Tag: Podcast

Introducing A New Source for the Latest Developments in Legal Ops, AI and Ideation

Posted on November 18, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Corporate legal departments and the enterprises they serve are increasingly on a mission to adopt best practices and transform them into smarter workflows, better processes and operational efficiencies.

Legal operations professionals are crucial in creating this digital transformation, something reflected in a recent CLOC survey. It outlined top-ranked priorities for legal operations, including automating legal processes, implementing new technologies and right sourcing legal work.

Over the past several months, experts and pioneers in digital transformation and legal technology have gathered to discuss some of the biggest challenges and opportunities for general counsel, in-house counsel and law departments. Their insight, covering areas such as NDA challenges and constructing world-class legal operations, is now available as podcasts on this LinkedIn page.

Some of the podcast highlights include:

  • How to Alleviate the NDA Strain – Nick Whitehouse, GM for Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, talks about how technology, AI and automation, including Automate NDA from Onit, is transforming the NDA process. Nick has extensive experience in leading digital transformation at large organizations, and he knows how important a quick win is to making those transformations successful.
  • How to Build World-Class Legal Operations – Brad Rogers, Onit’s SVP of Strategy and Growth, shares his insights into what goes into the creation of industry-leading legal ops. While budget is an important factor to how fast you can move on technology, it’s important to remember that you need to tailor the speed of your transformation to the human capacity for change.
  • What Lawyers Really Want from Contract AI – Are legal and contract AI technologies giving lawyers what they truly need? Lawyer Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, discusses this question and practical uses of technology in law.
  • CLM ROI: Is It Hype or Really Happening? – Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is yet another popular topic in legal tech today. Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get past the hype to CLM payoff and the ultimate ROI opportunity.

You can listen to all these podcasts and more here.

The Onit Advantage

Onit is home to some of the best minds in legal technology. Our executives created this industry and ground-breaking technology including enterprise legal management more than 20 years ago – all while working hand-in-hand with corporate legal departments to make it easier to handle the business of law.

To learn more about how Onit is revolutionizing legal operations, contact Onit today.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

Posted on November 11, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The legal industry has been undergoing a technological revolution in the past decade, and few technologies have been having a more significant impact than artificial intelligence. Lawyers everywhere are curious to know how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law.

Nick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of ExcellenceNick Whitehouse, GM of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, recently sat down with Jared Correia, host of Above the Law’s Non-Eventcast podcast (available on Apple and Spotify), to discuss how AI impacts the legal world. Spoiler alert: it’s not Terminator time just yet.

The conversation started with an icebreaker about the latest Pixar movie, Lightyear, which proved to be an ideal segue into the topic of AI. Pixar is a prime example of how you can find success by using computers to do things differently.

Nick and Jared then discussed lawyers’ current attitudes toward AI and the lack of understanding about what AI truly is. To many, AI is an amorphous concept, made up of technical terms like “algorithms” and “machine learning” that aren’t always easily understood. Nick provides some handy definitions to clarify the terms.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law

AI can have a tremendous amount of value for corporate legal departments and law firms. Consider areas of routine work that involve a lot of data. AI brings efficiency to many traditionally time-consuming tasks, like due diligence, document preparation, eDiscovery, transcription, contract lifecycle management, and billing. With the time saved, lawyers can focus on more complex and meaningful tasks than administrative or manual work.

According to Nick, the reality is that most lawyers are likely already using AI even if they don’t realize it. The emerging technologies will continue to reshape the legal landscape. Technologies like chatbots and robotic process automation are rapidly changing the way lawyers practice law. AI is helping lawyers understand what clients want and assisting with the work that meets those needs. Whether it’s drafting contracts, answering billing queries, automating administrative work or something else, AI is making it an exciting time to be a lawyer. The time to start experimenting and capitalizing on AI is now, so lawyers can gain a competitive advantage going forward.

When you discuss how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, it’s helpful to understand what will happen in the near future. What can we expect from AI in the future? As Nick explains, we’ll see AI increasingly used for contract management, matter management and billing. For in-house teams, AI will be applied more often to managing assets. At law firms, it will be harnessed more and more for determining proper fees, billing, data management and back-office productivity.

You can find the entire Non-Eventcast podcast on Apple and Spotify to hear Nick and Jared’s entire discussion of all things legal AI.

To learn more about how artificial intelligence will affect the practice of law, we recommend the following resources.

Contact Onit today for more information about how AI powers contract lifecycle management, enterprise legal management and more offerings for corporate legal.

 

Corporate Legal Department News and Updates for September 2021

Posted on September 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we ease into month nine of 2021, here are some of the most interesting and timely pieces of corporate legal department news. In this edition, we look into the NDA strain, how COVID and diversity impact GCs and law firms, the numbers behind contract management, legal analytics and more.

1. Are GCs Now Chief Medical Officers Too?

The pandemic has been responsible for many of the most drastic return to work policies in history. But it’s also been changing the roles of chief legal officers. This article examines how GCs are now considering COVID-related ethical questions and the impact of vaccinations on policy decisions and return to office working. Interestingly, some GCs feel as if they are ad hoc medical officers since they need to interpret the proliferation of governmental guidance issued around COVID.

Source: Law.com

2. Cold, Hard Contract Lifecycle Management Numbers [Infographic]

$1,893,312. That’s the average cost for in-house counsel to manage contracts each year. Why so pricy? Contracts often come with unrefined and time-consuming processes, creating a real drain on attorneys and gnawing away at their valuable time. This infographic presents the numbers behind the burden, who is estimated by analyst to use contract lifecycle management and AI and the real-life benefits of adopting both.

Source: Onit blog

3. Corporate Legal Department News Update: Progress Still Lacking in Law Firm Diversity

Corporate legal departments prioritizing diversity for outside counsel may find this recent survey disappointing. According to the Law360 Diversity Snapshot 2021 survey, there’s been only an “incremental change” in diversity numbers. The report found that 18% of law firm attorneys are minorities, a statistic that has crept up by only four percentage points over seven years.  Robert Ambrogi digs into reasons and solutions.

Source: LawSites

4. The New Champions of Driving Business Value Are Corporate Counsel

Digital transformation – either a large initiative or a smaller-scale, specialized project like NDA automation – can positively impact corporate legal departments. According to this article, the concept invites attorneys to step forward as agents of change. In-house attorneys have a chance to champion innovation, advance digital transformation and bring demonstrable value to their business. This article breaks down the fundamentals of becoming a change agent, including where to start, the keys to success and driving digital transformation.

Source: Corporate Counsel

5. Now Hiring: A Data Scientist?

In April, Gartner wrote about the rise of analytics and how legal leaders should tap into a new skill set to advance capabilities. According to the post:

“Legal should hire data scientists only once it has a sufficient number of legal analytics use cases, a solid foundation of data and technology, and a culture that supports advanced analytics.”

If your corporate legal department isn’t quite ready to go that route, it can still find insights into the data it gathers every day. Above the Law examines the demand for legal analytics, the Moneyball effect and news about a recent acquisition that expands legal spend analytics with benchmarking, market intelligence and AI.

Source: Above the Law

Bonus Resource: Avoiding the NDA Strain [Podcast]

The average cost to draft, review, negotiate and file a single NDA is between $114 and $456. Multiply that cost across 500 or 100,000 NDAs a year, and the price tag skyrockets quickly.

And don’t discount the mental burden NDAs take on attorneys.

In 2018, the American Bar Association studied 15,000 attorneys and found that nearly 30% struggled with depression and burnout. What causes depression and burnout? Tedious work, long hours and high stress. It’s not hard to see how high-volume NDAs contribute to those conditions.

In this podcast, AI and digital transformation expert Nick Whitehouse discusses a unique and quick way to avoid the NDA strain with automation and AI.

How to Intentionally Design World-Class In House Legal Operations

Posted on August 17, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The rise of in house legal operations is changing the way organizations approach and structure their legal function. As the discipline of legal operations continues to evolve, so does the conversation on what world-class operations should look like and how to intentionally design them to meet that status.

Last month, we sat down with Brad Rogers, Onit’s Vice President of Strategy and Growth and a former leader of operational excellence in Fortune 500 companies, to discuss what it takes to build world-class legal operations in today’s demanding legal environment. (You can find his full podcast here.)

In our first installment, we discussed the goals of an in house legal operations transformation journey and how to secure the funding to build the legal ops function your organization needs.

Now, we turn our attention to what that legal ops function should look like.

Legal ops should deliver productivity back to lawyers, significantly reduce and reallocate legal spend and future-proof the environment your lawyers are working in. But what would that legal ops function look like if it were intentionally designed?

Brad laid out three elements that are crucial to world-class legal ops: technology, support services and partnerships and business discipline.

In House Legal Operations Technology

Technology is a major factor in any legal ops transformation journey. We live at a peak time for innovation, with capabilities for legal professionals that are constantly evolving through advancements in areas like AI.

When you’re building your in house legal operations function, you should be thinking about your entire technology ecosystem – that means not just your foundational tools like matter management, e-billing and document management, but the surrounding technologies as well. You want to structure a solution set for your lawyers, not simply gather a collection of disparate tools for them to learn how to use.

A successful transformation journey requires a road map that connects all your capabilities to give you a better understanding of the nature and trends of your business. Once you understand that, you can start considering things like how AI would enhance your capabilities even further or where there are additional workflow efficiencies to be gained.

Support Services and Partnerships

One of the most beneficial capabilities a mature in house legal operations team can bring is the ability to leverage support services and strategic partnerships. When you’re first building out legal ops, however, this might look a little different.

You might start by approaching the lawyers and telling them to refer any nonlegal work they’re handling to legal ops. Even further, you can help them identify that work and cement your legal ops department as a valuable support team for legal. Going forward, legal ops should be involved in projects from the start and serve as proactive problem-solvers. Lawyers should be practicing law, not focusing on things like project management and business improvement. A strong legal ops team should also offer support for billing, which historically leads to significant lost time and inefficiency for legal departments.

The final aspect is managing the legal department’s internal partnerships with other departments, such as HR, risk compliance and security, and its external partnerships with vendors. Legal departments shouldn’t have to do everything by themselves. The point of legal ops is to let the lawyers focus on the law while ops handles the rest.

Business Discipline

One thing people often overlook when building world-class legal operations is the ability of in house legal operations to harness the power of data – both your internal data and data that exists outside the organization. Data analysis is key to understanding your business and trends in the market, allocating resources and making strategic plans for your organization.

Legal ops should be looking at all the available data and making informed decisions for the business. This can include outsourcing work, vendor management, strategic hiring and more. The goal is to get as much nonlegal work off the lawyers’ plates as possible to allow them to practice better law. Every legal department has hidden factories – pockets of inefficiency – that prevent them from being the most effective, disciplined legal function possible. Legal ops should ideally always be looking for those areas and figuring out the best way to eliminate or transform them.

For more legal ops insights, you can listen to the full podcast discussion with Brad here. You can also subscribe to the Onit podcast anywhere, including through Apple and Spotify or any service you use to listen to podcasts.

Celebrating 10 Years of Onit: A Podcast With Our Four Co-Founders

Posted on August 10, 2021 by - Company News and Events

2021 marks 10 years of Onit! In honor of our 10th anniversary, we sat down with Onit’s co-founders, CEO Eric M. Elfman, COO Eric Smith, VP of Marketing Jill Black and VP of Products John Gilman. The quartet, who have known each other for more than 20 years, chatted about how Onit began, pivots and successes along the way and what customers can expect to see from Onit in the future.

 

How Onit Started

Onit was born out of two early ideas:

  1. Finding ways to read invoices and get more value from them than existing rules engines
  2. Exploring how project management and workflow could be used with legal technology software.

“We were using some early natural language processing and concluded that we couldn’t extract the value [from invoices] at that time. The tools were not really at a point where we could do that,” explains Smith in the podcast. “We moved from what was the straight value proposition around the billing into something that we thought was a little more interesting, and it was around how project management and workflow could be used with legal technology software.”

Discussions with newer general counsels at the time underscored a growing priority for process improvement.

“We started heading down a path that was somewhat similar to support workflow and with a real sense that this needs to be ad hoc,” shares Gilman. “The problem with the business process tools at the time was that they were not flexible at all. We baked in some notions that anybody can add anybody else.”

Ultimately, they created a low-code business process automation platform – Apptitude – that allowed Onit to quickly build solutions such as enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, legal holds and legal service requests.

The Onit Nation, which includes Fortune 500 customers, partners and Onit employees, has also built more than 5,500 Apps and solutions on Apptitude that handle process challenges across the entire enterprise.

As Gilman summarizes in the podcast, “Our customers and partners are building apps that we’ve never even thought of. It’s really exciting to see.”

Building from 20+ Years of Entrepreneurial Experience

As with any business, there was some trial and error over the past decade. However, the co-founders have dedicated themselves to not repeating mistakes that had happened with past startups. This includes Datacert, the enterprise legal management company founded by Elfman and Smith in 1998 where all four worked together.

“It felt like we made every first-time entrepreneurial mistake possible at Datacert. The exit was great for all of the investors, but we felt like we could do it better. That’s what we dedicated the last 10 years trying to do at a minimum – not repeat those old mistakes. We’ve made plenty of new mistakes, but we don’t want to make any of those old ones again,” describes Elfman.

Award-Winning Legal Technology

Onit launched at a tradeshow and secured approximately 2,000 beta users – one of several proud moments for the co-founders. According to Black, an inspiring moment came from the industry’s validation of Onit and its customers’ work.

“About five years ago, we submitted a pretty prestigious award on behalf of one of our customers and he won. Not only did he win that award, he actually won four awards that year for legal technology and innovation in this space. For me, that was the pinnacle because I thought not only are we helping advance the industry, but our customers are seeing the value in this and the industry is taking notice,” she recounts.

The industry recognition continues to this day, with Onit and its customers winning titles including ACC Value Champion, Legal Innovation Awards, Legal Procurement Awards, Corporate Counsel Best Legal Department of the Year, Transatlantic Legal Awards and more.

Ten Years of Onit (and Beyond)

Since its launch, the company has gained more than 10,550 Fortune 500 and law firm customers and has grown into the only two-platform company in the market. Apptitude focuses on workflows and business process automation, and Precedent uses AI to drive business intelligence. More than 450 employees call Onit home and the company has a global presence with offices in Texas, California, New Zealand, Ukraine, the UK and India.

During the past 12 months, Onit has launched three AI offerings – Precedent and ReviewAI, ExtractAI for pre- and post-signature contract management. It debuted InvoiceAI, its AI-enabled invoice review tool, to customers in May, with a broader launch happening later this year. It also acquired two companies (McCarthyFinch and AXDRAFT) and its rapid revenue growth has been recognized in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, the Inc. 5000, the Inc. Private Titans and the Growjo 10K.

“We are building something significant here,” Elfman explains in the podcast. “I think that transcends any of us as individuals.”

To learn more about Onit, its founding and what to expect in the future, listen to the podcast embedded above or find the Onit podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify or anywhere you listen.

If you’d like to see Onit’s technology in action, you can reserve a demonstration here or email [email protected].

Legal Operations Manager Advice: How to Self-Fund Corporate Legal Transformation (Podcast)

Posted on July 22, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

A legal operations manager stepping into the role will probably face many of the same challenges peers do, according to the 13th Annual Law Department Operations Survey.  These include cost containment (60%), business process improvements (56%) and departmental resources, including funding for personnel and technology (38%).

As a result, corporate legal departments are building up their operations teams. CLOC reported that the average size of legal ops teams has increased compared to last year – one of many data points that illustrate the movement to transform how in-house counsel and legal professionals work. The ultimate goal is to spark transformation and create operational efficiencies that reduce low-value work for attorneys, save money and produce greater insight into legal spend.

Operational excellence comes with a price tag, though – one that may not be budgeted for. So the challenge is: How can corporate legal create world-class operations and self-fund the transformation?

According to Brad Rogers, Onit’s Vice President of Strategy and Growth, it requires a longer-term rethinking of how in-house counsel and legal professionals work. He recently shared his insight in a podcast (embedded below and available anywhere you listen to podcasts including Apple, Google, Spotify and more) on how to start a transformation journey and build a modern legal operations function. He draws this information from nearly three decades’ experience with operations excellence at companies including one Fortune 100 global financial services company with $1 trillion in assets, Bank of America, GE and JP Morgan Chase.

Goals of Transforming Legal Operations

Building world-class legal ops isn’t about changing what you do. In-house counsel will still give legal advice and manage matters. The concept focuses more on how this is accomplished by leveraging state-of-the-art capabilities – like automation and AI – to make work more streamlined and efficient.

A legal operations manager can lay the foundation needed for world-class legal ops by meeting these three goals:

  1. Protect the enterprise by practicing good law.
  2. Assemble a team of highly engaged top talent.
  3. Be efficient along the way.

It’s crucial to keep all three goals in mind. Too often, companies focus solely on efficiency and implement technologies that ideally save some time in day-to-day work. Ignoring the first two goals, however, is a misstep. Without keeping a purpose of protecting the organization in mind and strategically hiring the staff to meet that goal, technology alone won’t get you where you want to be.

When implementing new capabilities, legal operations should aim at building an environment that’s more engaging for lawyers and helping them get work off their plates so they can spend more time practicing.

Three Ways a Legal Operations Manager Can Self-Fund Transformation

Building world-class legal operations requires investment. You need to attract and mobilize the right resources that will help you accomplish your goals. However, when you’re starting from scratch, budget restrictions will likely make it harder to put the pieces together. There are three primary ways organizations can explore funding their journey.

  1. Examine legal spend. The first source of funding is to review your current spend and free up some dollars. Suppose you can find a way to cut your outside counsel spend by even 5 or 10%, either by better managing your outside counsel guidelines or finding other areas where you’re overspending. In that case, you can leverage those savings to self-fund part of your transformation.
  2. Redirect dollars. The second way is to keep an eye on the turnover in the legal department. If someone leaves, you might be able to leverage the money budgeted for that position into a few strategic, lower-price hires that can help you start the legal ops journey.
  3. Find investment funding. The third source, and typically the hardest one to tap, is to come up with a compelling business case to finance in an attempt to secure some investment funding. While it may be a long shot, it’s worth it if you can find any extra money to invest in legal ops.

Listen to the full podcast now.

If you’d like to hear more about legal operations transformation, here are some resources to explore:

Onit Welcomes Brad Rogers as Its Senior Vice President of Strategy and Growth

Posted on April 6, 2021 by - Company News and Events

Brad Rogers, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Growth, OnitToday, we are excited to announce that Brad Rogers has joined Onit as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Growth.

For many Onit customers, he doesn’t need an introduction. He’s very familiar with legal operations and transformation, as he most recently served as Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Advocacy and Oversight at a Fortune Global 100 company. While there, he held a leadership role in building legal operations capabilities designed to drive productivity and cost reductions.

In his new role, Brad focuses on developing, executing and sustaining corporate strategic initiatives that advance Onit’s aggressive growth trajectory and innovation. This is an area he’s well-versed in, having more than 25 years of transformation, process excellence, strategic planning and legal operations leadership experience at major multinational corporations, including Bank of America, GE and JPMorgan Chase. He also holds an MBA in Competitive Strategy and Quantitative Methods from Fordham University, a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master Black Belt in Six Sigma Quality and Change Management.

Podcast: Brad Rogers Discusses What is Driving Change in Legal

In Brad’s view, the legal industry is primed for transformation, not unlike that seen in healthcare two decades ago. Leaders in law are now thinking differently about how to drive efficiency, effectiveness and value.  The transition – which was happening well before remote working – is accelerating, with new operating models that are built on what he sees as the four major drivers of change in the industry. These include technology, the rise of legal operations, the replacement cost revolution and business model innovation.

To hear more of Brad Rogers’ insights on how the industry is poised for transformation, you can listen to our podcast interview with him (see below.)  You can also read the press release announcement here.

 

How Legal AI and Automation Work for Law Department Operations

Posted on February 19, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Implementing legal AI and automation is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. With numerous forms of both technologies, it helps to examine specific use cases and the corresponding benefits that come to the table.

In the first part of this blog and podcast series, we outlined what AI is at its foundation. In part two, we tackled how artificial intelligence and law departments are already working together.

Now, we’re back for the third and final segment of his AI series, which covers the combination of legal AI and automation. With the many different types of legal automation and AI assistance available today, we have some crucial points to consider for automation and AI’s role in it.

Starting the Journey of Combining Artificial Intelligence and Law Departments

Start by asking yourself some basic questions about the drivers you’re trying to achieve through automation. Is your goal to increase productivity, efficiency and quality? Are you most concerned about risk mitigation and compliance? Or are you trying to be efficient about identifying trends and actionable insights with the data you currently have?

For example, if your goal is to enhance efficiency, contract AI software and automation can speed up contract approval by up to 70% and increase user productivity by 51.5%.

Your reason for automating your law department will have an impact on how you go about implementing it. Regardless of your goals, you always need to be considering how automation can help your legal department become more valuable to the rest of the organization.

The Different Types of Legal AI and Automation

Automation isn’t one-size-fits-all and there many varieties of it available now. Before you start implementing automation and legal AI, it’s helpful to understand the different automation types that exist today. The goals you have might impact the kind of automation you choose.

There are three significant types of automation, plus a fourth that ties them all together:

  1. Intelligent process automation (IPA) focuses on optimizing tasks that traditionally require some form of human interaction. It assumes that companies have already digitized business processes and created workflows. IPA uses software to perform processes and automate tasks while completing workflows and automating and integrating digital processes. It extends the scope of process automation that has capabilities for reading documents. Think OCR, machine learning and natural language processing. It also manages processes through event triggers and intelligent workflow and helps collate and process data across multiple systems. For example, in the legal domain, an IPA-based platform can read and analyze contracts to automate the identification, extraction and evaluation of contract terms, identify business-critical information such as contract entities and assess them against standard clause statements.
  2. Business process automation (BPA) is the technology-enabled automation of tasks that accomplishes a specific workflow or function. BPA has somewhat similar goals as IPA, but its primary goal is to automate a business process while improving and simplifying business flows. A critical difference between BPA and IPA is that IPA is more about optimizing existing digital workflows, while BPA is about digitization. An example of this in the legal world would be digitizing all incoming matter-related documents and forms, with BPA capturing and validating information in any format as soon as such information is available.
  3. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses intelligent automation technology to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks, enabling business users to devote more time to other, higher-value work. The distinguishing characteristic of RPA is its capacity for awareness and ability to adapt to changes in circumstances.
  4. Hyperautomation brings together several components of legal automation and AI and machine learning to amplify work automation. The goal of hyperautomation is to optimize and deliver work more effectively, more efficiently and at a lower risk to drive innovation. A crucial component of hyperautomation is the ability to include humans in the digitization process. Hyperautomation can provide insights into ROI and leverage AI to enable end-to-end intelligent automation. For example, consider a law firm utilizing two technologies – one that intelligently reads data and documents and the other being an RPA tool (robot). An incoming email from a client triggers the RPA robot to read the email and its attachment. It logs in to the client’s system as an accredited user and downloads the data to be processed by the reading tool. The tool reads all the document’s data (which a human usually had to do) and extracts the relevant information utilizing machine learning to pass back to the RPA robot to populate the case management system and the finance system. It then notifies the supervising partner of the critical case information. With hyperautomation, the time to open a file decreases from 90 minutes to 10 minutes. It meets the service-legal agreement for the first response and the file opening administration team – through AI-assisted automation – focuses on higher-value work for the more complex cases.

Once you understand the different types of legal AI and automation and what you’re trying to achieve through automation, you can start to develop and implement your ideal technology plan for your law department.

To hear more about legal AI and automation, the benefits of combining artificial intelligence and law departments and the essential elements to consider before deciding on technologies, you can listen to our entire podcast (see below.)

Harness the Power of AI in Operations Management for Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 28, 2021 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

By now, businesses across all sectors recognize the benefits of legal AI in operations management – especially for processes such as contract management. Along with other technologies, AI is helping to reduce the financial pressure on operations teams and corporate legal departments who need to find ways to be more efficient. Particularly in the past year with the pandemic demands, there have been significant investments to decrease workloads for employees across businesses by streamlining things like workflow and approval processes. For example, this study found that contract AI in legal departments can increase efficiency by more than 50%.

In the first installment of our three-part blog and podcast series published earlier this month, we touched on AI’s ABCs. Now, we take a more in-depth look at some fantastic ways AI for operations is powering corporate legal departments. (You can find the podcast of this by scrolling down.)

Pushing Past the Buzz: Is It Really AI?

There’s no disputing that AI is a hot commodity now and a buzzword you hear often. AI in operations management and for legal teams is no exception. While you think your organization may be using it, you may be surprised. In reality, it can be challenging to identify, as AI in legal operations in day-to-day practice doesn’t always look like the images of AI we might have in our heads.

There are five ways to determine if you have an AI-driven system in place.

  1. Use of an interactive system – A fundamental cornerstone of AI is the ability to interact with your system more conversationally through the concept of a virtual agent.
  2. A wizard powered by learning to guide users – AI-enabled wizards lead users to the right workflows and tools, such as contract templates. This is based on learning from previous contract requests to offer more interactive guidance for your staff.
  3. Identification – Semantic analysis by AI can find patterns in related words relevant to an issue and then applies appropriate tags. This AI enabled semantic analysis is frequently used to identify issues in contracts, for example.
  4. Advanced analytics – AI builds off the identification process and allows you to utilize the identified terms very quickly by providing actionable recommendations for tasks.
  5. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – RPA can be used for approval of changes, not only in workflow but to help your system streamline the approval process by learning from decisions made in prior cases. Essentially, you’re changing the workflow based on past learning and providing recommendations to approvers based on previous actions.

Corporate legal departments vary widely in their current technology levels, so you may not see all of these hallmarks in your organization. Nonetheless, if you can do any (or all) of the things listed above, you’re currently using AI. The next question is how to ensure you’re fully taking advantage of it.

The Benefits of AI in Legal Operations

AI has significant impacts on lawyer productivity. Onit recently conducted a study of legal AI contract review software to see how it affected in-house lawyers’ productivity. The results showed that new users were immediately 34% more efficient and 51.5% more productive. Team leaders could reallocate 15% of their time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities if they use AI in operations.

Consider those results in the context of a typical midsize company that has 28 lawyers and reviews 4,850 contracts annually. With 51.5% more productivity, that same team of 28 lawyers could process 2,498 additional contracts each year. That’s the equivalent of adding nine lawyers to the team. The additional capacity could also reduce costs and free up lawyers to perform higher-value functions to support the business.

The benefits of legal AI don’t stop with productivity. Legal departments must have access to data, and AI for operations allows departments to combine data from all corporate data sources. AI can also flag suspect transactions or questionable third-party relationships and quickly assess their risk level. Having a value chain of data with an intelligence layer around it is essential. Being able to connect that intelligence layer to your legal operations is crucial.

Listen to the Podcast Now: Contract AI in Legal Operations

For a more in-depth discussion of AI enabled contract management and its importance for legal operations, you can listen to the entire podcast interview below.

In our third and final installment of this blog series coming next week, we’ll dive into some of the most useful forms of AI being used in business today.

 

Four Legal AI Trends Impacting Corporate Legal Departments

Posted on January 7, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Company News and Events

Each day, the accomplishments of artificial intelligence multiply. AI recently solved Schrödinger’s equation in quantum chemistry. It regularly diagnoses medical conditions, pilots jets and fetches answers for our everyday queries. And now, it might dance better than you do.

The ever-improving abilities of AI are having marked positive impacts on a wide variety of industries and professions – especially corporate legal departments and the in-house counsel and legal operations professionals that run them. So, what can corporate legal departments expect from legal AI in 2021?

Ari Kaplan, attorney, legal industry analyst, author, technologist and host of the Reinventing Professionals podcast, recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Nick, who is the 2019 IDC DX Leader of the Year and Talent’s 2018 Most Disruptive Leader Award (as judged by Sir Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak), shared the legal AI trends that general counsel and legal operations professionals should keep an eye on for 2021, including:

  • Accelerated adoption – The pandemic has greatly affected the use of AI, spurring businesses and their corporate legal departments to recategorize it from curiosity to necessity. For example, 2020 saw many companies having to quickly reassess large numbers of contracts (such as leases). Legal AI allowed in-house teams to quickly assess their contracts and take action, helping their businesses survive and thrive.
  • Banishing the black box – Legal departments have historically been perceived as black boxes – work goes in and decisions come out slowly with little transparency. AI reduces the time spent on individual transactions, increasing transparency by enabling consistent use of playbooks and the ability for the business to self-serve.
  • Focus on solving in-house challenges  – The technology has shifted from a project-based law firm focus toward products that are centered on solving in-house problems like contract lifecycle management and AI legal contract review. With 71% of lawyers saying they are mired in manual tasks, these AI products can drive a massive amount of value for corporate legal.
  • AI in the near future – In addition to the shift from law firm focused AI services to more in-house based services, corporate legal can expect a greater blending of AI into contract lifecycle management and third-party review as well as AI-assisted document automation and billing management.

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