Tag: elm

What is Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)?

Posted on October 16, 2025 by - Enterprise Legal Management

What is Enterprise Legal Management? ELM

Enterprise legal management (ELM) is the framework corporate legal departments use to bring structure, visibility, and strategy to their operations. It connects key functions like legal spend management, matter tracking, vendor oversight, and workflow automation in one cohesive platform.

For today’s in-house teams, ELM is more than an organizational tool. It is the foundation of a data-driven legal department that can manage complexity, respond faster to business needs, and demonstrate tangible value across the company.

Why ELM matters for modern legal ops teams

Corporate legal teams are balancing more matters, tighter budgets, and growing demands from leadership. Without the right system in place, work gets lost in inboxes, reporting becomes manual, and spend control slips through the cracks.

Enterprise legal management brings order to that chaos. By centralizing activity and automating routine work, ELM helps teams:

  • Gain visibility into legal spend, matters, and outside counsel performance
  • Improve accuracy and compliance with defined workflows
  • Replace manual data entry with automation
  • Collaborate easily with finance, procurement, and business units
  • Measure and report on the value legal delivers to the organization

In short, ELM allows legal operations to scale efficiently and stay aligned with business priorities.

Arrows upwards represending ELM enterprise legal management to help business growth

What enterprise legal management includes

Enterprise legal management software combines several core capabilities into a single environment. While each solution may vary, the most common components include:

  • Matter management: Track all legal work in one system, from internal projects to litigation and contracts
  • Legal spend management: Review invoices efficiently, enforce billing guidelines, and forecast budget with accuracy
  • Vendor management: Evaluate outside counsel based on performance and cost-effectiveness
  • Legal service request intake: Streamline how the business submits requests and route them automatically to the right team
  • Compliance and risk management: Maintain oversight of regulations, obligations, and potential exposure
  • Analytics and dashboards: Translate data into actionable insights that improve decisions

These features work best when connected through a unified platform that supports integration across the company’s legal tech stack.

Legal tech stack image to represent a company using Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) software

How enterprise legal management software works

Enterprise legal management software acts as a central hub for all legal operations. It gathers data from multiple systems, automates repetitive workflows, and gives legal professionals real-time access to information they need.

A well-designed ELM platform typically:

  • Centralizes matters, spend, and vendor data in one system of record
  • Automates approval processes and invoice review
  • Integrates with enterprise tools like ERP, CLM, and document management systems
  • Uses analytics to highlight spend patterns, cycle times, and workload distribution
  • Supports secure collaboration across departments and outside counsel

With these elements in place, legal teams can focus more time on strategic work and less on administrative tasks.

What makes modern ELM software different

Not all enterprise legal management solutions are created equal. Legacy tools often require heavy configuration, lack AI capabilities, or force teams to adapt to rigid workflows.

Modern ELM software changes that. It is designed to be:

  • AI-native: Built with intelligence that accelerates tasks like invoice validation, matter triage, and reporting
  • User-friendly: Intuitive interfaces help teams adopt new technology quickly
  • Configurable: Tailored to match each organization’s structure and processes
  • Connected: Seamlessly integrates with core business and legal systems
  • Insight-driven: Turns operational data into metrics that demonstrate value

The result is a legal department that operates efficiently, stays aligned with business goals, and makes data-backed decisions.

Image of admin tasks and analytics dashboard for ELM enterprise legal management

How Onit redefines enterprise legal management

Onit’s enterprise legal management software helps legal teams operate on their own terms. Designed by legal professionals, it brings together everything needed to manage matters, spend, and vendors in a single, AI-native platform.

With Onit, legal departments can:

  • Gain full transparency into spend and outside counsel activity
  • Automate manual review processes and approval workflows
  • Monitor vendor performance through detailed analytics
  • Connect seamlessly with finance, procurement, and compliance systems
  • Report on outcomes with dashboards that track time, cost, and efficiency

By putting automation and insight at the center of every workflow, Onit enables legal teams to work smarter, not harder.

Ready to see what ELM can do for you?

Use Onit’s ROI Calculator to estimate the value enterprise legal management could deliver to your department.

Ready to see Onit’s ELM in action? Book a demo today with one of our experts.

Modern Legal Operations Starts with Smarter Tools, Not More People 

Posted on August 1, 2025 by - Legal Operations

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. 

table with legal operations papers scattered on it

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 our Legal 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.