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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.

96% CSAT influenced by expanded product offerings, ongoing innovation, and ample customer education opportunities

HOUSTON, Feb 1, 2024 — Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions, today announced its 2023 Customer Stewardship Report, detailing significant milestones that its commercial portfolio, which includes SimpleLegal for Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) and ContractWorks for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), has achieved over the past year. Highlights from 2023 include 103 product releases, a deeper investment in customer experience initiatives by delivering additional service options, and improved results and time savings for customers through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“We’re excited about the progress we’ve made over the past year,” said Melanie Shafer, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience. “Our focus on the customer experience, coupled with advancements in our products and the application of artificial intelligence throughout our products, reflects our dedication to staying at the forefront of innovation and delivering on customer expectations.”

Onit’s commercial business, focused on servicing the mid-market segment, continuously invests in growing its product capabilities and services. The commercial portfolio is well known for its ease of use, scalability, and success in delivering value quickly – just 95 days to value for customers after purchase. The following are a few of the highlights from this year’s report:

1. Product Innovation – Launched 13 new products and features for its ELM and CLM products, enabling a more cohesive user experience and improved workflows. Also delivered 190 customer requests for product enhancements, and expanded the use of artificial intelligence to drive customer efficiency, like AI-assisted invoice reviews that automatically capture real-world legal billing errors without a human in the loop, to generative AI applications that create clauses and simplify legalese in contracts.
2. Customer Engagement – Expanded service offerings such as custom training options, held 129 product training sessions and 65 office hours, and hosted 32 user groups and Ask Me Anything (AMA) webinars to build cross-customer collaboration. These actions have helped expand customer knowledge of Onit’s product and service offerings, making it easier to use and gain value, leading to a 96% average customer satisfaction rating.
3. Investments & Results – Heavy investment in its products and services has made a big impact on customers:
   1. Average of 97 hours saved each month through improved efficiency with new contract management tools.
   2. Approximately 10% savings on legal spend through rigorous billing guideline enforcement and artificial intelligence.
   3. A 70% reduction in time spent on inquiries from law firms due to enhanced invoice adjustments and rejection workflow.
   4. An average of 35 hours saved annually per customer via expanded bulk action functionality.
   5. 95% improvement in time to value when setting up billing guidelines by making this feature accessible to customers directly.
   6. 92% reduction in time spent creating reports by optimizing dashboards, making data discovery much quicker.

“In 2024, Onit’s commercial customers can look forward to additional investments,” stated Mark Weidick, President, Onit Commercial Business. “Our dedication remains steadfast in creating more significant value across every phase of the matter, spend, and contract lifecycles.”

About Onit
Onit is the leading provider of legal workflow solutions for enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM). Onit’s comprehensive product portfolio customizes AI-driven workflows for managing matters, spend, vendors and contracts. With Onit, companies can evolve the legal department’s role as a business protector and transform it into a business driver that materially influences the enterprise by improving operational and cost efficiency while simultaneously contributing to faster revenue generation and business growth.

The Onit commercial portfolio of products includes ContractWorks, SecureDocs, SimpleLegal, and ReadySign. For more information, visit onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Onit Catalyst AI technology within the OnitX platform boosts productivity and sharpens the decision-making of corporate legal teams

Houston, TX – January 23, 2024 – Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions, today announced the launch of its groundbreaking Catalyst Virtual Assistant for Legal Operations within OnitX, a workflow automation platform for sophisticated, legal-related business processes. Legal professionals can now use natural language chat to access a new, powerful level of intelligence enabled by generative AI that simplifies and automates everyday legal tasks from within their most-used productivity software — Microsoft Outlook.

“The continuous and rising demand on legal teams as the protector of the business has brought significant challenges for operational scalability. Our objective with Onit AI Contract Chat for Legal Operations was simple —leverage the strength of generative AI to make relevant information easily accessible so the best action can be taken quickly,” said Mary Fuzat, Onit Senior Vice President of Product. “With Catalyst Virtual Assistant, the power of insights from the OnitX platform is brought right to a user’s desktop in Microsoft Outlook.”

The OnitX plugin for Microsoft Outlook has been enhanced with Catalyst Virtual Assistant to serve as a “bridge” to the new generative AI capability now built into OnitX . Users can more easily collaborate with workflows that provide compliance and control over legal processes, access information stored across different OnitX applications, and minimize time spent on mundane tasks.

The Catalyst Virtual Assistant for Legal Ops empowers users to:

• Automatically populate legal service and contract requests.
• Instantly surface related matters, contracts, and legal service requests.
• Answer questions based on legal service request, matter, and contract data stored within the OnitX platform using natural language chat.
• Rapidly draft follow-up emails and review/summarize in the context of your legal matters and requests.
• Translate different languages to support your global business.

The combination of the proven OnitX platform that has hosted hundreds of workflow automation apps and Onit’s deep legal expertise, as represented by the millions of legal interactions processed annually, 3,000+ customers, and $47B of legal spend data, is unique in the legal technology landscape. As a result, OnitX provides corporate legal leaders with a distinct means to boost productivity, ensure better decisions and outcomes, and provide intuitive access to the latest technologies that are practical and enterprise-grade.

“We initially introduced the Onit AI Contract Chat last fall to serve as a digital contract paralegal that reviews and edits contracts on Legal’s behalf,” said Nick Whitehouse, Managing Director of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence. “The Onit AI Contract Chat for Legal Ops is the continuation of our strategy to build meaningful AI into workflows – automating a huge number of legal tasks and scaling knowledge across legal organizations in a controlled and impactful way. These virtual assistants demonstrate how the OnitX platform is at the forefront of this new era of AI-augmented work.”

Learn more about the Catalyst Virtual Assistant for Legal Operations between January 30 – February 1 at Legalweek New York 2024, where the company will offer live demonstrations of all its enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation solutions.

About Onit
Onit is a global leader of workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and 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.

Accomplished software executive to spearhead the next phase of growth and customer success.

Houston, TX – January 16, 2024 – Onit, Inc. announced that longtime software executive Michael Farlekas will join the company as Chief Executive Officer, effective March 1, 2024. Onit is the leading provider of legal workflow solutions for enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation. Current CEO and co-founder Eric Elfman will move to the role of Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Michael Farlekas

“When Onit was founded thirteen years ago, we had an ambitious goal to make legal a strategic partner to the business. Since then, we have become a recognized market leader, serving over 3,000 customers globally, providing hundreds of workflow automation applications and end-to-end solutions for Enterprise Legal Management and Contract Lifecycle Management. I’m excited to welcome an individual with Michael’s deep experience in scaling growth businesses to lead this next chapter of Onit’s journey and look forward to supporting him and the team as a member of our Board.” said Mr. Elfman.

Mr. Farlekas will lead all aspects of the company, focusing on driving customer value and accelerating the adoption of modern, legal-related business processes through automated, intelligent, and comprehensive software solutions. He brings to Onit an extensive track record of successful executive leadership, boasting over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and leadership within the realm of enterprise software and operations.

Most recently, Mr. Farlekas led E2open to unprecedented growth over the past eight years. As CEO, he completed fourteen acquisitions to grow the customer base to more than 420,000 manufacturing, logistics, channel, and distribution partners through a network tracking over fourteen billion transactions annually. Previous executive roles include successful stints at Roadnet Technologies and RedPrairie.

“I am honored to join Onit and to have the opportunity to work with our customers and talented team,” said Mr. Farlekas. “Onit today has a market-leading global footprint and a strong passion for customer satisfaction and innovation. I am committed to building on this great foundation and leading the company towards scalable and profitable long-term growth in the industry.”

“We are delighted to welcome Michael to the Onit team,” said Mike Velcich, Partner at K1 Investment Management. “He is a proven business leader with an excellent track record of scaling businesses for the long term. We look forward to working with Michael to accelerate Onit’s momentum, fostering continued expansion and value creation for customers and stakeholders.”

About Onit
Onit, Inc. is a global leader in AI-enabled workflow automation solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments. Companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies through Onit’s enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management, and legal hold solutions. It helps transform how corporate legal departments with mid-market to Fortune 500 companies bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement.

For more information, visit onit.com.

About K1
K1 is a global investment firm that builds category-leading enterprise software companies. K1 partners with strong management teams of high-growth technology businesses to help them achieve successful outcomes. With over 125 professionals, K1 and its operating affiliate, K1 Operations LLC, change industry landscapes with operationally focused growth strategies designed to rapidly scale portfolio companies. Since the inception of the firm, K1 has partnered with over 200 enterprise software companies including industry leaders such as accessiBe, Atera, Checkmarx, Complysci, ControlUp, Emburse, Employ, Granicus, HR Acuity, IronScales, Onit, RethinkFirst, Reveal-Brainspace, RFPIO, simPRO, Smarsh, Technomile, XTM International and Zapproved.

For more information, visit k1.com and follow K1 Investment Management on LinkedIn.