Tag: enterprise legal management

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.

AI for Legal Teams Begins with the People, Not the Platform

Posted on September 10, 2025 by - Artificial Intelligence, Legal Operations

AI for Legal Teams Begins with the People, Not the Platform

You’ve seen the shift coming for a while… now it’s right at your desk. AI for legal teams isn’t a someday conversation anymore. It’s the reality smart legal ops leaders are stepping into right now. But if you’re still waiting for the perfect tech stack to drop from the sky, you’re looking in the wrong place. Probably somewhere between the fax machine and the fantasy budget.

But you know what? The most important thing to get right before anything else isn’t the tool. It’s the team.

AI for Legal Teams Begins with Who, Not Just What

The legal tech market is loud and noisy. Everyone’s promising smarter processes, faster turnaround, and less manual work. But here’s what often gets overlooked: no matter how advanced a tool is, it doesn’t know your business. Not like your team does.

Bringing AI into legal operations is less about shiny features and more about empowering the people who already understand where the work slows down. The ones reviewing line items, redlining NDAs, chasing outside counsel for timekeeper adjustments. They’re the ones who know what needs to change.

Legal ops leaders who succeed with AI aren’t scrambling for new hires. They’re rethinking how their current team is structured and supported. That starts with trust, context, and a framework that gives people permission to question the way things have always been done.

Clarifying Roles Creates Real Capacity

Most legal departments have talent that’s underleveraged, not underqualified. The challenge is clarity. When responsibilities are vague, opportunities for automation fall through the cracks. Time gets lost in follow-ups, escalations, and duplicated effort: the triple threat of legal inefficiency.

AI for legal teams becomes exponentially more effective when roles are aligned to the work that AI can actually support. Think about the person who’s always customizing approval workflows or manually reviewing every invoice line. They don’t need a replacement. They need to be freed up for higher-value analysis, exception handling, or cross-functional collaboration.

That’s not just good for efficiency. It’s good for morale. Empowered legal teams feel the shift when they stop fighting systems and start owning them.

Legals ops and ai for legal teams - smiling workers at their desks

Leadership Is the Difference Between Experiment and Execution

Implementing AI in legal operations isn’t just an IT decision. It’s an operational transformation, and legal ops leaders are uniquely positioned to drive it.

It starts with asking better questions. What’s repetitive and rules-based? What drains the team’s time without moving legal forward? What’s being done “because we’ve always done it that way”? If that phrase had a frequent flyer program, legal ops would have lifetime status.

The answers to those questions will uncover more than just inefficiencies. They reveal opportunities for AI that actually make a difference. The kind that increases transparency, reduces legal spend, and improves collaboration across departments.

That’s how you move beyond experimentation and into meaningful execution.

Great Legal Ops Teams Don’t Work in a Vacuum

AI for legal teams doesn’t exist in a legal-only bubble. The most effective teams are the ones building smart bridges across functions, especially with IT, compliance, procurement, and finance. And not just after the fact, but from the start.

If legal wants to own its AI roadmap, it needs allies who understand the business case and the operational needs behind it. That means getting IT out of reactive troubleshooting mode and into collaborative planning. It means helping finance see spend control not as a reporting exercise, but as a strategic lever.

The best legal ops teams don’t just ask for buy-in. They show their cards. They bring forward a plan backed by realistic implementation steps, accountability, and expected ROI. And they come to the table understanding the risks, concerns, and language of each partner.

The result is fewer roadblocks, smoother execution, and legal that’s no longer seen as “different,” but as an integrated part of the enterprise strategy.

Modern Legal operations playbook and ai for legal teams - worker pointing to their device.

What Forward-Thinking Legal Ops Teams Are Doing Now

If you’re not overhauling your department overnight, good. The smartest legal ops leaders know that progress doesn’t come from massive changes. It comes from small, strategic shifts made consistently and visibly.

Start by documenting where your team spends the most time, especially on tasks that feel manual, repetitive, or invisible to the business. Look for areas where you are double-handling data, reviewing things that should never have made it to your desk, or chasing down missing details from vendors.

Then talk to your internal partners. Find out what IT needs from you to support AI projects more smoothly. Ask finance what data would help them feel more confident in legal’s spend strategy. Look for the low-friction, high-impact changes that set the stage for bigger moves.

The best part? You don’t have to do it all on your own. With the right framework and the right partners, your team can move faster than you think. It all starts with clarity, intent, and the decision to lead.

Of Course Tools Matter, But Timing and Ownership Matter More

Yes, your team needs tools that are explainable, configurable, and purpose-built for legal work. That’s why we created a tech stack checklist to help legal ops leaders evaluate what fits.

Before you dive into demos or explore AI agents with IT, map the workflows your team owns, the bottlenecks that slow you down, and the outcomes that legal leadership actually cares about. Then match solutions to those realities.

A tool with the wrong team is just shelfware: expensive, impressive, and utterly unused. A focused team with the right structure can unlock results in weeks, not quarters.

Image of ai growth representing legal ops teams and scalability

The Playbook for Legal Ops Teams Who Want More Than Buzz

The AI Legal Ops Playbook was built for legal teams who want to lead with intention, not react to pressure. Inside, you’ll find:

  • A strategic framework for team design and role alignment
  • A buyer’s checklist for evaluating legal AI solutions
  • Tips for communicating ROI to the GC, CIO, or CFO
  • Real examples of how AI is helping teams reduce review cycles and tighten spend controls

It’s built for real teams doing real work, not hypothetical tech stacks that assume more resources than you actually have.

The Teams That Will Win Are the Ones That Move with Purpose

AI for legal teams is not a side project anymore. It’s the main event. The training wheels are off and the spotlight is on.

Legal’s no longer in the corner. You’re front and center on the transformation stage. Time to step into the ring and bring it.

AI is already reshaping how the best legal teams operate, and everyone else is just racing to catch up. But real change doesn’t start with tools. It starts with a team that’s aligned, confident, and ready to lead with clarity.

If you’re tired of AI content that talks around legal, this cuts through it. It’s made for you: the team doing the real work and ready to lead. We kept it tight, useful, and totally focused on legal ops. Think of it as your shortcut to strategy, minus the 50-slide internal pitch deck.

Download the AI Legal Ops Playbook

Or if you’re already mapping out your AI plan, let us show you what we can do – Book a demo.