Legal intake software should make it easier to manage requests, not expose how broken the process really is. But for many legal teams, the absence of a clear intake system is exactly what creates the problem.
When you don’t have dedicated legal intake software, tracking and assigning work feels nearly impossible. Business partners toss requests over the fence via email, text, or hallway conversations, often leaving out critical details. This forces your team into a loop of back-and-forth phone calls just to get the information they need to start working.
It’s time to stop the scramble. Corporate legal departments need a smarter way to work, and automated legal intake software is the solution.
By implementing an intelligent, self-service portal, you centralize the chaos. You enable information sharing across departments and reduce the time your staff spends on manual data entry.
Why you need legal service request (LSR) software:
Streamlined processes: Simplify how work enters the department.
Reduced admin time: Drastically cut the cycle time spent on low-value tasks.
Strategic focus: Free up time for high-value legal work.
Better service: Enhance responsiveness to your business partners.
If you are ready to transform your operations, here are the six non-negotiable features you should look for in legal intake software.
1. Centralized intake
A scattered process is a broken process. Your legal software must support a central intake workflow for all legal service requests. This not only simplifies the experience for your business partners but also provides a complete, defensible audit trail for every matter.
2. User-friendly interface
Adoption is everything. If the tool is difficult to use, your partners won’t use it. Look for legal intake software that is intuitive and easy to learn, requiring virtually no training for users to get started immediately.
3. Variable workflows
Rigidity kills efficiency. Your workflow process should be flexible and easy to modify. You need the ability to alter requests, review and approve them dynamically, and add new approvers on the fly without slowing down the entire operation.
4. Automated notifications
Eliminate the “black box” perception where requests go to die. Your software should automatically generate notifications to keep business partners updated on the status of their requests. Transparency builds trust.
5. Reporting and dashboards
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Robust reporting and dashboard views allow the corporate legal department to track legal intake software metrics by region, department, business unit, or complexity. Use these data-driven insights to optimize resource allocation.
6. Rapid deployment
You don’t have months to waste on implementation. Look for an intake solution that offers rapid deployment with little or no IT involvement. The goal is to get your corporate legal department up and running quickly so you can start seeing ROI immediately.
Driving success with legal intake software
The right technology allows your legal department to stop chasing paperwork and start focusing on business needs. With well-chosen legal intake software, you can provide higher-quality services, operate more efficiently, and become a driving force in fueling your company’s success.
Ready to put these ideas into action? Download the Legal Service Request Checklist to evaluate whether your current intake process actually supports how your legal team works today, or quietly holds it back.
And if you want to see what a modern, automated intake experience looks like in practice, you can also speak to an expert to find out how Onit helps legal teams streamline requests, improve visibility, and operate on their terms.
Let’s be honest: if you’re not measuring your legal department KPIs, you’re flying blind. The modern legal team is expected to prove their value, support the business’s strategy, and ruthlessly optimize legal spend management. If you aren’t there yet, you’re overdue for a change.
Stuck in spreadsheet hell? You’re not alone, but you’re also not going to win the future that way. Legal reporting best practices and technology can take you from manual chaos to automated clarity. The best part? You don’t need a massive analytics platform to crush your KPIs. Start with structure, consistency, and the four hacks below to unlock performance data that actually matters.
1. Legal department KPIs are your leverage
Legal department KPIs aren’t just pretty numbers for a slide deck. They’re your narrative. They tell leadership exactly how your team impacts the bottom line and why you should have a seat at the decision-making table. This aligns with broader business guidance on performance measurement, like Harvard Business School Online’s breakdown of how effective KPI structures drive organizational decision-making. Quantified, strategic, and focused: that’s how forward-thinking legal leaders play the game.
Even if you’re building from scratch, laser in on high-impact metrics: efficiency, risk reduction, alignment with business goals. This isn’t an optional exercise. It’s your ticket to credibility.
Still tracking data privacy costs manually and watching them climb? There’s your smoking gun. Use those insights to push for process changes, justify training, or argue for in-house moves that slash outside counsel spend. Strong legal department KPIs tell a story the C-suite can’t ignore.
2. Cut the fluff: Choose legal department KPIs that actually matter
Let’s talk results. Your legal KPIs must expose the link between legal effort and business value. Ditch vanity metrics and focus on what drives decisions.
Start with these proven performers for both legal spend management and operational rigor:
Actual spend by month: Own your budget, find burn points, and spotlight cost control.
Total hours billed: Reveal capacity constraints and dependency on outside counsel.
Discounts, adjustments, alternative fee arrangements: Show you don’t just spend. You negotiate and save.
Number of contracts executed: Measure how legal accelerates (or blocks) deals.
Matters resolved and time per matter: Find choke points, boost efficiency, and rebalance workloads.
If you’ve got access to AI-native analytics or enterprise legal management tools, level up:
Top matters by attorney hours and rate: Pinpoint where you’re leaking money or over-allocating talent.
In-house vs. outside counsel workload: Stop outsourcing what you should be running internally and vice versa.
Line-item spend breakdowns: Kill off travel drains, admin bloat, and research inefficiencies.
Reporting on these KPIs isn’t about making leadership happy. It’s about controlling your narrative, driving legal reporting best practices, and putting yourself in the driver’s seat for strategic initiatives.
Pro tip: Modern legal ops solutions automate dashboards and reporting, letting you focus on strategy instead of spreadsheet migraines.
Quantitative KPIs: Don’t guess, prove it
Dig deep into your data. Your in-house timesheets and coded invoices hold gold if you know how to mine it. Build your legal spend management story from the numbers, not just gut feelings.
Track reductions and overruns by line item. Follow the money. Compare workloads and costs across practice areas over time. Trends don’t lie, so use them to predict, pivot, and persuade.
Qualitative KPIs: Influence beyond the numbers
Some of your impact is beyond the spreadsheet. Smart legal reporting best practices mean capturing qualitative wins too. Did negotiating a high-stakes deal save the company millions? Shout it out.
Ask your business partners for honest feedback. Are they waiting too long for support? Do they feel legal is a strategic enabler or a stubborn bottleneck? Build internal surveys and measure what matters, not just what’s easy to count.
3. Ditch the data dumpster: Build smart records around legal department KPIs
Tag invoices precisely. If it doesn’t drive a KPI, why track it?
Train your squad on the critical fields. Everyone must play by the same data rules.
Standardize formats for ease, speed, and auditability.
Stay compliant. The regulators will thank you, plus you’ll sleep better at night.
If the company demands ruthless efficiency, your systems and reporting must make cost savings unmistakably clear. Legal department KPIs are your ammunition. Organize them, defend them, and use them to drive real change.
4. Track legal department KPIs the modern way, or get left behind
Let’s face it. Spreadsheets are a stopgap, not a solution. They’re better than nothing, but if you want to bring the heat, automation and real-time dashboards are your best friends.
Pull all your legal department KPIs, legal spend management data, and performance metrics into one simple view for leadership. No more scrambling before the next quarterly report. Let cloud tools and visualization software do the grunt work so you can focus on results.
When you’re ready to stop living in the stone age, migrate to an AI-native solution. Let automation run the numbers, surface trends instantly, and produce dashboards executives actually want to read. The future of legal reporting best practices is real-time, interactive, and smart.
With the right tech, your team can:
Build automated dashboards that make spend, matter cycles, and vendor performance instantly visible.
Slice KPI reports by team, region, or matter type with ease.
Share insights in seconds, not days or weeks.
Time to upgrade or be outpaced
A basic spreadsheet works until it doesn’t, then you need a legal ops platform that automates data management and reporting. Modern legal analytics tools are purpose-built for legal department KPIs. Get dashboards you can trust, share insights on autopilot, and keep leadership looped in with zero manual hassle.
It breaks down the real mechanics behind legal performance, spend control, and operational impact, and shows why manual math has no place in modern legal ops.
Onit has brought SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, SecureDocs, Axdraft, Readysign, and BusyLamp together in one destination designed to simplify and strengthen legal operations.
Change brings clarity. That’s exactly what this moment represents for Onit and our customers. We’ve brought every solution in the Onit family together in one place at Onit.com. With SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, SecureDocs, AXDRAFT, ReadySign, and BusyLamp part of a single digital experience, this marks a new chapter for unified legal operations.
This change isn’t about taking anything away. It’s about making it easier to find what you need, explore what’s possible, and experience the strength of one connected brand built for the future of legal operations.
A simpler, stronger experience for customers
Nothing changes in how you work. You’ll continue to use the same solutions, access the same logins, and connect with the same trusted support teams. Each product remains available and fully supported, just as before. What’s new is the simplicity. Instead of multiple websites, you now have one destination where every Onit solution lives together. It’s easier to learn, compare, and explore how our tools connect to help legal teams manage spend, automate contracts, streamline workflows, and reduce risk — all within a unified legal operations experience.
The power of one brand
Bringing every Onit solution together at Onit.com strengthens our shared foundation. It’s more than a design change. It’s a reflection of who we are: a single organization delivering trusted, AI-native solutions that help legal teams scale smarter.
SimpleLegal continues to lead in legal spend management and ebilling.
ContractWorks offers intuitive contract management for legal and business teams.
SecureDocs remains the go-to for secure data rooms and deal collaboration.
Axdraft simplifies document automation for faster, more accurate drafting.
BusyLamp empowers legal departments with advanced matter management and time tracking.
Each solution keeps its strengths and identity while benefiting from the collective innovation, clarity, and support behind Onit.
Why we brought everything together
Onit’s growth across the legal technology space has always been driven by one goal: helping legal teams work more efficiently. Over time, that goal expanded into a portfolio of proven products designed to solve specific needs. Bringing them together was the natural next step, creating a more cohesive experience and a stronger ecosystem for every customer. One website. One brand. One Onit. This unified approach allows us to innovate faster, support customers more effectively, and show how our solutions fit together to move legal operations forward.
Legal operations built for today and ready for tomorrow
The unified Onit experience is built on an adaptable, AI-native foundation that grows with our customers. From spend management to document automation, every solution within the Onit family works together to help legal teams stay focused, strategic, and future-ready.
What does this mean for you? Moving forward together
Unifying our brands marks more than a milestone. It represents our long-term commitment to customers, partners, and the future of legal technology. Whether you manage spend with SimpleLegal, collaborate in SecureDocs, or track matters with BusyLamp, your experience remains the same: trusted, consistent, and stronger with Onit.
Budget season is here, and that means the ROI of legal eBilling is under the spotlight. Legal teams that can prove their value with data will keep control of their budgets. Those that can’t will ultimately face harder conversations about spend and impact.
Every department is expected to speak the language of ROI, but many legal teams still struggle to connect their work to measurable business outcomes. Modern legal eBilling technology gives them a way to do it. It links efficiency, visibility, and spend control to results that matter to the business.
For too long, legal has defended its budget with reports and anecdotes that don’t hold up in financial discussions. Finance teams, on the other hand, move fast with data and metrics that speak in real numbers. That’s the gap modern legal operations is closing.
Modern eBilling technology makes legal eBilling ROI much clearer. It turns spend management into measurable proof of value and gives legal a stronger position when it’s time to plan for next year.
You can’t defend what you can’t measure
Manual invoice review once felt manageable. Someone checked rates, spotted errors, and chased approvals. Today, that process drains productivity and introduces unnecessary risk. Every minute spent tracking invoices by hand is time that could be spent improving strategy or partnering with the business.
Without automation, spend data becomes fragmented, outdated, and unreliable. Spreadsheets hide errors, and by the time finance asks for numbers, legal is already behind. That lack of visibility makes it difficult to prove the ROI of legal eBilling or any operational investment when it matters most.
Automation changes the outcome. Modern legal eBilling platforms centralize invoices, flag billing violations automatically, and give teams real-time visibility into spend. When every dollar is tracked and analyzed, the ROI of legal eBilling becomes clear and defensible.
The ROI of legal eBilling starts with control
Success in legal operations depends on control, not just cost cutting. The ROI of legal eBilling comes from giving teams the visibility and structure to manage spend with precision.
Automated workflows keep billing consistent across regions and vendors. AI-driven review tools identify overbilling and enforce guidelines before invoices reach approval. Dashboards and analytics reveal where spend goes and how to optimize it for the future.
This is where the legal eBilling ROI begins to grow. The more visibility legal gains, the more leverage it has in vendor negotiations, budget planning, and strategic forecasting.
Finance believes data, not declarations
CFOs want measurable outcomes. Legal teams that can quantify their impact through metrics such as billing accuracy, time saved, and improved forecasting accuracy will always have stronger footing in budget discussions.
Modern legal eBilling technology provides that level of proof. It creates a single source of truth for all spend data and makes the ROI of legal eBilling quantifiable. Legal can show how automated reviews reduce manual time, how billing compliance improves, and how accuracy leads to better financial forecasting.
Manual spend management wastes time and hides risk. When approvals, budgets, and vendor communications are spread across email and spreadsheets, errors slip through and create surprises later. By the time finance catches them, the damage is already reflected in the budget.
Legal eBilling’s ROI grows from eliminating those risks. Automation enforces compliance consistently, keeps data accurate, and prevents overbilling before it happens. With a centralized platform, everyone sees the same information at the same time. Transparency builds trust, and trust builds credibility when budgets are on the line.
The ROI of legal eBilling proves more than savings
The ROI of legal eBilling is about more than reducing spend. It proves how legal creates value for the business. The most forward-thinking teams now measure their return on investment in decision intelligence: how quickly they identify trends, adjust to them, and use insights to shape business strategy.
With modern legal eBilling tools, teams can track spend trends in real time, benchmark vendor performance, collaborate with finance on forecasting, and quantify efficiency gains across the department. These capabilities demonstrate operational maturity and strategic alignment that resonates with executive leadership.
Legal isn’t just improving efficiency. It’s proving its contribution to the business in financial terms, and that is the kind of ROI leadership understands.
In budget season, proof wins
Budget planning no longer revolves around defending last year’s expenses. It focuses on proving the value of every dollar spent and demonstrating how future investments will multiply that value.
When legal operations can show the ROI of their legal eBilling efforts with accurate data, the conversation with finance shifts from cost to opportunity. Instead of justifying expenses, teams highlight measurable results, forecast future savings, and make the case for continued innovation.
Manual processes cannot deliver that level of credibility. Teams that adopt modern legal eBilling systems enter budget season with proof in hand and confidence in their outcomes.
Make your case with real numbers
Want to see how top-performing legal teams are proving ROI? Explore our ROI of Legal eBilling Tech whitepaper to learn how modern spend management delivers measurable business results.
Ready to quantify your own success? Use our ROI calculator to estimate how much your department could save and how quickly the investment could pay for itself.
Budget season rewards clarity, not claims. The teams that can prove the ROI of legal eBilling will be the ones shaping what comes next. Are you going to be one of those teams?
If your legal intake process lives in your inbox, it’s already costing you time, credibility, and control.
Modern legal teams need more than email threads and spreadsheets to keep up. They need a smarter, structured way to manage requests from the start. Every vague “quick question” or one-line email from the business creates hidden friction. Before you know it, your team is buried in requests, half-tracked approvals, and missing context that slows everything else down.
For many legal departments, this is just how work happens. It’s the status quo. But when your legal intake process chaos becomes the norm, you stop operating strategically. You’re reacting, not prioritizing. The real cost isn’t just time, it’s credibility. And that’s not something you want to lose.
So let’s talk about what’s actually slowing your team down and how to fix it.
A poor legal intake process equals lost time, lost context, lost visibility
Manual legal intake probably feels simple. People send requests, you respond, things move forward. But behind the scenes, those small inefficiencies compound fast.
When service requests come through scattered channels like email, chat, or hallway conversations, it’s nearly impossible to see what’s in the pipeline or who’s handling what. Critical details get lost. Work gets duplicated. Business partners feel like they’re waiting in line without updates.
And for legal ops leaders, that means no visibility into metrics that matter: request volume, turnaround times, or workload distribution. Without data, it’s hard to justify budget, identify bottlenecks, or even show how much the team is handling day to day.
A modern legal service request (LSR) system fixes that by replacing the patchwork with something standardized, automated, and trackable.
How modern legal ops software transforms legal intake
Modern legal ops software is built to take the busywork out of intake. Instead of managing dozens of requests scattered across inboxes, it centralizes everything in one digital workspace that connects directly to enterprise legal management systems.
That means:
Fewer missed details. Requesters complete guided intake forms that capture the right information every time.
Faster routing. Requests are automatically assigned based on category, matter type, or workload.
Smarter prioritization. Dashboards show what’s pending, urgent, or overdue without relying on manual tracking.
Better visibility. Leaders can instantly see volume trends, turnaround times, and performance metrics.
Legal ops teams using LSR tools to modernize their legal intake process tend to move faster because the system handles the flow. The technology doesn’t just collect requests, it gives you control over how work comes in, moves through, and gets completed.
Signs your intake process is holding you back
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once to modernize. But you should pay attention to early warning signs that your current legal intake process is costing you efficiency.
If any of these sound familiar, it’s time to take a closer look:
You spend hours each week triaging requests instead of managing outcomes.
Your team constantly follows up to clarify missing details.
Work requests pile up without a clear way to track or prioritize them.
You can’t quantify how much work comes through intake or how quickly it gets done.
When your legal intake process feels like it’s grounded in guesswork, that’s your cue. Modernizing doesn’t just save time; it strengthens your department’s foundation. It helps you work on your terms, not your inbox’s.
From inbox chaos to legal intake clarity
A legal service request system is more than a tool, it’s a shift in how legal teams operate. It builds discipline into your process without adding friction. It shows business partners exactly how to engage with legal. And it gives your team the data to work smarter and prove value.
The result is faster response times, clearer accountability, and a department that looks organized and proactive, not reactive and overextended.
Your legal intake process doesn’t have to drain your time or your team’s energy. With the right system, it can finally work the way you do.
See how modern legal intake actually works
If you’re unsure where to start, Onit’s Legal Service Request Checklist is a quick way to assess where your current intake process might be slowing you down. It highlights key areas to evaluate before you modernize.
Ready to find out how Onit’s AI-native legal service request system eliminates bottlenecks and helps legal work faster? Talk to one of our experts today.
Everyone has something to say about AI in legal operations. It’s a hot button issue. But talk is cheap. The departments that are moving ahead are the ones treating AI as more than a pilot. They are cleaning up data, replacing outdated systems, and preparing their people to work in new ways. That is what separates the talkers from the doers: legal teams that add measurable value instead of chasing hype.
Treat Data as a Strategic Asset
The teams making AI in legal operations work well begin with the one thing that powers it all: data.
They are cleaning up timekeeper rate inconsistencies, standardizing matter metadata, tracking vendor performance with accuracy, and enforcing billing guidelines that too often slip through the cracks. It’s not glamorous work, but it is essential. AI relies on information that is clean, structured, and accessible. Without it, models return unreliable results and adoption stalls.
The most effective teams don’t treat this as a one-time project. They embed governance into their operations, assign owners to critical data sets, and create rules that keep information accurate as new matters, vendors, and invoices enter the system. They also prioritize integrations that keep data flowing in real time, not stuck in silos or spreadsheets.
Instead of drowning in disconnected platforms, they consolidate. They invest in centralized environments where data can fuel multiple functions at once, from invoice review and accrual tracking to forecasting legal spend. This shift gives them visibility they never had before and sets the stage for legal ops teams to create real business impact.
Replace Tools that Lag
Legacy systems weren’t designed for intelligent automation or embedded AI. Some were built decades ago, long before today’s demands for flexibility and speed. High-performing departments know this, and they aren’t waiting for outdated platforms to bolt on partial fixes.
They’re replacing rigid, one-size-fits-all systems with enterprise legal management software that’s AI-native. These modern platforms allow legal operations teams to build, automate, and adapt workflows on their own terms. That means no waiting on IT tickets for every small adjustment. No rigid templates that block experimentation. Just intuitive tools that legal and operations can control directly.
Equally important, these systems are not isolated. They integrate with finance, procurement, and contract management systems so that data and automation can flow across the business. This connection ensures AI in legal operation is not a siloed effort, but part of a larger digital strategy.
When tools are flexible and connected, adoption is not only easier, it’s sustainable.
Redefine Efficiency
For leading legal teams, efficiency isn’t just cutting headcount. It’s removing the friction that slows everyone down.
They deploy AI for high-volume, repeatable tasks like invoice routing, matter intake, or compliance checks. This reduces the hours spent on administrative work and frees legal professionals to focus on strategic advice, risk management, and collaboration with the business.
But they also know speed alone is not enough. They measure results in terms of impact:
How much time is actually being saved?
How much rework is being avoided?
Where can legal add more value to the business now that routine tasks are automated?
For these departments, efficiency means precision and purpose, not just productivity. It’s a redefinition of legal’s role, moving from reactive support to proactive business partner.
That’s why the most successful departments invest in team readiness alongside system rollout. They don’t assume new tools will automatically be used correctly. Instead, they offer training sessions, set shared definitions for what AI will be used for, and make sure different functions — legal, finance, IT, procurement — are aligned from the start.
Many are creating new roles to guide adoption. Some are formal positions like legal tech program managers or AI operations leads. Others are informal champions within practice groups who normalize change, collect feedback, and help translate new use cases into day-to-day results.
They also establish clear accountability. Someone is responsible for tracking AI performance, handling exceptions, and feeding insights back into the system. That structure ensures adoption does not stall when workflows shift or regulations change.
When teams feel prepared, adoption does not feel like forced change management. It feels like progress.
Choose the Right Vendors
Not every platform is ready to support AI in legal operations. The strongest departments know this and ask sharper questions before they buy.
They want platforms their teams can configure without relying on expensive professional services. And they want AI features that are fully integrated, not patched on. They want models that are transparent enough to audit. And most importantly, they want partners who understand how legal teams actually operate.
The best teams go further. They evaluate what happens after the contract is signed:
Will the vendor evolve the system as priorities shift?
Are upgrades included or locked behind additional fees?
What kind of training, documentation, and human support are available?
Departments that succeed in AI adoption are not just out there buying shiny technology. They’re choosing long-term partners who can help them adapt as their strategy matures. That’s how they keep adoption scalable and defensible.
Focus on Problems, Not Pilots
High-performing departments don’t pursue AI for its novelty. They focus their efforts on recurring problems that slow down the business and apply AI to solve them.
Examples include:
Flagging noncompliant invoice line items automatically
Summarizing matter updates for business stakeholders
Predicting budget overages based on historical patterns
They test, measure results, and scale from there. This grounded approach is what makes AI adoption in legal ops stick. It’s always tied to real business needs, not abstract experiments.
Use Frameworks that Keep You Aligned
The most effective teams don’t improvise. Instead, they use frameworks like the AI Buyer’s Checklist to stay focused and ensure adoption does not lose direction.
They ask questions like:
Is our legal data clean, consistent, and centralized?
Can our workflows adjust as priorities change?
Are our teams aligned on how AI will be governed?
Can our platform support automation without adding complexity?
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s clarity. And clarity is what makes momentum sustainable.
What Drives the Adoption of AI in Legal Operations?
Well, it certainly isn’t hype. It’s intent.
The departments that are getting AI right are aligning people, data, and systems to scale intelligently. They set expectations early, bring business stakeholders into the fold, and ensure AI is part of broader strategy, not just a side project for legal.
They aren’t just implementing a new feature, but rather, they’re building new ways of working.
So, the question is: are you a team of talkers or doers when it comes to AI adoption?
If you are ready to assess where your team stands, the AI Buyer’s Checklist is the best place to start. It will help you evaluate your data quality, workflow flexibility, stakeholder alignment, and vendor fit. Use it to spark internal discussions, compare options with confidence, and design a smarter plan for AI in legal operations.
Because lasting adoption isn’t about chasing all the trends. Instead, it should be about preparing for what comes next, on your terms.
You’ve seen the shift coming for a while… now it’s right at your desk. AI for legal teams isn’t a someday conversation anymore. It’s the reality smart legal ops leaders are stepping into right now. But if you’re still waiting for the perfect tech stack to drop from the sky, you’re looking in the wrong place. Probably somewhere between the fax machine and the fantasy budget.
But you know what? The most important thing to get right before anything else isn’t the tool. It’s the team.
AI for Legal Teams Begins with Who, Not Just What
The legal tech market is loud and noisy. Everyone’s promising smarter processes, faster turnaround, and less manual work. But here’s what often gets overlooked: no matter how advanced a tool is, it doesn’t know your business. Not like your team does.
Bringing AI into legal operations is less about shiny features and more about empowering the people who already understand where the work slows down. The ones reviewing line items, redlining NDAs, chasing outside counsel for timekeeper adjustments. They’re the ones who know what needs to change.
Legal ops leaders who succeed with AI aren’t scrambling for new hires. They’re rethinking how their current team is structured and supported. That starts with trust, context, and a framework that gives people permission to question the way things have always been done.
Clarifying Roles Creates Real Capacity
Most legal departments have talent that’s underleveraged, not underqualified. The challenge is clarity. When responsibilities are vague, opportunities for automation fall through the cracks. Time gets lost in follow-ups, escalations, and duplicated effort: the triple threat of legal inefficiency.
AI for legal teams becomes exponentially more effective when roles are aligned to the work that AI can actually support. Think about the person who’s always customizing approval workflows or manually reviewing every invoice line. They don’t need a replacement. They need to be freed up for higher-value analysis, exception handling, or cross-functional collaboration.
That’s not just good for efficiency. It’s good for morale. Empowered legal teams feel the shift when they stop fighting systems and start owning them.
Leadership Is the Difference Between Experiment and Execution
Implementing AI in legal operations isn’t just an IT decision. It’s an operational transformation, and legal ops leaders are uniquely positioned to drive it.
It starts with asking better questions. What’s repetitive and rules-based? What drains the team’s time without moving legal forward? What’s being done “because we’ve always done it that way”? If that phrase had a frequent flyer program, legal ops would have lifetime status.
The answers to those questions will uncover more than just inefficiencies. They reveal opportunities for AI that actually make a difference. The kind that increases transparency, reduces legal spend, and improves collaboration across departments.
That’s how you move beyond experimentation and into meaningful execution.
Great Legal Ops Teams Don’t Work in a Vacuum
AI for legal teams doesn’t exist in a legal-only bubble. The most effective teams are the ones building smart bridges across functions, especially with IT, compliance, procurement, and finance. And not just after the fact, but from the start.
If legal wants to own its AI roadmap, it needs allies who understand the business case and the operational needs behind it. That means getting IT out of reactive troubleshooting mode and into collaborative planning. It means helping finance see spend control not as a reporting exercise, but as a strategic lever.
The best legal ops teams don’t just ask for buy-in. They show their cards. They bring forward a plan backed by realistic implementation steps, accountability, and expected ROI. And they come to the table understanding the risks, concerns, and language of each partner.
The result is fewer roadblocks, smoother execution, and legal that’s no longer seen as “different,” but as an integrated part of the enterprise strategy.
What Forward-Thinking Legal Ops Teams Are Doing Now
If you’re not overhauling your department overnight, good. The smartest legal ops leaders know that progress doesn’t come from massive changes. It comes from small, strategic shifts made consistently and visibly.
Start by documenting where your team spends the most time, especially on tasks that feel manual, repetitive, or invisible to the business. Look for areas where you are double-handling data, reviewing things that should never have made it to your desk, or chasing down missing details from vendors.
Then talk to your internal partners. Find out what IT needs from you to support AI projects more smoothly. Ask finance what data would help them feel more confident in legal’s spend strategy. Look for the low-friction, high-impact changes that set the stage for bigger moves.
The best part? You don’t have to do it all on your own. With the right framework and the right partners, your team can move faster than you think. It all starts with clarity, intent, and the decision to lead.
Of Course Tools Matter, But Timing and Ownership Matter More
Yes, your team needs tools that are explainable, configurable, and purpose-built for legal work. That’s why we created a tech stack checklist to help legal ops leaders evaluate what fits.
Before you dive into demos or explore AI agents with IT, map the workflows your team owns, the bottlenecks that slow you down, and the outcomes that legal leadership actually cares about. Then match solutions to those realities.
A tool with the wrong team is just shelfware: expensive, impressive, and utterly unused. A focused team with the right structure can unlock results in weeks, not quarters.
The Playbook for Legal Ops Teams Who Want More Than Buzz
The AI Legal Ops Playbook was built for legal teams who want to lead with intention, not react to pressure. Inside, you’ll find:
A strategic framework for team design and role alignment
A buyer’s checklist for evaluating legal AI solutions
Tips for communicating ROI to the GC, CIO, or CFO
Real examples of how AI is helping teams reduce review cycles and tighten spend controls
It’s built for real teams doing real work, not hypothetical tech stacks that assume more resources than you actually have.
The Teams That Will Win Are the Ones That Move with Purpose
AI for legal teams is not a side project anymore. It’s the main event. The training wheels are off and the spotlight is on.
Legal’s no longer in the corner. You’re front and center on the transformation stage. Time to step into the ring and bring it.
AI is already reshaping how the best legal teams operate, and everyone else is just racing to catch up. But real change doesn’t start with tools. It starts with a team that’s aligned, confident, and ready to lead with clarity.
If you’re tired of AI content that talks around legal, this cuts through it. It’s made for you: the team doing the real work and ready to lead. We kept it tight, useful, and totally focused on legal ops. Think of it as your shortcut to strategy, minus the 50-slide internal pitch deck.
There was a time when managing legal spend was supposed to transform the way legal teams worked. But what they actually got were clunky interfaces, disconnected tools, and manual workflows disguised as “digital solutions.”
That ends now.
Onit’s 2025 summer release marks a new era for legal operations, one where legal spend is easier to control and optimize.
Introducing Unity, the AI-native framework built from the ground up to bring legal’s most critical workflows — spend, vendors, and data — within a more unified and intuitive experience. And yes, it actually does the work.
This is what legal looks like, on your terms.
What Makes Unity Different?
With Unity, legal teams get a more connected interface. It’s designed to bring together work across legal spend, vendors, and data over time. And it offers AI agents that automate tasks and understand legal context, along with configurable workflows that scale.
Say Hello to Unity e-Billing
The first spend management pillar launched on Unity is our new ELM e-Billing experience. This was designed to help you manage outside counsel spend with precision, speed, and total control.
ELM e-Billing centralizes all your spend management in one place. So this brings vendor data, invoice review, and budget tracking together for a clear, real-time view of legal spend. AI-powered automation speeds approvals and enforces billing guidelines. While flexible reporting and budgeting tools help you track performance, forecast accurately, and make smarter spend decisions as your team grows.
Meet Spend Agent: Your First AI Assistant for Legal Spend
Spend Agent is your new AI-native reviewer for legal spend invoices. It interprets billing guidelines in plain language, flags issues on incoming invoices, and generates crystal-clear justifications. It even helps vendors understand and fix issues faster.
Spend Agent offers instant compliance without the complexity; audit-ready transparency; smarter decision-making with less manual effort.
CounselMatch: Find the Right Firm, Fast
When outside counsel selection feels like guesswork, CounselMatch steps in. With access to more than 400,000 attorneys and 5,800+ firms, it lets you filter by performance, billing model, diversity, and practice area, then integrates your choice.
In addition to Unity, this release brings major upgrades across the broader Onit ecosystem:
SimpleLegal now keeps internal and external budgets in sync with matter-specific rate settings that put you in the driver’s seat. And the redesigned budget view makes it faster to filter, sort, and take action because budgeting should move as fast as the rest of the team.
ContractWorks now offers folder-level auto-tagging (Beta) for instant metadata capture, Retry AI Processing to refresh legacy contracts, and self-service tag activation for faster implementation and value. Contracts API adds e-signature support, enabling packets to be sent from external systems with fewer steps for quicker execution and a smoother path from draft to done.
BusyLamp now allows users to track invoice revisions; automate WIP archiving; simplify dropdowns; tighten access controls to protect sensitive data.
Built for Scale and Designed for Legal, by Legal
Unity is more than a product. It’s a signal that legal tech software is finally evolving and that it’s evolving on legal’s terms.
With Unity, legal departments gain more control over legal spend across your department; improved workflows across every part of the legal lifecycle; real-time visibility into vendors, matters, and contracts; automation that speaks legal’s language; a connected experience that replaces siloed systems.
Why Legacy ELM Fell Short
For years, enterprise legal management software made promises it couldn’t keep. Legacy systems were built for a different era, before AI, before flexible workflows, and certainly before legal ops became the strategic driver it is today. They were hard to configure, harder to adopt, and forced legal teams to work around technology instead of with it.
The result? Fragmented systems, manual workarounds, and limited visibility. Innovation stalled because the software didn’t move at the speed of legal.
Unity changes that.
Moving Legal Workflows Toward Connection and Scale
Many legal ops teams struggle with time-consuming invoice reviews, vendor management spread across spreadsheets, and point solutions that do not connect. Unity is being built to address these challenges by bringing core legal workflows closer together in an AI-native environment that can scale over time.
With Spend Agent reviewing invoices in real time as an add-on to Unity e-Billing and OnitX ELM, and contract data extracted in seconds via ContractWorks, legal teams are gaining back time and putting it toward higher-impact work. They’re spending less time fixing broken workflows and more time driving strategy.
Who Unity e-Billing is Built For
Unity e-Billing is designed for legal teams that want a lightweight, simple, and fast legal spend management solution. It’s built for in-house teams looking to enforce billing guidelines, accelerate approval workflows through automation, and gain clear insights into vendors and legal spend.
Whether you’re a GC looking for visibility across departments, a legal ops lead managing complex budgets, or a contract manager streamlining workflows, Unity e-Billing was built with you in mind.
Why Onit Built Unity
At Onit, we’ve always believed legal should lead, not follow. That’s why we built Unity from the ground up: to deliver a truly AI-native solution that’s powerful enough for enterprise scale but flexible enough to meet teams where they are.
Unity combines intelligent automation, hands-on support, and a modular structure that adapts to each customer’s needs. It’s more than software. It’s a commitment to helping legal teams modernize on their terms with trusted intelligence, connected tools, and expert guidance at every step.
Ready to See Unity in Action?
Whether you’re rethinking spend management, centralizing vendors, or ready to use an AI spend agent, Unity gives you the tools to move faster, smarter, and with more confidence than ever before.
Modern legal operations doesn’t need more complexity. It needs a reset.
Legal teams everywhere are feeling the pressure: do more with less, move faster without compromising accuracy, and be strategic while staying compliant. Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? That’s where modern legal operations come in.
Today’s legal departments are trading bloated systems and manual processes for purpose-built platforms which offer data-backed insights and integrated workflows. With the right legal ops tools in place, legal teams of all sizes can move from reactive to proactive, from being viewed as bottlenecks to becoming true business drivers.
What Are Legal Ops Tools, and How Do They Support Modern Legal Operations?
At their core, legal ops tools are the systems, software, and strategies that enable in-house legal teams to become high-performing business units. Think of them as the infrastructure of modern legal operations. These are the tools that provide visibility, consistency, and control across legal workstreams.
Whether it’s managing outside counsel, wrangling contracts, automating invoice approvals, or pulling performance analytics for the GC’s board presentation, these tools are doing the quiet heavy lifting so legal professionals can focus on lawyering, not logistics.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t need to be a Fortune 100 to get started. Legal operations is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity, and modern legal operations help make that shift possible.
Top 5 Legal Ops Tools That You Can’t Live Without
Not all tools are created equal. If you’re building out your legal ops tech stack as part of a modern legal operations strategy, start with these five.
1. e-Billing & Spend Management
Think of this as your financial GPS. Tools like Onit’s ELM e-billing help legal teams track every dollar spent, analyze outside counsel performance, and surface opportunities to switch from hourly billing to AFAs. It’s also a great way to build trust with finance by giving them exactly what they want: predictability.
2. Matter Management
No more mystery around who’s doing what, where, and by when. A matter management platform organizes caseloads, deadlines, documents, and stakeholders in one centralized space. Bonus points if it integrates with your other tools. Nobody needs another silo.
3. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)
From NDAs to MSAs to “we-needed-this-yesterday” custom deals, CLM tools accelerate contract review cycles, reduce risk, and bring visibility into every stage of the contract journey.
4. Legal Service Requests & Intake
Tired of email chaos and surprise fire drills? Legal intake tools are your “legal front door” and help standardize the way the business requests help, routes tasks, and automates common responses. Translation: fewer interruptions, more strategy.
5. Analytics & Dashboards
Legal teams are no longer the department of “no.” They’re strategic partners at the table. That means showing up with data. Modern legal operations depend on tools that deliver insights into spend, efficiency, and performance so you can speak the same language as your CFO.
“We Have No Idea Where Our Legal Budget Is Going”
That’s not just a stressful statement. It’s a red flag waving over your entire department. When legal spend is opaque and unpredictable, it creates ripple effects across the business. Finance loses confidence. Leadership starts asking hard questions. Legal’s seat at the strategy table starts to wobble. If you’ve ever found yourself scrambling to explain quarterly spikes or retroactively justifying outside counsel costs, it’s time to stop duct-taping your processes and start upgrading your foundation.
This is where legal ops tools come in. The right tech stack doesn’t just help you track spend. It gives you the foresight to manage it. By consolidating billing data, enforcing guidelines, and surfacing actionable insights, modern tools replace guesswork with clarity. And in today’s fast-paced business environment, clarity is your most valuable currency.
Chaos Isn’t a Strategy (But It’s Often the Default)
You shouldn’t need a crystal ball to figure out where a contract is in the approval cycle or whether that vendor invoice was reviewed. But if your team is constantly chasing status updates across inboxes or relying on tribal knowledge to move matters forward, you’re not alone. You’re just stuck managing legal operations the way it used to be done.
Legal ops tools solve this by creating structure around workflows. They help standardize intake, route requests based on urgency or risk, and give legal leadership the kind of performance metrics that other departments have had for years. No more managing legal like it’s 1999. No more spreadsheet heroics. Just a streamlined, connected way to run legal like a business unit… because that’s what it is.
So if legal still feels like the team that slows things down instead of driving things forward, it’s not a people problem. It’s a tooling problem. And that’s fixable.
Rethinking Legal Operations for a Modern Era
Too often, legal operations has been synonymous with clunky systems and slow adoption. But today’s approach is different. It’s modular, agile, and built for the way legal actually works. Legal ops leaders aren’t looking for another layer of process. They’re looking for clarity, control, and cross-functional momentum.
This evolution is particularly visible in how teams approach enterprise legal management. Not as a static system, but as a dynamic strategy. When powered by the right legal ops tools, modern legal operations become more than just a support function. They become a strategic engine that helps legal collaborate better with finance, support faster deal cycles with sales, and forecast resource needs before a crisis hits.
This isn’t just a digital transformation for the sake of “change.” It’s legal, evolved and positioned to lead.
Future-Proofing Legal: AI, Automation, and the Tools Ahead
Legal ops tools aren’t static. As AI, NLP, and machine learning evolve, they’re rapidly being baked into legal operations platforms, making it easier to:
Auto-classify incoming legal requests
Flag risky contract language
Review invoices for compliance
Predict matter outcomes based on historical data
In other words, your legal tech stack isn’t just about catching up. It’s about staying ahead.
AI is already transforming the way legal work gets done. From invoice review to matter triage to contract risk scoring, legal ops teams are finding ways to scale their impact without scaling their headcount. And the best part? These tools are becoming easier to implement and easier to justify, especially when they show measurable ROI.
For many teams, this next wave of modern legal operations is finally closing the gap between day-to-day legal work and enterprise legal management goals that once felt out of reach.
What’s Your Move?
The legal industry is transforming, and modern legal operations are the engine behind that evolution. Whether you’re a solo legal ops pro or part of a global team, investing in the right tools today will pay dividends tomorrow. Because at the end of the day, the best legal departments don’t just respond to change. They drive it.
If you’re ready to take the next step, we’ve got two resources to help you get started.
Step 1: Download ourLegal Ops 101 One-Pager: A quick-hit guide to what legal ops is and why it matters. Perfect for busy GCs and legal ops leads needing a fast gut check.
Step 2: Dive deeper with our Legal Operations 101 Whitepaper. This is a comprehensive, strategic blueprint for building and scaling a high-impact legal ops function. From hiring to tooling to cross-functional collaboration, it’s everything you need to chart the right course.
Step 3: Already know what you need? Let’s talk. We’d love to hear what you’re solving for.
Legal operations tools were supposed to simplify your work. Instead, they’ve multiplied it.
Most legal departments today are buried in disconnected systems: one for intake, another for invoice review, and even more just to get a clear report. The result? A tech stack that creates more problems than it solves, and a legal ops team stuck managing chaos instead of driving strategy.
Tasks are repeated. Workflows get bottlenecked. Spend slips through the cracks. And while your tech promises to do more, your team ends up doing the heavy lifting.
But never fear, change is here. The latest generation of legal tech — like Onit ELM — is smarter, faster, and actually works the way legal teams do. This is your chance to reboot.
Here’s how to evaluate what’s worth keeping, what’s holding you back, and what your legal operations tools should actually deliver.
Why Legal Tech Feels Broken (Even If It’s “Modern”)
What’s marketed as innovation often turns out to be a fresh coat of paint on the same legacy platform. Or worse: a tool that “uses AI” but still asks you to forward invoices to a shared inbox (booo!).
The brutal truth? Many legal ops teams are working harder just to keep their tech stack afloat. But often, they’re just getting buried under more work.
When your legal software becomes yet another system to navigate, rather than a tool that actually supports how your team works, it’s not helping. It’s slowing you down.
And that’s not modernization; that’s just maintenance and more work.
Why Legal Operation Tools Matter More Than Ever
Legal operations has moved from reactive service provider to proactive business partner, and expectations are rising. You’re being asked to control costs, forecast accurately, streamline intake, prove value, and do it all with limited resources.
You can’t meet that mandate with a disconnected set of point solutions. You need legal operations tools that are cohesive, intelligent, and action oriented. Your tech stack isn’t just supporting legal operations anymore. It defines what your department can achieve.
And the gap between the teams who have the right tools — and the ones who don’t — is only going to widen.
What Today’s Legal Ops Tools Should Actually Do
To move your legal team forward, your tools need to do more than plug gaps. They need to remove them entirely. Whether you’re managing matters, invoices, or workflows, here’s how a truly world-class platform can help.
1. Streamline Legal Spend Management and Invoicing
Tracking spend isn’t enough. Today’s tools should help you control it.
That means smarter automation, like flagging billing violations before they hit your desk. AI bill review should be baked into the platform, not added through a third party. You should be able to see which vendors are overspending, which departments are trending high, and where your money is going – without digging through PDFs or spreadsheets.
If your legal spend data lives in silos or static reports, you’re not just lacking insight. You’re losing leverage.
Legal operations tools that claim AI functionality need to do more than slap a chatbot into the corner of your screen. They should automate approval workflows, intelligently triage legal intake, and reduce manual touchpoints that drain your time.
The best AI doesn’t just respond. It anticipates and learns. It works in the background to keep things moving, so your team can focus on legal strategy (not software babysitting).
And if your current tools can’t evolve , it might be time to look for a new partner that can.
3. Automate Legal Workflow (Without the Extra Work or Headaches)
Legal operations professionals are no strangers to bottlenecks. New requests come in through Slack, email, shared folders, and more. Most of it still ends up relying on manual routing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The right workflow engine should centralize intake, automatically assign tasks based on priority or matter type, and give full visibility into what’s moving and what’s stuck.
Workflow automation isn’t about adding layers of logic. It’s about removing friction. If your current tech still makes you manage work around the system, it’s not working hard enough for you.
4. Deliver Analytics Built for Legal Ops
Your team is already overloaded. The last thing you need is another dashboard to keep track of. You need answers… fast.
A legal operations platform should give you real-time visibility into the health of your matters, your spend, vendor performance, and internal resourcing. Reporting shouldn’t take days. It should take a few clicks, and it should tell you something useful.
If your system can’t explain where your time and money are going, or which firms are helping you hit KPIs, is it even a reporting tool? No, it’s a mirror.
Time for a Tech Stack Reality Check?
Legal ops teams are being asked to deliver more value with less margin for error. But if your legal tech is still clunky and disconnected, it’s undermining your mission instead of supporting it.
The gap between expectation and execution is where your tech stack lives. And if you’re constantly working around the limitations of your tools, you’re definitely not being set up to lead.
Rebooting your legal tech stack isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about reclaiming control. On your terms.
Ready to Really Evaluate Your Legal Ops Tech?
Download Onit’s AI Buyer’s Guide to get the goods on what to look for. This is a practical resource built for legal operations teams who want clarity.
The guide walks you through the real questions that matter:
Are your tools actually AI-capable, or just AI-labeled?
Is your spend management workflow helping you control costs or just documenting them?
Can your platform scale with your needs, or are you building on top of duct tape?
You’ll get a clear framework to assess what you have today, identify what’s missing, and understand what to look for in your next legal tech investment. It’s helpful whether you’re upgrading one piece or rethinking your entire stack.
If your current tools are costing you more time than they save, theAI Buyer’s Guide will help you spot the signs early and move forward with confidence.
