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
Manual rule coding? Over. Vague invoice rejections? Gone.
Spend Agent is your new AI-powered 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.
Faster selection. Smarter partnerships. Better results.
And That’s Just the Beginning
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.
Ready to see it in action? We’ll show you.
Book a demo to explore how Unity can work… on your terms.
