We are thrilled to announce our new podcast! This timely episode is not to be missed, as it features Christine DiDomizio, legal operations lead at Jaguar Land Rover North America speaking about their implementation of Onit’s enterprise legal management solution and how their legal department is handling the current COVID-19 crisis.
Christine begins by giving an overview of Jaguar Land Rover’s North American team and the composition and functions of their legal department. She noted that they respond to legal service requests from not only the United States but also from Canada and the U.K. Christine goes on to explain a bit about what exactly their Onit solution is helping them with in the legal department. Before they implemented Onit, they didn’t even have an electronic billing system. So e-billing was one of the first workflow solutions they started using, followed by matter management. Christine points out that they did quite a bit of customization to their matter management solution to help them track and manage different areas very well. They also use a document repository where they store contracts and capture metadata about the contracts. They also have another Onit solution that helps them get that information into the repository, and other departments can submit legal service requests to their department via Onit’s legal service request solution.
Christine then sheds some light on her department’s goals when beginning their transformation. She explains that a priority was getting a handle on invoice processing – the sheer volume of which was overwhelming; not to mention most invoices were hardcopy or pdf. This of course led to their implementing e-billing. Their previous matter management system was also rudimentary, with people putting files on a shared drive, and filing paper documents. To make matter worse, parts of files could be physically separate on different individuals’ desks or other areas. Going paperless and consolidating everything including emails related to a matter was a priority.
Christine addresses the question of how collaboration with outside counsel has changed since they implement Onit. She explains that the biggest change has been in the area of product liability, as her department must do very detailed reporting of product liability cases to their parent company. She emphasizes the fact that there was a lot of copying and pasting involved with those reports previous to Onit, and so the implementation has been very successful in that regard. Christine mentions that her favorite feature in Onit is the grid reporting, along with the sorting and filtering capabilities and being able to do ad hoc reporting so easily and get results so quickly. She also points out that Onit is an ever-evolving system, and this is important because needs change. “Onit has been able to keep up with us, and then some!” she commented.
Christine responds to the question of how they’ve been dealing with the COVID crisis by saying it was surprising how seamless the transition has been. The podcast closes with Christine mentioning how her department has been able to function well largely because of Onit.
Listen to the podcast:
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