backbone for its transformation vision. The company, which is the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider and a leading provider of global communications services and solutions, adopted a platform to fuel their transformation – one that won the prestigious Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations and has been recognized by both the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and the Legal Procurement Awards.
  • ADM’s Self-Built Vendor Management App: Fortune 100 company ADM, a global leader in nutrition and agricultural origination and processing, turned to technology to streamline a common challenge – vendor management. A major issue, the company had no standardized processes around selecting the right vendor for any particular matter or project. They built their own solution to streamline the vendor management process on a no-code platform.
  • VMware’s Data-Centric Transformation Journey: Every company’s digital transformation stems from different priorities. For VMware, a leading provider of multi-cloud services, the goal was to transform and scale legal services to accelerate the company’s growth and simplify the customer experience. That could only happen if they could find a way to harness the power of the huge volumes of data they had in their possession and access benchmarking information. With careful planning, vision and technology, they accomplished just that.

Tips for Implementing Successful Legal Digital Transformation

In addition to these specific success stories, the Quick Start Guide outlines some top pieces of advice for how corporate legal departments can drive transformation at their organizations. From budgeting considerations to hiring the right talent, the guide draws on a recent CLOC panel of experts that offered best practices for scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization.

The Quick Start Guide also offers some valuable transformation advice from Brad Rogers, Onit’s own vice president of strategy and growth and former chief operations officer and chief of staff for advocacy and oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company.

As Brad explains, digital transformation in the legal industry requires a longer-term rethinking of the way you work and should be aimed at leveraging modern capabilities and business processes to change the way your company operates. He also lays out the three goals to keep in mind when building world-class legal operations from scratch.

You can find these successful examples of digital transformation and read more advice here.

How to Implement Legal Digital Transformation

Posted on October 19, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Companies both large and small have increasingly been turning their attention to legal digital transformation, with an eye toward implementing new initiatives and pursuing innovation that will help increase efficiency and improve the legal function. However, it can be challenging to know where to start and how to keep yourself on track.

Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy & Growth, headed up a CLOC Ask the Experts panel that offered some valuable advice for companies looking to implement legal transformation projects. Here are the top five considerations to keep in mind as you pursue legal transformation at your organization.

1.   Remember that legal digital transformation is a journey.

No matter how prepared or dedicated you are, the transformation won’t happen overnight. You need to think of it as a journey – and one that’s disruptive and often messy. You might not be able to plan precisely where you’re going, but you should know where you want to get goal-wise. Just be prepared for the path there to zig and zag along the way. Too many people think of legal digital transformation like building a skyscraper with square corners where you can count all the nuts and bolts you’ll need to get the job done. In reality, transformation is more like building a city, where many people are involved, and some neighborhoods will go faster or slower than others.

2.   Know the primary goals of your GC.

It’s essential to keep your GC’s primary goals in mind as you implement legal digital transformation and align your strategy with those goals. Most GCs have the same priorities, namely to protect the company, have a team of highly engaged, top talent, and boost efficiency to be a world-class legal department. Keeping these goals in mind at all times will keep your GC engaged in your transformation efforts and lead to a better outcome.

3.   Know the primary reasons why you’re transforming in the first place.

No transformation initiative will be successful without a concrete plan. It’s not only important to have a plan, though – you also need to be able to articulate it. Successful digital transformation requires buy-in from all the stakeholders in your organization. If you want to secure that buy-in, you need to be able to adequately explain the reasons behind your transformation in your company’s town hall, in team meetings or even in the elevator.

4.   Understand why data is important for legal digital transformation.

Data plays into legal transformation in a number of ways. First, a data-driven staffing model is the only way to fully understand how many and what type of resources you’ll need to make your transformation initiative succeed. Second, you need to present data on matters, risks, legal spend and more to help your GC and your company’s leadership team understand your organization’s legal exposure. Finally, you need to give your leadership and your lawyers data on the legal function to help them manage the business better.

5.   Foster a process-based mindset.

It’s not always easy to get your lawyers to think about processes. The way you think and speak about legal digital transformation may not line up with the way your lawyers think. To overcome the gap, you should start with a high-level process map that your lawyers can follow. It shouldn’t be overly detailed, but simply create clarity around roles and responsibilities. Another helpful tool is a dashboard that provides key operational metrics that break down the process in a way that’s easily understood.

You can listen to the entire panel here for more insight into best practices for pursuing legal digital transformation.

Onit is helping businesses of all sizes with their legal ops transformation journey. Contact us at [email protected] or schedule a demo to learn more.

ACC Panel: BT’s Efficiency Gains Through Digital Transformation

Posted on October 14, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Every year, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) hosts the world’s largest gathering of in-house counsel. Onit is proud to be a gold sponsor of this year’s ACC Annual Meeting, which will take place virtually from October 19–21, 2021.

This year’s schedule features an impressive roster of speakers from some of the world’s top corporations, who will be addressing some of the most pressing topics for corporate legal departments today. Among them is Onit customer British Telecom (BT), who will be talking about the company’s digital transformation journey along with Matt DenOuden, Onit’s SVP of Global Sales, on Thursday, October 21 at 9:00 a.m. CT.

BT’s Digital Transformation Story

Digital transformation has recently been sweeping across corporate legal departments, and BT is a prime example of how to do it successfully. BT’s recent efforts allowed them to see increased efficiency and productivity gains in a short period of time, thanks to implementing the right tools.

BT’s legal team took a multi-pronged approach to digital transformation that allowed them to re-envision their processes and technologies to optimize the delivery of legal services to stakeholders across the organization. Ultimately, BT reduced the complexity of its technology stack by 75 percent, were able to track and report on 70 percent of matters and overhauled how they track and control legal spend.

For BT, the digital transformation journey started with implementing technology that would serve as the backbone for company-wide transformation. BT replaced its existing piecemeal solutions with Onit’s business automation and workflow platform Apptitude. Using the platform, BT’s legal department was able to build the Apps it needed to help manage its matters and documents.

Within three months, BT’s new system was live for matter management and real-time reporting. Within a year, BT had successfully implemented a cutting-edge platform that eliminated manual management tools and disconnected processes. Going forward, BT’s legal department will continue to build and deploy the configurable solutions it needs on Onit’s platform, Apptitude, to automate legal operations and compliance processes and increase collaboration across the organization.

To hear more about BT’s transformation journey, you can listen to our podcast.

At the ACC panel, BT and Onit will offer insights into creating a digital transformation plan, how to combine organizational health, customer service and technology to create organizational success, what we can expect to see in the world of digital transformation going forward, and more. You can read the entire program for the ACC Annual Meeting and register to attend here.

Onit will be offering demos of all our products at our virtual booth. To find out more about how Onit can help with your organization’s digital transformation, contact us today.

The Role of Data in VMWare’s Digital Transformation Journey

Posted on October 4, 2021 by - Digital Transformation

As technology continues to advance, the data it generates has become increasingly important to the functioning of today’s corporate legal department. Data is central to prioritizing and justifying investment in technology at companies of all sizes as exemplified by the VMware digital transformation.

For our customers, Onit functions as their department’s “central nervous system,” driving the collection and presentation of that data. To help explain just how important data is to companies today, Onit recently hosted a webinar with executives of HBR Consulting and VMware to discuss trends in the legal space and how data played a critical role in VMware’s successful legal tech transformation journey.

The HBR Survey

The most recent HBR Law Department Survey focused on the technology investments law departments are currently making and plan to make going forward, looking at areas like staffing, spending, process, technology, and compensation.

The survey results show that 2.1% of the internal budget across all participants was allocated to technology, a very slight increase from the previous survey. The top three areas where companies are currently implementing technology are e-billing, legal hold, and matter management, whereas AI, a previous hot technology, is now being considered as something to implement down the road. E-signature technology saw the biggest increase in implementation due to law departments’ need to figure out how to deal with a remote workforce. While AI has taken a bit of a downshift in terms of priority, it’s expected to pick back up in the years to come.

The survey highlights the importance of not just the amount of money that departments are spending, but of what actual technology categories those companies are spending money in and prioritizing.

The VMware Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is sweeping the legal sphere, but every company’s journey looks a little different depending on what its priorities are. For VMware, the mission was to transform and scale legal services to accelerate the company’s growth and simplify the customer experience.

VMware resisted the temptation to simply turn to the latest tools on the market, and instead took a step back first and figured out what business problems they were trying to solve and what the best path to solving them was. As VMware will tell you, transformation is not something that can be rushed.

An important part of the VMware digital transformation was to analyze the challenges and establish baseline metrics. Next, you need to simplify your infrastructure and workflows to resolve process problems that can’t be treated with a quick technology fix. Only after both of these steps should you start to implement technology.

Data plays a huge role in making the journey a successful one. While the technology you choose matters, it should also be viewed as an enabler to get information and benchmarking data. You always need to understand the baseline metrics of the problems you’re trying to solve.

Despite their success, VMware will be the first to admit that you should expect to see failures and mistakes along the journey. Relying on data will allow you to measure the impacts your changes are having on the business and whether you’re meeting the necessary benchmarks that will drive adoption and value.

The VMware digital transformation involved a number of pieces. Among other things, they created an enterprise contract repository that served as a single source of truth for the organization. They also automated their core contracts that generated the most revenue.

Perhaps most importantly, though, VMware took a platform approach, using the Onit platform, Apptitude, to consolidate all matters in a single place. Within that platform, VMware was able to leverage Onit dashboards to drive proactive strategic decisions and monitor both risks and trends. They also created a self-service NDA portal that allowed for nimble and agile processes, real-time visibility, and a reduction in time, cost, and errors in the NDA process.

Ultimately, the reason VMware chose to double down on Onit is because they truly believe that platform solutions, rather than single-point solutions, are the future. When you can take advantage of AI that’s embedded in a platform, you can amass data in one place, rather than implementing and justifying more and more disparate solutions. Onit’s platform also gave VMware confidence that they were adequately handling all their privacy and security concerns.

At the end of the day, VMware’s success depended on investing in a change management strategy that aligned its data transformation journey with its business priorities. Success depended on defining metrics upfront and establishing baseline benchmark metrics. Data was pivotal to it all.

These are just a few highlights from the discussion about the VMware digital transformation. You can listen to the entire webinar here.

For more information on how Onit can help with your transformation journey, contact us today and schedule a demo.

CLOC Panel: Legal Department Operations Experts Weigh in on Transformation Best Practices

Posted on September 16, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Digital Transformation

Today’s legal department operations teams significantly impact how corporate legal functions daily, spurring transformation through innovation. A CLOC Ask the Experts panel (you can view the session here) gathered recently to discuss this phenomenon and best practices for legal digital transformation. Presenters included:

  • Danielle Antil, Director of Legal Operations at Barings LLC
  • Tony Curzio, Program Manager Legal Technology & Projects at MassMutual
  • Sarah Mintz, Legal Operations Analyst at Barings LLC
  • Brad Rogers, SVP of Strategy & Growth at Onit

The presenters drew from their extensive experience to offer listeners advice for successfully scaling legal transformation projects within a legal team and organization. Whether companies are just starting with transformation or are well into the process, the panelists offered up best practices, lessons and learned perspectives to help with success.

How Legal Department Operations Can Drive Transformation

The following is a summary of some of the biggest takeaways from the panel.

  • Include legal operations projects in the regular corporate budget and the roadmap of transformation programs. Start by establishing a high-level strategy and roadmap that articulates your business case for funding the transformation initiatives. Then, make that business case clear to the people who need to hear it.
  • Help your team develop a process-based mindset. It’s important to realize that lawyers may not be fluent in the language of process. When you implement training to support your transformation efforts, you want to make sure it speaks to the specific audience you’re trying to reach. In addition, after you start to implement change, you should have support materials available and offer yourself as a support resource for the department and the organization as a whole.
  • Start transformation from scratch. If you’re starting your transformation journey from nothing, an excellent first step is to inventory the current state of your infrastructure. Look at technology from the perspective of what isn’t compatible with your plans going forward. Also, evaluate its usability and whether it will lead to adoption. Before you can move forward, it’s essential to understand what your current processes are.
  • Ensure you have the right talent available when you need to quickly scale. You should always be networking to build a collection of internal and external resources to tap into. Consider bringing in consultants and subject matter experts that can help you prepare the groundwork or pitch in when you need additional help on short notice.

Listen to the On-Demand CLOC Session

These are just some of the insights the legal department operations panelists shared. To hear more, including discussions on what best-in-class legal operations support looks like, how to decrease your staff’s workload without increasing outside spend and more, you can listen to the entire presentation: CLOC Ask the Experts – Legal Transformation Projects and How to Scale Up or Down to Your Needs

Additional Legal Operations Resources

Brad, who served as Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company before joining Onit, has executed more than 10 significant transformations at five different Fortune 100 companies. You can hear more digital transformation advice from him by listening to his Onit podcasts:

Corporate Legal Market Trends for August 2021

Posted on August 5, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Welcome to the August edition of our monthly look into corporate legal market trends. In this edition, we share some thought-provoking articles covering innovative GCs, the digital transformation of BT’s legal operations and how AI and contract lifecycle management help legal departments run like a business. We hope you find some practical takeaways in the following articles.

1. Examples of Operational Excellence from Legal Teams Running the Department like a Business

Running corporate in-house legal departments like a business is quickly gaining traction in legal departments around the globe. The age-old complaint that lawyers are holding up critical processes is rapidly turning into a thing of the past. Technology solutions have significantly contributed to alleviating this problem, providing faster processes and newfound collaborative abilities at unforeseen levels. Of particular note: Lenovo’s contract management transformation, which happened thanks to a strong vision and the adoption of contract lifecycle management technology and AI.

According to the article:

Lenovo has recently digitised its contracting processes and is now able to measure how much time is spent on a contract, how many lawyers worked on it, and how much a template has been modified. “Data analytics has enabled insights we never had before,” says [Marcelo] Peviani [legal director at the centre of excellence for Lenovo].

Source: Financial Times

2. The Next Legal Market Trend to Put on Your Radar: Running the Post-Award Phase of Contract Management

According to a World Commerce & Contracting Association and Deloitte survey, contract professionals are shifting their focus to the post-signature phase of contract management. The results show a growing emphasis on the post-award stage of contract management. According to the survey, “less than 30% of organizations currently have centralized or center-led post-award contract management resources” and “only a little over 20% attempt to monitor or calculate the costs or overall benefits associated with contract management.” It also discovered that nearly 40% of the participants are looking to improve post-award processes, and more than one-third are striving to introduce more “robust approaches to obligation management.”

Source: World Commerce & Contracting Association

3. Hear BT Discuss Its Award-Winning Legal Operations Digital Transformation  

David Griffin, head of legal technology and change at BT, joined the Onit podcast recently to discuss his company’s award-winning legal operations transformation. He shared how the company led legal market trends by replacing manual and disconnected process and management tools. The change helped the department handle workload and matters across the teams from inception to closure.

Judges for the Legal Innovation Awards took note, sharing with Law.com that BT stood out “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.”

BT won the Legal Innovation Award for “Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations” and was named a finalist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. You can hear David’s story here.

Source: Onit

4. Thinking outside of the Box Reaches New Level among In-House Lawyers

The Financial Times has featured 20 highly experienced GCs who are directly challenging traditional legal roles. By redefining themselves as strategic thinkers, they are making market-leading headway when it comes to sustainability and digital transformation. Companies are now operating in ways that require lawyers to use their skills and experience in new ways. The continuing proliferation of implementing legal technology gives these lawyers more time to focus on high-impact legal work.

Source: Financial Times

5. AI and Contract Lifecycle Management: What Should You Expect?

If you’re following legal market trends, you’ve probably already heard how contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management. But now that AI is in the mix, how does that affect contract lifecycle management? A new visual guide tackles this topic to get you up to speed in no time. It explores questions such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Source: Onit resources

Bonus Resources: The Latest on CLM and AI

Year after year, legal market trends have pointed to lawyers and legal departments finding ways to be more efficient while controlling costs. Adopting cutting-edge technology, thinking outside of the box and running the department like a business are important ways to achieve these objectives.

Combining contract lifecycle management tools with AI is a prime example of working toward those means. When paired, they offer streamlined processes, a decrease in friction for employees across the enterprise and deliver more business value. If you’d like to learn more about legal market trends for contract lifecycle management tools, check out some of our recent blog posts:

Filling the App Gap: How Process Builder Makes it Easier for Corporate Legal to Automate Processes

Posted on September 3, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

According to a McKinsey survey, the use of automation has increased by roughly 10% compared to two years ago. Participants who reported high levels of success often attributed it to the fact that their companies made automation a strategic priority.

Earlier this week, Onit announced the availability of its Solutions Catalog (now available online here.) The catalog shares more than 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions, all built by Onit customers, partners and employees on the Apptitude platform. The Apps reach beyond the legal department to automate critical business processes, extending into HR, IT, accounting, sales, procurement and more. As a result, legal operations innovators have increased transparency, saved time and ensured compliance with governmental regulations and internal guidelines.

The progress made over a decade is astounding, as hundreds of thousands of users worldwide rely on Apps and solutions built on Onit Apptitude to streamline processes.

However, we wanted to make it easier to create Apps.

Introducing Onit Process Builder

The latest version of Onit Apptitude, released in August, bridges the gap between technical and business uses and simplifies the creation of new workflows. Process Builder, the new interface for Apptitude, provides a visually-oriented, drag-and-drop-friendly workflow-building interface. The new configuration tool empowers Onit Apptitude developers (our Onit Nation) to build workflows much faster. Process Builder was designed from the ground up with ease of use as its primary goal. As a result, it benefits both experienced Apptitude Developers and those who are brand new to building.

Join Us for Apptitude Training

Learn more about Process Builder by joining us for Apptitude certification classes.

Whether you’re simplifying a contract management process, building a full-featured e-billing or matter management system, or implementing a custom process, it is valuable to learn Apptitude’s many workflow tools and configuration options. The Apptitude certification track takes a vertical-agnostic approach, focusing on the key concepts required to work with Apptitude’s many automation and metadata management tools.

You can find classes and schedules here.