Category: Legal Operations

Legal’s Brand Image: A Shining Opportunity for Positive Influence

Posted on March 23, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Legal Operations

Legal is most often viewed as a stellar guardian of the enterprise and outstanding advisor — yet its perception as a business partner is not quite as golden. In these uncertain economic times when businesses are searching for both cost efficiency and growth, what can Legal do to reconcile its reputation and magnify its material impact?

In business as in life, image is essential. It is also a principal focus of the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report*, which reconfirms one of the most prominent findings from its inaugural edition: Four in five (78%) corporate employees perceive Legal’s enduring image as a trustworthy protector of the business that imparts sage advice.

Yet even though respondents view Legal as an authority figure and business protector, nearly three in four (73%) do not consider Legal an approachable business partner. In fact, many view Legal as a “bottleneck,” as “adding unnecessary roadblocks,” or “simply expect to experience holdups” when interacting with legal teams. As a result, relationships between Legal and its internal clients have declined year-over-year (YoY) in every department — by almost 10% in HR, 18% in Finance, 30% in Sales, 27% in Marketing, and 41% in Procurement.

Image is (Almost) Everything

Though Legal’s inherent image has remained, the world has changed dramatically over this past year. The bullish economy at the outset of 2022’s data collection is now besieged by the effects of inflation and layoffs due to the macroeconomic climate. This itself had been sparked by the continuing effects of the global pandemic and social and political unrest that have set off a chain reaction of privacy concerns, regulatory revisions, and disruptions to overseas vendors and supply chains.

Cost containment and EBITDA are now the terms of the day, and legal departments are no exception to enduring employee burnout and smaller budgets. For a function established to protect the business, it is not overwhelmingly startling, then, that when so much seems fragile and beyond our control, trust in Legal might experience a stress fracture of sorts.

There is a silver lining, however: The major finding in the 2023 ELR Report is that Legal can play a meaningful part in impacting business materiality, growth, and operational efficiency. Right now, Legal has the opportunity to reset expectations and reshape its reputation in the eyes of its internal clients and executive teams. Here are three ways that Legal can “up” both its positive image and material impact, especially in these times of economic uncertainty.

1. Collaborating more intently.

The 2023 ELR Report reveals that nearly half (43%) of the study’s non-legal respondents state that better communication and collaboration is the most essential way Legal can support its internal clients. Of course, execution of matters is always important. Providing better law firm or outside counsel management is as well. But what clients say they need more from Legal is more involved client service within the business, and that starts with better communication and greater responsiveness.

2. Accelerating processes and workflows.

While there are many capacities in which Legal shines, almost half (45%) of corporate employee respondents feel that Legal can be too slow. Another 15% cite the fact that they feel processes are overly manual, which also has a negative impact on efficiency. Some legal matters do take longer than others, of course, but this is where technology — including AI — can play a significant role in keeping everything from spend management to contracts moving.

3. Championing corporate culture.

Another way Legal can demonstrate its charter as protector is with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Although current macroeconomic conditions may force companies to put the bottom line ahead of investment in cultural initiatives, Legal has a powerful base from which to influence DEI: More than half (57%) say Legal’s impact on corporate culture is positive. That fact must remain top of mind for Legal — to provide a safe and equitable work environment, to elevate problem-solving and competitive differentiation, and to foster and nurture lasting trust.

Reputation, it has been said, is the echo that remains once we are no longer in the room. It can make or break us — and that goes for legal departments as well. Fortunately, Legal has a firm foundation on which to continue building, with its enduring image as trustworthy protector and advisor. Yet Legal doesn’t exist only to protect.

This is Legal’s metamorphosis moment to evolve its image into that of a greater, more strategic business partner — by communicating more deeply with clients, accelerating efficiency, and embracing cultural and technological innovation. In turn, Legal will have a more positive and direct influence on the growth and materiality of every corner of the enterprise.

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

*The 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report is the second installment of a multinational annual study spotlighting year-over-year changes in the brand image of corporate legal departments through the eyes of their internal clients.

Powering Scalable and Rapid Integrations: Onit’s Partnership with Workato 

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Legal Operations

A streamlined, scalable, and rapid application integration layer is essential to the success of a SaaS platform. A modern platform must ensure connectivity and communication with business-critical applications and data sources throughout the organization. This makes it easy for users to perform workflows that cross over multiple applications. Integrations also deliver critical connections between the platform and stand-alone analytic tools, enabling powerful insights derived from the platform’s data repository.

If application integrations are seamless and easy to implement, the solution can do what it must without any headaches for vendor or customer — and quickly secure its return on investment. On the other hand, a platform that fails to integrate rapidly with other necessary business applications can be devastating for an organization. Poor integration can bring about a loss in productivity, wasted time and resources, and overall platform failure (not to mention the catastrophic budgetary consequences).

OnitX, a smart workflow platform for sophisticated legal matters and contract solutions, has introduced a scalable and secure integration layer powered by Workato. One of the most honored companies in the space (recognition includes a coveted place on the “Forbes” Cloud 100 list and the “Leader” designation from Gartner five years in a row), Workato delivers simple connections of applications that match business needs and reinforce integrated workflows.

The new OnitX integration layer offers SSO authentication, tailored resources, and custom integrations. It also provides unlimited scalability, a centralized admin console, and high-end security features that allow for future growth, easy management, and complete customer and vendor safety. Powerful auditability features enable IT departments and compliance efforts to track the digital trail of essential documents and communications. Additionally, Workato API abstraction makes it simple to adopt new software versions.

Additionally, the platform makes it simple for organizations to preserve APIs as future versions roll out — keeping integrations up to date, so clients do not have to worry about time-consuming version maintenance.

The OnitX platform provides three integration options:

  • Standard OnitX integrations for typical applications that are part of legal matters and contract workflows
  • Custom integrations built by Onit to support the unique needs of individual corporations
  • Partner or customer-built integrations later this year using the OnitX Integration Builder

Several standard OnitX Integrations are either available today or will be available shortly, including:

  • OnitX Legal Holds Management integrations: Allows for the seamless preservation-in-place of electronic documents through integrations with standard productivity tools such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack.
  • Salesforce integration for OnitX CLM: Gives sales teams the transparency to always know the location and status of their contracts within Salesforce, including agreements coming up for renewal.
  • SAP Ariba integration for OnitX CLM: Enables users to initiate contract workspace creation within SAP Ariba and streamline the flow of supplier data into OnitX CLM, reducing data re-entry and improving efficiency.

To learn more about the OnitX platform, please read this blog.

Introducing Onit Catalyst – Upping the AI Game for ELM and CLM

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Legal Operations

Since the birth of artificial intelligence at a conference held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, it has made rapid strides. In recent years, AI has garnered considerable investment; as of the end of 2020, the top 100 AI startups globally had a combined valuation of over $258 billion.

However, in some regards, AI technology has become a commodity, with many of the technologies being part of the open source community. Its application to specific business or technical use cases that depend on models built by a combination of data scientists and engineers, functional or industry experts, and a large amount of curated data makes AI a valuable business contributor.

We have been at the forefront of incorporating AI technology into our product as we seek to add more customer value through automation and intelligence. Beyond AI-based products developed in-house, we have acquired various AI-based products and technologies to bolster our capabilities.

We are excited to announce the new brand name of our AI-enabled products purpose-built to transform ELM and CLM is Onit Catalyst. A chemical catalyst is an inert substance, but when added to a reaction, it accelerates it. Onit is applying AI in the same way – combining it with your data, use cases, and other Onit products – to accelerate the value you receive from it. The Onit Catalyst products were previously marketed under the Precedent and Bodhala brands.

Onit Catalyst provides actionable insights from legal matters or contract data through better reporting, dashboards, benchmarks, and legal business intelligence. They can be implemented alongside an existing third-party ELM or CLM implementation or with the OnitX platform, to which they have tight and seamless integrations. With Onit Catalyst, we have done the data science for you. In addition, our AI Center of Excellence has applied AI and other analytic techniques to address real and practice use cases related to enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. Powering the Onit Catalyst products is a dataset that includes $47B+ in legal billings, over 200,000 timekeepers, 8,900 law firms, and more than 1 million assisted legal interactions each year.

Below are the products within the Onit Catalyst family:

Onit Catalyst for ELM
Proactive law firm management using legal business intelligence so legal can run like a business		Onit Catalyst for CLM
Smart management of legal documents via process automation, augmentation, and intelligence
Onit Catalyst Report Cards
Onit Catalyst Quarterly Business Review
Onit Catalyst Rate Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Matter Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Rate Proposal Analyzer
Onit Catalyst Comparative Analysis		Onit Catalyst ReviewAI
Onit Catalyst Contract Extraction

Onit Catalyst products will always work best with the OnitX platform to form smart solutions that provide insights at the point of decision and need.

Contact us to learn how Onit Catalyst can enhance your ELM and CLM workflows today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following products are available within the OnitX platform:

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

The Future of Legal Technology: A Modern Platform for Success

Posted on March 17, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

In previous blogs, we discussed the mandate for corporate legal departments to optimize their operations and how adopting a platform model can help them do so. In this blog, we help technology buyers or evaluators understand the key elements and characteristics of a modern software platform that supports the management of legal matters and legal-related documents such as contracts and agreements.

The ideal modern platform has five layers to its architecture: service, business analytics, tech, data, and integration.

A Modern Platform Architecture

A service layer is the critical “front door” to legal services for internal clients. It needs to provide a simplified, consumer-like experience to encourage business users to use it versus sending a one-off email or chat to the legal team. Users can either make a legal service request or directly access technology in a self-service manner that addresses their needs. Legal-related services that could populate the service layer include NDA requests, invention disclosures, trademark or logo use requests, whistleblower submissions, and data breach incident reporting.

A business analytics layer provides users with an embedded capability to derive insights from data. While stand-alone analytics tools like Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI are great at doing ad-hoc analysis and reporting, the average business user wants to use insights at the point of need, i.e., during the performance of a workflow. The ideal business analytics layer provides a range of capabilities, such as reporting, dashboards, benchmarking, and legal business intelligence within the platform.

A technology layer includes the software necessary to fulfill a request or automate a workflow. The service layer can provide a skilled user with direct access to the technology layer. For a platform that addresses legal matters and legal-related document requests, the technology layer should ideally include capabilities for matter management, legal spend management, legal holds management, and contract lifecycle management. It should also include an engine to automate collaborative workflows and business processes with sophisticated, custom requirements.

A data layer allows data sharing amongst the different technology layer components. This avoids the double entry of data and provides consistency across datasets, a single source of truth, and the ability to generate consolidated reports and analyze data holistically and more efficiently.

Lastly, an integration layer is a critical connection between the platform and other business applications such as ERP, CRM, and GRC systems. It should also enable connectivity to other data repositories and analytic tools.

While the ideal platform for legal matters and documents solutions has each of these layers, it should also possess several essential characteristics:

  • Is configurable to address the needs and circumstances of a large, complex enterprise.
  • Provides scalability to support future growth in users and data.
  • Is extensible to accommodate new features and capabilities, including integrations with more business applications.
  • Can be consumed in a modular fashion that does not require monolithic adoption by a customer.
    Addresses security, compliance, and reliability needs.

Please contact us to learn how Onit can provide a modern platform for legal operations.

The Power of Platforms: Why Corporate Legal Leaders Should Take Notice

Posted on March 17, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

When corporate legal leaders consider different legal operations technology solutions, they face a world of bland and similar descriptions for various offerings. A case in point is the use of the term “platform.” The technology platform concept has been trendy for several years, alongside cloud computing and artificial intelligence. While a powerful idea, it, unfortunately, has become a throwaway word as most legal technology vendors use it to describe their loose collection of products that are a mix of organically developed and acquired products. 

Firstly, the discussion of a platform does NOT begin with technology. Instead, it is a proven business model technology-based companies repeatedly apply to dominate their markets. Think Amazon, Uber, eBay, Airbnb, and so forth. 

A platform approach consolidates demand for a specific consumer need efficiently and connects it seamlessly with supply – retail goods for Amazon, temporary and localized transportation for Uber, and vacation rental properties for Airbnb. The model was initially developed to serve consumer markets but has also been replicated for business marketplaces. For operationally efficient and agile companies and business functions, it has also been applied to address an “internal” market for corporate services. 

 

The Platform Model

Two examples come to mind. First, most corporate IT organizations moved to a platform approach starting a decade ago. For example, an employee needs a new laptop, a developer needs access to a database or virtual server, a marketer needs to add a new SaaS tool, and an executive needs desktop support. Solutions from companies such as Zendesk, Jira, and BMC have enabled the CIO to implement a platform approach to aggregate the internal demand for IT services and efficiently satisfy it with a combination of internal hardware, public cloud services, and IT staff and contractors. Second, leading HR organizations offer a similar model. For example, an employee needs a copy of a paystub, wants to change benefits, or needs to make a vacation request. A manager must initiate and manage an annual review process with her team. A Chief People Officer relies on Workday, Ceridian Dayforce, or SAP SuccessFactors to deliver a platform model to address employees’ needs for HR-related services. 

As with other business functions, a platform model does NOT replace the highest value work that the legal department performs that requires deep collaboration and partnership with other business functions, for example, understanding the implications of a pending regulation on a business unit operating model, the development of a new, global chain strategy, or the development of a seamless digital quoting and contracting process for a family of SaaS offerings that is directly accessible by customers. Instead, it creates efficiency for legal and frees the team to focus on these value-add projects. In a previous blog, we shared that ~80% of corporate legal’s time and expense goes towards run rate legal support: contracts, business agreements, IP and trademark requests, legal holds management, real estate agreements, and so forth. A platform model can help reduce this allocation of time and effort so legal can have the bandwidth to focus on making a cross-enterprise impact. Legal leaders have internal references for the model’s effectiveness – their own CIO or Chief People Officer. 

In addition to a better internal customer experience, legal leaders gain greater understating and control of their function: 

  • The visibility to internal demand can feed an internal quarterly legal “report card” and provide the data needed to forecast future demand. 
  • Central aggregation allows managing all work more efficiently, enabling more self-service of legal requests through a combination of established processes and technology. 
  • A deeper awareness of the “what and who” of their operations. 
  • A better ability to balance work done internally versus by outside counsel. 
  • A greater understanding of outside counsel activity and spending so you can proactively manage outside law firm work. 

Back to where we started — given the sameness of how legal technology providers merchandise their “platforms,” what should legal leaders expect when considering a modern technology platform that can support this model? Learn more in our next blog, which outlines the critical elements of a modern platform. 

The Key to Streamlined Legal Operations in 2023

Posted on March 17, 2023 by - Enterprise Legal Management, Legal Operations

With The Conference Board forecasting that the U.S. economy will formally enter a recession in early 2023, many large enterprises are having flashbacks to the past two significant periods of economic turmoil in 2008 and 2018. Likewise, PwC’s 26th annual global CEO survey highlighted the need for businesses to “evolve or die,” per the 4,410 CEO respondents. Seventy-three percent of CEOs believed that global economic growth would decline in 2023. Moreover, nearly 40% did not think their companies would be economically viable a decade from now if they continued their current path.

Behind this sobering economic backdrop are three other prominent trends driving further business complexity:

For corporate legal leaders, these forces represent two sides of the same coin.  On one side, they represent significant run-rate work for already heavily utilized legal teams. But, on the other side, they represent an opportunity for legal leaders to partner with the C-suite and business unit leaders to provide the best possible business guidance on the legal elements of each of these trends.

Corporate legal departments have their own set of challenges. With corporations expecting to do additional work with fewer resources and less budget, so must legal. An E&Y law survey reveals that general counsels expect workloads to increase 25% over the next three years, yet 75% do not expect budgets to keep pace. Per ALM, 2023 rate hikes are 7% to 8% for many corporations, with high-end firms commanding more than a 30% increase.

So, what is the path forward for the corporate legal department? In discussions with Onit customers, we hear that most of their time and expense goes into daily run rate legal matters and activities: contracts, business agreements, I.P. and trademark requests, legal holds management, real estate agreements, and so forth. Unfortunately, this leaves little time for legal to partner with business leaders and provide the guidance the business desperately needs.

Executives now expect legal to operate like other business functions. This includes delivering higher satisfaction amongst internal clients, providing superior legal outcomes (and thus better business outcomes), improving operational efficiency, and demonstrating ROI on spending. To do so, corporate legal departments must optimize legal operations.

They are not alone. Today, many legal departments connect to the business in more influential, material ways – from impacting revenue generation and growth to EBITDA and operational efficiency. While legal operation has existed for decades, the function is at an inflection point. Forward-thinking organizations represent torchbearers for a new chapter in legal operations’ history – an era of optimized legal operations.

Even for departments that have not established a formal legal operations function or team, the operations of legal still happen every day. Nascent legal ops initiatives should adopt a start-up mentality and embrace a modern operating model versus taking a similar adoption path that more mature legal operations functions took.

Legal’s path to making a more material impact on the business requires a focus on driving down the mix of time and money spent on run rate legal matters, so legal teams are freed to focus more on innovation and transformation initiatives.

The Transformation to Optimized Legal

Such a transformation will rely on the usual combination of people, processes, and technology. Corporate legal leaders must now challenge legal operations technology providers to deliver the technology piece of the equation – a modern software platform for managing sophisticated legal matters and contracts with more intelligence, speed, and efficiency. Such a platform needs to provide a digital self-service capability, automate workflows and collaboration, and apply artificial intelligence to bring insights to bear at the point of decision or need.

Why is a platform the linchpin to this transformation? In this next blog, learn how a platform approach starts with a business model, not technology, that can enable Legal to materially impact the business.

6 Ways Legal Spend Management Technology Can Reduce Your Costs

Posted on March 13, 2023 by - Legal Operations

With the increased pressure on legal departments to improve efficiency and control costs, modern legal spend management solutions are a sensible option as they quickly generate savings that exceed the initial investment. E-billing automates processes and allows legal departments to identify cost-saving measures in the immediate term and by using data-driven strategies for the future. Here are six of the ways legal spend management can reduce your costs.

1. ENFORCEMENT OF LEGAL BILLING GUIDELINES

E-billing software automatically checks invoices against billing guidelines such as caps on hours, total spend, expenses, overtime, or staffing rules. Human reviewers will make mistakes and miss certain invoice and line-item violations. This is especially the case for departments with multiple guidelines or different rules for different firms. Your company’s specific rules can be loaded into the e-billing software, which then automatically evaluates invoices during processing. Non-compliant invoices that may have previously gone unnoticed will be rejected or flagged for review, and compliant invoices will automatically be approved for payment.

2. REAL-TIME COST TRANSPARENCY

E-billing offers visibility and consistency of how legal bills, matter information, and budgets are input, processed, and centrally stored. This creates greater control vs. spreadsheets by default. Modern Legal Spend Management software has additional tools to improve visibility of the entire matter lifecycle and associated costs. Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp, for example, allows law firms to enter work in progress (WIP) and draft invoices before invoicing the respective line items, so the legal department does not need to wait for the bill to get this information. Legal departments can also submit cost estimates and instruct firms directly from the software. This increased transparency makes budgeting easier and reduces unexpected costs.

3. INVOICE PROCESSING AND TIME EFFICIENCIES

As with many software tools, legal spend management dramatically improves efficiency and accuracy. With BusyLamp, information is processed digitally without needing sorting and organizing, as bills are forwarded automatically to a designated person after being checked for guideline compliance. This saves a vast amount of administration time spent doing tasks that carry the risk of significant manual errors, and some tasks are made redundant, such as data entry, scanning, and filing. Coupled with other process automation, lawyers are freed up to spend time on actual legal work, their area of expertise, not tedious manual tasks.

4. REPORTING EFFICIENCIES

Having real-time, secure, accurate, and consistent, centralized data saves time accessing and reporting on documents, matters, and financials. A lot of time is wasted by legal staff of all seniorities manually compiling reports from multiple on- and offline sources. Using Legal Spend Management software, custom reports, as required by the business, can be scheduled for automatic creation and delivered to stakeholders by email. When ad-hoc reports are inevitably needed, they can be compiled in just a few clicks.

5. LEGAL ANALYTICS FOR STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING

Over time, legal spend management creates a database of all historic matters and their associated spend, broken down into UTBMS and LEDES codes. Analytics can gain insights into legal spend and inform data-driven decision-making by comparing savings, spending trends, and budget-to-actuals across law firms, matter types, practice areas, jurisdictions, timekeeper seniority, and more. This further reduces costs and improves legal operations. E-billing captures spend accurately and comprehensively. Without it, analyzing spend is incredibly time and resource intensive. With e-billing, the legal department is armed with valuable information for long-term legal spend management. It can contribute to business goals and achieve year-over-year improvements, becoming a driver of value and savings for the company instead of a cost center.

6. VENDOR SOURCING

Modern legal spend management solutions like BusyLamp include tools to submit RFPs and cost estimates for work to law firms. Pre-structuring the requests in a consistent format ensures a fair and easily comparable response from the firms. Proposals are more likely to be competitively priced, as firms know they compete for the work. Using data from responses and estimates can empower a legal department to make more informed resourcing and budgeting decisions faster.

To find out exactly how much you can save in each area, download the Building a Business Case for e-Billing Guide, which provides calculations for each saving category that can be achieved with a legal spend management solution.

What Legal Ops Teams Should Know About RFPs

Posted on March 13, 2023 by - Legal Operations

When humans make decisions, they are nearly always impacted by invisible biases. And we are not the ones to blame! If anything, we will have to blame evolution for that. Humans only naturally rely on feelings, experiences, and personal views when making decisions. After all, in the past, this bias has often decided between life and death. Luckily, nowadays, the business decisions we must make daily are usually less dramatic. Yet they are equally shaped by experience, so we often stick with the tried and tested. This path often appears as “the safe choice,” but it leaves no room for improvement and might even sometimes prevent you from making the best or most cost-effective choice for your business.

Request for Proposals (RFPs) are a powerful tool to pre-empt this potential bias and choose a data-based approach to selecting the most suitable provider for your matter. A standardized template, for example, ensures that your legal teams repeatedly ask themselves and their vendors critical questions that support finding the right vendor. We have learned first-hand how crucial selecting the right vendor is to the project’s success going forward. Here, we will provide helpful tips on which features your RFP should include to best support you and your team in the decision-making process and pave the way for a successful project outcome.

BE PRECISE AND ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Be specific in your questions and provide law firms with information that gives a clear picture of the task. Precise questions are the be-all and end-all because the more general your questions are, the broader the law firms’ answers will be. Of course, you do not want to read pages and pages of marketing materials from law firms, which exist to represent themselves positively but are ultimately not a good decision-making aid. To get away from the so-called “gut feeling” and marketing materials, determine a set of questions that tells you which law firm is best for the upcoming project and your company. From the law firm’s point of view, it is helpful to have as much information as possible about the matter and, if relevant, about your industry to formulate precise answers and for them to respond with an offer. The more specific your questions are, the more likely you are to receive well-prepared answers that will help you to find legal advice that suits you and your business. Allow enough time for the drafting; you will usually get it back afterward because the RFP process will benefit from it.

HOW CAN BUSYLAMP HELP YOU STREAMLINE THIS PART OF THE PROCESS?

Frequently, a simple document or spreadsheet is used to gather and send a set of questions to law firms – it takes no tech expert to know that there are more modern and efficient solutions. Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space, for example, summing compilation of relevant answers for your evaluation. This gives you summarized tabular data supported by graphs, allowing you to compare responses instantly. The RFP module asks law firms specifically for the information relevant to you and provides specialized templates, e.g., for finance and M&A transactions. Therefore, all the information in the law firms’ responses is in a standardized format of your choosing and adapts flexibly to subsequent changes.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS THAT SPEED UP YOUR SOURCING-PROCESS

Depending on the complexity of the matter, it is good practice to allow law firms to take up to three or four weeks to answer all your questions. We understand that there are often more urgent cases in the work schedule where the law firms need an almost immediate response – e.g., in corporate cases or an M&A acquisition. BusyLamp provides a functionality especially valuable for these specific cases, allowing users to limit the time to file a response. Additionally, software solutions generally save a significant amount of your time in the RFP process because answers on staffing, costs, hours, etc., will be received uniformly formatted, which allows a simple and intuitive comparison of the answers received. This leaves valuable time for other tasks, especially if your project is already very time critical.

DON’T FORGET TO NEGOTIATE

Ask the law firms about alternative cost structures and possibilities for discounting. Negotiation is possible, and it can be done without difficulty in a software-based environment. Finally, you do not want to simply receive an overview of standard rates. If law firms add to or adjust their responses after the initial offer, you will need to reassemble data at this point and track the changes. As an in-house legal team, you should be able to back up your negotiation results with numbers at any time. If a law firm revises its offer during the RFP process, you will want to note this later in your reports. A good negotiation result can make you feel good, but you should have clear numbers up your sleeve to back this up. BusyLamp works for you and records if the offer has changed during the RFP process. For example, it points out whether an hourly rate has changed within an RFP (i.e., if the rate was lowered compared to the previous response).

KICK-OFF FOR A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION

In BusyLamp, the RFP module is only the first step in creating and managing the matter. After interviewing, evaluating, and selecting the law firm, the data from the RFP module is applied to a new matter with the corresponding budget settings by simply clicking one button. In the same step, the law firm receives an invitation to start collaborating on the matter in BusyLamp. If desired, it is possible to have the matter checked and the budget approved by the departments responsible with our approval module. Software-powered RFP processes are a time and resource-saving alternative to the old-fashioned and clunky manual processes. In conclusion, a powerful RFP tool is essential for selecting your vendor. It bypasses the urge to act based on biases and allows a data-driven approach instead. Doing that decisively shapes the outcome of the overall project’s success.

BusyLamp is acknowledged by our clients for its value-adding, continuously enhanced RFP tool. With the right decision made, the entire matter management cycle can be followed up in our legal spend management solution — a vital asset in times of remote working.

Request a demo of eBilling.Space today and see our RFP functionality for yourself.

5 Key Skills of Successful Legal Operations Managers

Posted on March 13, 2023 by - Legal Operations

Legal operations is gradually becoming one of the most important disciplines for legal departments around the globe. Broadly speaking, legal operations encompasses all the responsibilities of a legal department that are not the law itself, including spend management, increasing efficiency and productivity of the legal department, vendor management, legal technology implementation. It is, therefore, multi-faceted with many roles and responsibilities and enables legal counsel to focus on providing legal advice in the most valuable and productive way possible. A legal operations team needs a wide range of skills to generate the best outcomes.

Fortunately, the legal operations head does not need to be perfect in those areas, as they can sometimes build a diverse team around them. Nevertheless, an excellent legal operations manager should always strive to develop generalist skills to mentor and lead the specialists within the team. Those with teams are the fortunate ones, though. A solo legal operations manager runs most legal operations functions in Europe, and it is even more critical that this person develops the necessary key skills.

Whether you’re already in the job or aspire to transition into legal operations, here are five essential skills every legal operations professional should have or be actively working on improving, especially if they are in a “team of one.”

1. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION

A legal operations manager needs to define and identify the relevant stakeholders for projects to understand their needs and address them while balancing competing requirements and priorities. On occasion, final budget decisions will be made in other departments of the organization, so maintaining effective communication and a positive relationship with all stakeholders is vital. The legal operations director is the link between the legal department and the rest of the organization, ensuring stakeholders are involved and updated. This may also entail influencing stakeholders to buy into a project in the first place by identifying how the project benefits the wider business. As other departments may be unfamiliar with the legal department’s workflow and the resulting obstacles, a legal operations manager must be able to explain projects and benefits in terms that make sense outside of the legal silo. They should be able to network and communicate with people at several levels throughout the organization. As Ben Eason, Head of Legal Transformation at Barclays, says, “Evidence of flexibility, interchangeability, negotiation, and managing stakeholders are crucial. These skills are arguably the most important for legal operations success.”

2. LEGAL DEPARTMENT BUDGETING

A legal operations manager should be able to manage and calculate the budget the legal department has and the budget it might need, even if this responsibility is outside their remit. Reliable, stable financial planning will help the legal department to develop consistently. While there should be an understanding of previous and actual budgets, as this helps with forecasting, actually planning the future is more important. The legal department will constantly be pressured to be more efficient, and resource optimization is key to success. Part of the job will be to spot new cost-saving opportunities. Spend management tools can make the visibility of these metrics, and therefore decision making, much easier. The legal operations director should have the acumen to acquire a budget for a project when there isn’t one by communicating with the budget holder/s and creating a business case that advocates what is best for the legal department and the whole organization. This links with stakeholder management and communication skill in that the business case must resonate with the budget holder/s aims and objectives, not just the legal department.

3. LEGAL TECHNOLOGY KNOWLEDGE

Technology is playing an ever more significant role in the role of a legal operations manager as legal departments strive to become more agile, collaborative, and efficient. A legal operations head needs to have an innovative and curious approach to problem-solving. They should be confident in rolling out tech (or knowing where to go for help) and have the ability to plan and implement a long-term process and technology roadmap. The rapidly evolving legal technology landscape can cause distractions, so staying up to date with legal tech trends and new entrants to the market to avoid any sense of overwhelm is important. This also helps the legal operations manager ensure projects and plans stay true to the department’s objectives. The ability to critically evaluate the relevance of the current plan and pivot quickly if required is essential. Since many lawyers are still doing repetitive and time-consuming tasks manually, the legal operations manager should find solutions to streamline and/or automate these processes by using existing enterprise tech or evaluating legal-specific vendors. An excellent legal operations head will know how to map out current processes and decide which can be improved by changing processes vs. those which require technology to solve and then prioritize accordingly.

4. FIRM AND VENDOR MANAGEMENT

In some organizations, the legal operations team manages the procurement of external legal services from law firms and vendors. In many companies, firms and vendors are traditionally selected through personal contacts or loyalty, though this status quo is being challenged more frequently now. A good legal operations manager has to turn this thinking around and focus on more effective and transparent solutions for the department. Instead of agreeing on standard pricing and staffing models, the head of legal operations should facilitate the negotiation of more flexible and transparent pricing models to create positive incentives. This can be a win-win for clients and firms, incentives such as ‘volume discounts’ encourage counsel to drive more work towards a single firm to reach the threshold that triggers a discount. Legal operations professionals not from a legal background need to familiarize themselves with how legal services are billed; rates, AFAs, LEDES, etc. They also need to approach vendor management with sensitivity to influence in-house counsel to the new way of thinking.

Legal services aren’t a commodity, and it can be challenging to quantify added value, so it is about more than “lowest cost wins.” By setting up a structured bidding request, as one example, the legal operations manager can force competitive rates from the firms while requiring counsel to objectively decide which proposal generates the most value for the cost. Another part of the work in this area is the administration of efficient onboarding for new vendors or firms. After choosing the right vendor/firm, clear rules (such as billing guidelines) must be introduced to measure the performance of the collaboration and get maximum value for money. The head of legal operations also needs to facilitate fair, transparent, and data-driven performance reviews with vendors and firms.

5. DATA LITERACY

Data literacy is vital for the work of a legal operations director. Many legal departments are making decisions inefficiently, using outdated processes such as spreadsheet reporting, anecdotal feedback, or simply “gut feel.” A legal operations professional is unlikely to start their job with sophisticated reporting tools and must be confident in navigating the existing paper or spreadsheet reports to find the needed data. While there is no need for a legal operations manager to be a data scientist, data literacy goes beyond compiling reports. Many legal departments waste time compiling frequent reports in which most data goes unused. The director of legal operations needs to avoid data tracking for the sake of it and understand how to use the information to develop the department and the organization as a whole. They should identify the goals (using existing data to help, if appropriate), work backward to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and important metrics, and then ensure the department can capture the data points needed to measure KPIs. This consistent data lays the foundations for analytical capabilities to enable strategic decision-making and solve problems.

An excellent legal operations head needs to know how to structure, gather and analyze the relevant legal data. This can help in practical ways, such as maximizing value when negotiating external contracts or making a business case for increased headcount and budgets. Data literacy will also help the legal operations head to balance the needs of the department in an objective manner and decide where to focus their efforts.

Learn more about BusyLamp from Onit, our end-to-end legal spend management solution built for European corporate legal departments.