Tag: SimpleLegal

Legal Spend Just Got Its Groove Back 

Legal Spend Groove Back Blog Image

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. 

Legal Ops Revolution - Legal Spend Just Got It Groove Back

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. 

Legal spend - Spend Agent by Onit

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.  

Legal Ops and Spend Management

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. 

legal spend with onit elm ebilling spend agent and counselmath

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. 

Legal Ops on your terms. Spend management. Onit ELM ebilling. CounselMatch. SimpleLegal.

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 workon your terms. 

Onit Acquires SecureDocs, Extending Contract Management to New and Rapidly Growing Corporate Legal Departments

SecureDocs - ContractWorks - ReadySignA little over two years ago, Onit launched its contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, helping Fortune 500 companies streamline the complex processes of buy-side, sell-side and corporate contract administration. The solution quickly gained popularity with enterprises who found that they could shorten sales cycles, speed up revenue generation, improve risk mitigation and strengthen collaboration across departments.

Since the launch, Onit has continued on the path of innovation by introducing new CLM products, including:

  • ReviewAI, technology that uses AI to review and redline contracts in two minutes or less, resulting in a productivity increase of up to 52%.
  • Smart Checklists, which creates checklists made up of concrete, task-based actions that are generated from your company playbook.
  • ExtractAI, software that obtains usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts and turns it into actionable information.
  • Automate NDA, which removes manual work from high-volume and often low-value NDAs, resulting in faster agreement execution and a significant reduction in end-to-end processing time.

The Next Phase of CLM Expansion

Now, we’re excited to announce that we have expanded our CLM market reach with the acquisition of SecureDocs. SecureDocs augments Onit’s portfolio with a contract management solution ideally suited for companies that have new or rapidly scaling corporate legal departments.

SecureDocs, based in Santa Barbara, California, is a software company specializing in contract management software that can be set up in minutes (ContractWorks), a data room that streamlines the entire deal process (SecureDocs), and secure, legally binding electronic signatures (ReadySign). Its solutions have helped customers effectively manage more than 13 million contracts and documents across 96 countries.

Many midsize companies rely on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails to manage legal obligations. While these tools are readily available, they limit transparency and efficiency when it comes to contract management. ContractWorks from SecureDocs dramatically increases contract visibility, minimizes risk and ensures customers don’t miss renewal dates. Since it can be set up in minutes, it provides an effective and easy-to-deploy solution with a fast time-to-value.

SecureDocs and SimpleLegal

SecureDocs will integrate with SimpleLegal, Onit’s legal operations management software subsidiary.The companies share a similar approach to building simple, intuitive software. Together, they will provide solutions to streamline operations and offer greater efficiency for scaling legal departments.

As with all of Onit’s acquisitions, we are investing in SecureDocs, its employees and its products. We are excited to welcome the entire SecureDocs team to Onit and will continue to develop all of the company’s products.

Onit’s Growth and Expanded Market Reach

SecureDocs joins Onit at a time of exponential growth. In addition to SecureDocs, Onit has acquired four other companies in the past 15 months, including:

  • BusyLamp, a premier provider of legal spend and matter management software for European corporate legal departments.
  • Bodhala, a legal spend analytics, benchmarking, and market intelligence company.
  • AXDRAFT, a document automation provider.
  • McCarthyFinch, a legal AI innovator.

These acquisitions follow Onit’s first acquisition, SimpleLegal, which closed in May 2019.

To learn more about our acquisitions and products, customers are invited to reach out to their account managers or customer success managers.