Archives: News

Quickly and Accurately Draft, Review, Redline, and Edit Contracts in Minutes

HOUSTON, Sept. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Onit, the global leader in AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for the legal industry, announced significant enhancements to its groundbreaking ReviewAI product, powered by generative AI technology. This launch marks the first of several major AI-driven product releases scheduled for this year, underscoring Onit’s commitment to remaining at the forefront of AI innovation. Onit’s continued leadership in AI stems from years of investment and expertise, positioning the company well ahead of competitors.

“AI has been our fastest-growing product line for the past three years, and that momentum is accelerating,” said Michael Farlekas, CEO of Onit. “The launch of ReviewAI into the mid-market is just the beginning, with three more major AI-driven releases coming this year, targeting legal spend management, contract management, legal operations, and service requests.”

Leading the AI Transformation

Onit has been pioneering AI capabilities designed specifically for legal workflows for years, building its reputation as a leader in legal tech. The launch of ReviewAI is a testament to the company’s advanced generative AI capabilities, transforming contract lifecycle management by offering tools that can read, write, and reason like a lawyer.

“Eight years ago, we became one of the first companies to deliver software that could emulate legal reasoning with ReviewAI,” said Jean Yang, VP of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. “Today, we’re proud to offer ReviewAI as a standalone product, powered by the latest advancements in generative AI and large language models.”

ReviewAI’s Impact on Contract Management

ReviewAI delivers intuitive, AI-driven tools that streamline the contract management process from drafting and negotiation to review and execution. Designed to integrate with any contract management system, it allows legal teams to enhance their workflows without disruption.

With ReviewAI, legal teams benefit from:

• 4x faster contract audit and migration
• 70% faster contract negotiations
• 400% faster data entry and validation with Onit CLM

The generative AI-powered contract chat feature provides instant answers during reviews, while pre-configured playbooks enable faster and more accurate contract assessments customized to align with business standards.

Looking Ahead

ReviewAI is just the first of four AI-driven launches for 2024, reinforcing Onit’s dedication to delivering innovative solutions for legal departments worldwide. The company’s future AI-driven products will continue to enhance operational efficiency and client value.

About Onit

Onit is a global leader of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. To learn how, book a demo.

Groundbreaking Feature Adds Status Sharing and Management, Permissions Control, Notification System to SimpleLegal

HOUSTON, Aug. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Onit, the leader in software solutions for legal operations teams, announced a new feature for matter and spend management that will continue to transform how in-house legal teams work with their service providers.

Shared Matter Updates, a new feature in SimpleLegal, centralizes communication and ensures all stakeholders remain current on the status of legal matters throughout the matter’s lifecycle.

“We’re proud of the success of the initial phase of our groundbreaking vendor collaboration has had in helping establish clear communication and efficient collaboration between in-house vendors and outside counsel,” says Shri Iyer, SVP of Product Management and Design. “With the introduction of bidirectional Matter Updates with outside counsel, we’re taking this to a new level by centralizing communication within our platform. This ensures that all matter updates are stored securely and remain accessible, preserving historical information and guaranteeing continuity.”

Enhanced bidirectional vendor collaboration offers three key capabilities to improve and expand your collaboration efforts:

• Status sharing and management: Enhance real-time communication to update and manage the status of legal matters
• Permissions control: Tailor who can see and update the status of matters
• Notification system: Maintain a single source of truth about the latest status of matters, with visibility into in-house and outside counsel conversations

“Rapid collaboration and communication are the foundations for success in the fast-paced modern legal environment,” Iyer says. “With vendor collaboration’s new features, in-house teams and outside counsel have the powerful and secure real-time tools they need to collaborate and communicate with speed.”

Matter Updates is available today for all SimpleLegal customers with a matter management plan.

To learn more about Matter Updates and vendor collaboration with SimpleLegal, request a demo or learn more on the blog.

About Onit

Onit is a global leader in AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management, and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Onit product brands are OnitX, SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, ReadySign, BusyLamp, and SecureDocs.

The appointment further accelerates Onit’s success in building AI solutions for the world’s best companies

Houston, TX, June 25, 2024 – Onit, a global leader of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for the legal industry, today announced the promotion of Nick Whitehouse to Chief AI Officer. This strategic move extends the company’s leadership in AI-enabled products for legal departments by putting even greater focus on continued AI innovation for Onit’s global customer base.

“Nick’s track record on the cutting edge of AI development makes him the perfect person to lead Onit’s AI strategy for our customers and business,” says Michael Farlekas, CEO of Onit. “The legal industry is at an inflection point and AI-embedded tools – like our Catalyst Generative AI Paralegal and ContractWorks Taggy – are examples of how Onit is already transforming legal departments around the world. Nick’s leadership will help Onit deliver new AI-enabled products, integrate AI even deeper into our existing portfolio, and drive greater customer adoption than ever before.”

In his new position, Whitehouse will lead Onit’s AI strategy and development, focusing on creating unified AI solutions that deliver real productivity gains. Whitehouse has already led the integration of AI into more than 50% of Onit’s products, serving Legal AI to more than 1,300 customers worldwide.

“Onit customers interact with our AI solutions millions of times a year, solving critical problems for their businesses,” says Whitehouse. “With continued focus and investment in AI, we are well positioned to extend our market leadership and see our customers leverage AI tens of millions of times a year, dramatically improving the efficiency of their legal operations.”

Onit’s investment in AI-embedded products began more than 8 years ago. Today the company offers three standalone AI products that serve more than 50 enterprise clients. Whitehouse owns an aggressive product roadmap that will deliver multiple AI releases before the end of the year, aiming to more than double the number of customers that use Onit AI capabilities.

With a formidable background in transformation and AI that spans two decades, Whitehouse has been a pioneering force in the legal industry. His achievements have earned him numerous accolades, including the IDC Australasian Digital Transformation Leader of the Year and the Global Most Disruptive Leader, awarded for his innovative contributions to technology in law.

Whitehouse previously served as the Managing Director of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence and joined Onit following its acquisition of McCarthyFinch, a legal AI company he co-founded. During his tenure as Chief Digital Officer at MinterEllisonRuddWatts, Whitehouse was recognized as a world leader in legal digital transformation, where he was instrumental in executing digital initiatives and securing the firm’s reputation as a leader in innovation.

About Onit

Onit is a global leader of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

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Onit Catalyst’s generative AI technology is further integrated within Onit Contract Lifecycle Management to enable the easy automation of data extraction from contracts.

Houston, TX – April 30, 2024—Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions, today announced the deeper integration of its leading Catalyst generative AI technology with its legal business process automation platform. Onit Catalyst delivers a natural language chat feature to automate the extraction of vital data from a company’s library of contracts. The Onit platform has also been further enhanced by adding a new best practice Vendor Suite template that provides legal departments with better law firm analytics capabilities and the deeper integration of its Legal Holds management capability with Microsoft to ensure more robust preservation of digital records.

Companies are often hampered by their inability to collect their contracts within a single contract lifecycle management platform and extract critical information efficiently and rapidly, as traditional extraction tools can retrieve only a limited number and type of attributes. This need arises from consolidating legacy contacts, expanding the range of attributes collected in a contract database to better manage commercial agreements, and conducting compliance audits.

Onit Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) leverages Catalyst generative AI technology to support “smart fields,” additional attributes that can be extracted from contracts using natural language chat powered by an LLM. This flexible system allows for the easy addition of new custom data fields to the contract database, empowering users to adapt the system to their specific needs. By accurately extracting these attributes, customers can effectively manage their contracts, ensure compliance, monitor performance, and make informed decisions based on contract data analysis. The integration also allows contracts and contract data to be easily imported into Onit CLM for seamless analysis, giving users complete control over their contract management process.

In the fall of 2023, Onit introduced Matter Suite and Spend Suite best practice templates that allow legal operations professionals to track key performance indicators and have better visibility across invoices, budgets, matters, and more. Onit has now added Vendor Suite, which provides greater insights and analysis capability of critical law firm metrics so legal departments can make informed decisions regarding the efficiency and competitiveness of law firms concerning their timekeeper rates. It presents trends and details of timekeeper rates, segmented by staff classifications such as Partners, Of Counsels, Associates, geography, and more. Vendor Suite enables users to quickly evaluate how the average rates align with fairness, adequacy, or excellence standards across similar law firms.

The Onit Legal Hold capabilities have also been enhanced to provide greater flexibility and more complete, easier-to-manage digital records preservation. Legal departments can customize Legal Holds Management to meet their unique workflows, including custodian notification, categorization, and approval matrices. The recently added integration with the Microsoft Purview compliance portal allows for preserving records across the Microsoft landscape (including OneDrive and SharePoint) from within Legal Holds Management. Lastly, when IT modifies preservation settings, these changes can now be audited within Onit to ensure necessary legal holds remain.

Learn more about Onit’s ELM and CLM solutions at CLOC Global Institute 2024 in Las Vegas from May 6-9; Onit is a proud platinum sponsor of the CLOC Global Institute.

• Onit’s CLOC presence features: Jean Yang, Vice President of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, will moderate a panel titled “Complexity to Consistency: Three Keys to Empowering Legal Excellence with AI” on May 8 at 12:20 p.m. PDT.
• Visit us at Booths #309 and #402 to learn more about these product updates, book a demo, or arrange to meet the team at CLOC.

Additional Resources

For more company news, industry trends, and best practices from corporate legal innovators, read the Onit blog and follow us on LinkedIn.

About Onit

Onit is a global leader of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Strategic hirings are part of a larger investment strategy to build on Onit’s success and further scale the business.

Houston, April 9, 2024 - Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions including enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM), today announced three new senior executive leadership team members. Michelle Culp has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for all go-to-market functions. Nathan Peirson has joined as Chief People Officer, leading the company’s global human resources organization and driving Onit’s strategic talent goals. Laura Fese has joined Onit as Chief Legal Officer, leading the company’s global legal operations. Melanie Shafer has been promoted to the new Chief Customer Officer position, where she will be responsible for the company’s services and customer success functions. They join recently appointed CEO Michael Farlekas and CFO Austin Owens, who joined in June 2023.

Michelle Culp will focus on implementing an integrated, global go-to-market strategy for Onit. This strategy will benefit customers of all sizes by enabling them to better understand the benefits of the entire portfolio of Onit’s ELM, CLM, and custom workflow automation applications. Culp brings a demonstrated history of transforming and leading SaaS sales and marketing teams across multiple customer segments. Before Onit, she served as the Global Vice President of Sales at Sovos, a leading compliance software company serving over 100,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 500, across 70 countries. Culp also served as the Vice President of Sales, Small Business at SAP Concur.

Nathan Peirson brings over twenty years of global HR experience to the Chief People Officer role, with considerable expertise in high-growth SaaS and technology companies. In his role, Peirson will drive Onit’s enterprise talent strategy while building a best-in-class Human Resources function. Prior to joining Onit, he served as SVP of Talent and Employee Experience at Paycor, a leading provider of human capital management software. He also served as Worldpay’s Global Head of Culture and Talent and held multiple global HR leadership roles during his tenure. He was recently nominated as one of OnCon’s top 100 HR Professionals of 2024 award.

Laura Fese has joined as Chief Legal Officer, bringing over twenty-five years of experience in managing legal operations for private and public multi-national supply chain and ERP SaaS businesses.  Recently, Fese served as Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of E2open (NYSE: ETWO).  Fese is an effective leader with expertise in accelerating growth through developing exceptional legal talent and implementing critical process and automation improvements.

Melanie Shafer has assumed the new role of Chief Customer Officer. Shafer most recently served as the SVP of Customer Experience of Onit’s Commercial Business. Shafer’s primary focus is to create a scalable service experience for Onit customers, regardless of their maturity stage in legal operations. This comprehensive strategy enables Onit to act as a trusted advisor to its customers, enhancing efficiency, cost containment, and risk mitigation for the General Counsel’s office. Before Onit, Shafer served as VP of Professional Services and Support at Zywave, a pioneer in the insurance technology industry, where she led teams responsible for the implementation and ongoing support of 15,000+ customers through multiple acquisitions and international expansion.

Austin Owens joined Onit in June of 2023 and has focused on improving finance practices to support scalable growth. Owens has brought expertise in financial planning and analysis, business analytics, and business process design to Onit, along with experience in global operations. Owens most recently served as Chief Financial Officer at Data Axle, a leader in data-driven marketing and business intelligence solutions, supporting various activities ranging from business unit partnerships with sales and operations leadership to corporate and treasury-focused responsibilities related to cash management and business development. He also served as the lead across the entire lifecycle of merger and acquisition engagements.

“I am excited by the addition of these outstanding senior leaders with diverse experiences. “Together with our exceptional employees, they will be instrumental in transforming Onit into the leading legal operations software platform company serving companies of all sizes worldwide,” said Michael Farlekas, CEO of Onit. “The industry is at an inflection point, with corporate legal departments needing to adopt a core business platform with AI embedded that supports better productivity, higher efficiency, and data-driven decision-making so legal leaders can focus on helping create business advantage for their corporations.”

About Onit
Onit is a global leader of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Modernized event management decreases risk for legal departments where the stakes are higher for missed deadlines

HOUSTON, March 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — SimpleLegal (an Onit company), the industry leader in easy-to-learn and implement e-Billing and matter management software, announces the launch of its purpose-built event management feature within its matter management solution.

Compared to available market options, SimpleLegal separates task and event management, functionality traditionally tied together in matter management applications. The separation draws attention to the importance of events, such as court dates, filing deadlines, and depositions, and the negative consequences when events are mismanaged.

“We all work in tools like Outlook and Google where creating a meeting, inviting the right people, and adding relevant details is simple,” says Shri Iyer, SimpleLegal’s SVP of Product Management and Design. “We set out to replicate this ease of use, designed specifically for legal departments, after our customers vocalized that deadlines are too important to be viewed as mere tasks that are checked off a list.”

When it comes to missed deadlines, the stakes are higher for legal departments. Failing to file court documents on time or overlooking statutory limits, for example, can pose significant risk to a business, potentially resulting in lawsuits, attorney sanctions, and case dismissal. The robust calendaring provided by SimpleLegal’s event management gives legal departments the centralized, matter-specific view of upcoming events that has been missing in the market. Better visibility and accountability make collaboration effortless and keep key stakeholders informed.

SimpleLegal’s event management further integrates with CalendarRules, the most comprehensive and reliable court rules platform offering over 1,800 rule sets nationwide. As the first matter management solution to offer this integration, legal departments can confidently prepare for and manage upcoming events and deadlines thanks to automated, real-time data from CalendarRules to SimpleLegal.

“After extensive research and conversations with legal ops professionals, we knew separating tasks and events was the right call. It didn’t make sense to treat a deadline-driven event the same way as a task,” shares Iyer. “To successfully and continually build value for our users, we can’t lose sight of how legal teams operate and must adapt our product accordingly.”

SimpleLegal streamlines legal operations by packaging event and task management into a single matter management solution. This unified approach enhances visibility into team capacity, supports strategic decision-making, and simplifies matter intake and management, increasing workflow efficiency and productivity.

Additional Resources
To learn more about SimpleLegal’s event management, request a demo or learn more on the blog. For company news, industry trends and best practices from corporate legal innovators, read SimpleLegal blogs and follow us on LinkedIn.

About Onit
Onit is a global leader in AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally. It helps transform how Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs, and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Onit product brands are OnitX, SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, ReadySign, BusyLamp, and SecureDocs.