Most legal departments can name a dozen manual processes they’d automate tomorrow if they had the resources: an intake form that should route itself, an approval that still moves by email, a certification that gets tracked in a spreadsheet instead of a system of record.
The idea isn’t the hard part. The build is.
In a lot of organizations, turning a workflow idea into a working process means submitting a request to IT, waiting for it to reach the top of a queue that legal doesn’t control, and hoping the final product matches what the team actually asked for. For a legal department managing a handful of processes, that delay is annoying. For a legal department managing hundreds of processes across multiple regions and business units, it’s a structural limit on how fast the function can operate.
When Every Workflow Competes for the Same Developer
IT-dependent workflow building doesn’t scale with legal’s needs, because legal’s needs and IT’s priorities rarely move at the same pace. A new disclosure requirement, a shift in how a business unit handles vendor onboarding, or a spike in a particular request type can all create an immediate need for a new or updated workflow. But IT teams are managing their own backlog, and legal requests are competing with everything else on it.
The result is familiar to a lot of legal operations teams: workarounds. Processes stay in email and spreadsheets longer than they should, not because anyone prefers it that way, but because building something better isn’t within the team’s control. That’s one of the common manual habits still holding legal departments back, and it tends to persist until legal has a way to build without waiting.
What Changes When Legal Can Build Its Own Workflows
Low-code platforms shift where workflow ownership sits. Instead of writing a specification and handing it to a developer, legal operations teams can configure the workflow directly, adjust it based on how people actually use it, and expand it to new use cases without opening a new project with IT every time.
That doesn’t remove IT from the picture entirely. Integrations, security requirements, and enterprise-scale deployment still benefit from IT’s involvement. What changes is the day-to-day iteration: legal can stand up a new workflow, test it with a small group, and refine it in days rather than months.
Onit’s App Catalog and Apptitude are built around that model, and the same logic applies to how legal teams handle inbound requests through a Legal Service Request system: routing work to the right resource automatically, rather than triaging it manually.
A Real-World Example: ADM
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the world’s largest agricultural processors and food ingredient providers, faced this challenge at global scale. ADM’s Legal Affairs, Regulatory & Compliance (LARC) department manages a wide portfolio of litigation, regulatory, compliance, and commercial matters across regions, and needed a way to standardize procedures and reduce manual burden without becoming dependent on IT for every change.
Since adopting Onit in 2015, ADM has continued to expand its use of the platform. Powered by Apptitude, ADM’s low-code, highly configurable model has enabled the LARC team to build hundreds of purpose-built workflows supporting its own function and the broader business. Today, with more than 18,000 users globally, Onit serves as ADM LARC’s system of record and reporting.
That foundation supports a wide range of use cases:
- Contract lifecycle automation: NDA intake and auto-creation, integrated with DocuSign, reduced turnaround from weeks to hours by eliminating manual steps.
- Legal Service Request: Increased transparency for business users and routed requests to the right legal resource automatically.
- Compliance and risk workflows: Automated processes from conflict-of-interest review to quarterly disclosure certifications.
- Attorney management and internal approvals: Custom tools for onboarding, budget approval, law firm RFP and preapproval, and engagement letter execution.
- Bond and insurance certificate processes: Centralized, self-service workflows in place of fragmented manual steps involving multiple parties.
- Real estate process management: End-to-end tracking from initial need through execution and handoff to lease management.
ADM also builds in MVP-style iteration, using early usage data to refine each workflow so automation stays aligned with how the business actually works, rather than how it was originally scoped.
“Having a platform and partnership with Onit has been game-changer for ADM, having the ability to quickly turn ideas into action to eliminate an inefficiency and/or create visibility in a process has allowed us to build credibility with our business partners and other functional colleagues,” said Aaron Van Nice, Vice President, LARC Operational Excellence.
Building a Workflow Model That Scales
A few practices separate legal teams that scale automation successfully from those that stall out after the first few workflows:
- Start with the processes causing the most friction, not the ones that are easiest to build. High-friction, high-volume processes deliver the clearest return and the strongest case for expanding the program.
- Treat the first version as a starting point, not the final product. Usage data reveals what a workflow needs to actually do, which is rarely identical to how it was first scoped.
- Keep IT involved where it matters. Integrations, data security, and enterprise rollout still benefit from IT’s expertise, even when day-to-day configuration doesn’t require it.
- Measure adoption, not just completion. A workflow that’s technically live but rarely used hasn’t solved the underlying problem.
None of this requires legal to become a technology function. It requires a platform that lets legal operations build, test, and adjust workflows at the pace the business actually needs, which is a theme that shows up across modern legal operations more broadly, not just in workflow automation.
See the Full Results
ADM’s LARC department has moved from addressing isolated workflow challenges to supporting enterprise-wide transformation across a global legal function. Read the full ADM customer story to see how the team built and scaled hundreds of automated workflows, and what results followed.
