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Onit’s 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report reveals Legal’s direct impact on business — from sales and innovation to brand and corporate culture — hinges on ability to evolve relationships with internal clients demanding better communication and efficiency

HOUSTON, March 15, 2023 — Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions including enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management, today released the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report, an annual multinational study spotlighting year-over-year changes in the brand image of corporate legal departments through the eyes of their internal clients. The study reveals the linkage between Legal’s relationship with the business and material impact — from revenue generation and operational efficiency to innovation and corporate culture.

In November 2022, Onit commissioned Provoke Insights, a New York City-based market research firm, to conduct a study of 4,000 non-legal enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. The study helps corporate legal teams and executive teams understand areas to improve working relationships, accelerate legal workflows and transform the function’s strategic role in large enterprises.

The 2023 ELR Report reaffirms one of the most prominent findings from its inaugural edition in 2022 — Legal’s enduring image as a trustworthy protector of the business. About four in five (78%) non-legal enterprise employees view the legal department in this light. However, the 2023 report reveals a changing dynamic between Legal and its internal clients. In one year, the quality of interactions noticeably decreases across every function. The decline is most evident between Legal and public-facing, revenue-impacting departments. A year-over-year comparison reveals a 30% and 27% drop in quality among Legal’s interactions with Sales and Marketing, respectively.

Employees Continue to Bypass Legal and Its Policies

According to the 2023 ELR Report, employees are concerned about Legal’s responsiveness, communication and efficiency — or perceived lack thereof. These concerns are further exacerbated by macroeconomic distress and the subsequent pressure on employees to show value by improving operational efficiency amid cost-cutting measures and demands to execute faster. The need for speed and collaboration exposes that legal departments are viewed as slow or non-responsive. Seven in 10 (71%) non-legal enterprise respondents say it often takes days or weeks to receive a response from Legal. For the second year in a row, just two in five (41%) view Legal as efficient. As a result, only one in four (27%) consider Legal a good business partner.

Apparently, enterprise employees are not waiting around. Two in three (67%) admit they bypass Legal and its policies — up from 65% in 2022 — because Legal is overly bureaucratic (31%), slows employee productivity (30%) and does not understand their business needs (23%).

These findings put Legal in a unique position. How the profession chooses to adapt will dictate Legal’s relevance and impact during an uncertain time when businesses are searching for cost efficiency and growth from every corner of their enterprise.

Legal’s Golden Opportunity to Impact Sales, Revenue Generation, and More

Despite nagging concerns affecting Legal’s brand within its businesses, the 2023 ELR Report shines a spotlight on the function’s opportunity to foster better relationships with internal clients. According to the report, greater support through communication and collaboration will not only improve Legal’s image as a good business partner but also contribute to directly influencing enterprise growth and efficiency, particularly amid economic uncertainty.

The study reveals an overwhelming belief that Legal positively impacts multiple revenue-impacting functions around the enterprise, including contract renewals (64%), sales and revenue operations (56%) and deal cycles (51%). This is where Legal’s stellar negotiation skills provide major material impact — three in four (76%) employees acknowledge impressive negotiation skills.

“Legal is at a crossroads — a difficult macroeconomic climate has presented the department with an opportunity to evolve into a better partner and material business driver,” Onit CEO and co-founder Eric Elfman said. “As CEOs and executive teams search for new strategies to achieve greater growth and EBITDA, the 2023 ELR Report spotlights Legal as a relatively untapped resource within enterprise organizations that can add a meaningful and material impact.”

The ELR Report concludes that increasing communication and deepening collaboration will enable Legal to improve its interactions with the business, decrease the frequency in which employees bypass its policies and directly influence materiality, growth and efficiency.

Other key findings that further magnify Legal’s material impact across the enterprise include:

• Enterprise employees believe Legal has a positive effect on corporate brand (61%), procurement (54%) and innovation (48%).
• Six in 10 (60%) acknowledge Legal’s positive impact on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); 57% say the same regarding corporate culture.
• The most frequent types of interactions with Legal involve contract review and signing (46%), compliance (46%), HR matters (37%) and patents, trademarks, copyright and intellectual property (IP) matters (25%) – fundamental activities that protect and enable its businesses.

To learn more about Legal’s brand image in the eyes of its internal clients, download Chapter 1 of the 2023 ELR Report, register for the ELR webinar, visit Onit at Legalweek New York 2023 or read the 2022 ELR Report.

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 portfolio of products includes SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT, Bodhala, BusyLamp and SecureDocs. Learn more at onitprostg.wpengine.com.

Media contacts
Mike Nadeau, [email protected] 

Onit bolsters ELM offering with new product integrations that increase rate accuracy and drive efficiency across legal business operations

HOUSTON (March 8, 2022) — Onit, the leading provider of legal workflow solutions, including enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM), today announced a set of integrations to its ELM solutions that further incorporate two of its recent acquisitions into its comprehensive portfolio for managing advanced legal workflows. The integrations, which stem from Onit’s acquisitions of Bodhala and BusyLamp in September 2021, optimize legal operations in two key areas — financial benchmarking and localized support for Europe.

The new integrations with Onit Spend Management and Onit Matter Management address three common industry challenges: lack of supporting industry insights at the point of decision, data silos and tool proliferation. Onit Spend Management leverages Bodhala’s comprehensive benchmarks from data that includes more than $47B in legal billings. This provides a breadth of comparison for proposed changes to current timekeeper rates and evaluation of new rates. For European legal departments, the integration of Onit Matter Management and BusyLamp eBilling.Space offers a proven ELM solution with a configurable matter management workflow that eliminates the double entry of matter information. Collectively, these integrations enable sophisticated legal departments at large multinational corporations to make smarter, cost-efficient choices at the point of decision.

Benchmarking for Smarter Spend Management

Onit Spend Management’s integration with Bodhala’s AI-enabled technology pulls data from 200,000+ timekeepers and nearly 9,000 law firms, improving the accuracy of benchmarks and providing germane data points so legal teams always understand the going rate for timekeepers against the context of an individual law firm, the company’s entire panel of law firms and the market at large. By providing insights at the point of decision, legal departments eliminate the need for time-consuming and often costly ad-hoc rate analysis as they now have the unique ability to quickly approve new timekeeper rates resulting from outside counsel promotions, raises or additions to a firm.

A Complete European ELM Solution

Onit Matter Management’s integration with BusyLamp’s legal spend management solution provides a single system of record with specific capabilities for European corporate legal departments. Matters can be created in Onit Matter Management and then synced with BusyLamp with the click of a button for matters where outside counsel is engaged. This offers a flexible and configurable matter approval workflow capability while also leveraging specific currency, regulatory and tax capabilities that Busylamp provides for the European market today, without having to manage legal matters in two different systems.

The integrations with Onit Spend Management and Onit Matter Management will be widely available to customers in July.

“The transformation of legal operations begins with smart, integrated solutions that evolve with your business’ unique needs,” said Scott Wallingford, President of Onit’s Enterprise Business. “These integrations are the first of many we have planned to ensure improved collaboration across Legal and greater access to actionable insights that help make smarter and faster business decisions. At Onit, we are tying together our corporate acquisition strategy and product portfolio’s evolution to help customers optimize their legal operations.”

Learn more about the new Onit Spend Management integration here and Onit Matter Management integration here. Onit is also offering live demonstrations of all its ELM and CLM solutions at Legalweek New York 2023 on March 20 – 23.

Additional Resources

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

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 portfolio of products includes SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT, Bodhala, BusyLamp and SecureDocs. Learn more at onitprostg.wpengine.com.

New integration with Salesforce and SAP Ariba increase productivity and connect legal workflows more closely to key business departments

HOUSTON, Dec. 8, 2022 — Onit, the leading provider of enterprise workflow solutions, including enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM), today announced a set of feature upgrades to its CLM solution that enrich data analytics and more closely tie contract processes with key stakeholders across the enterprise — from procurement to sales.

Onit CLM’s release addresses two challenging areas of the contract management process: reporting and analytics and system integration. The reporting dashboards leverage AI and data insights to help business leaders minimize risk associated with clause violations, such as force majeure, payment terms and intellectual property from customer-defined contract rules. New system integration with major CRM and ERP systems like Salesforce and SAP Ariba increases efficiencies in critical legal and claims workflows, meeting customers where they work and making work flow seamlessly. In short, the integration with Salesforce and SAP Ariba bring Legal workflows closer to the business.

Onit CLM’s set of newly released features includes:

• Risk Analysis Dashboard: Assess low, medium and high-risk contracts based on customer-defined rules using proprietary AI from Onit.
• Clause Usage Dashboard: Approach clause library management with intelligent visibility into how often clauses are used; allows customers to modify clause libraries based on data and historical actual world actions.
• Salesforce Integration: Give sales teams the transparency to always know the location and status of their contracts within Salesforce, including agreements coming up for renewal.
• SAP Ariba Integration: Enable users to initiate contract workspace creation within SAP Ariba and streamline the flow of supplier data into Onit CLM, reducing data re-entry and improving efficiency.

Applying Onit CLM’s new dashboards and integration to current contract management processes allow users to make real-time decisions about clause violations and new or obsolete contract language while simultaneously achieving seamless data transfer between core business systems to avoid migrating data outside of workflows.

Onit CLM’s risk analysis dashboard is available to customers using Onit’s ReviewAI for contract review and drafting, and clause usage dashboards are available to customers with a Tableau license. The system integration is  available to customers using SAP Ariba or Salesforce, with the Salesforce integration soon available via the AppExchange.

“An end-to-end CLM solution connects legal teams more closely to key business departments such as Sales, IT, HR, Business Operations and more while elevating collaboration, efficiency and productivity across the enterprise,” said Mary Fuzat, VP of Product at Onit.  “By leveraging more AI-powered insights and further integrating with common front- and back-office systems, Legal has the opportunity to empower the business to focus more strategically and efficiently — while still protecting the company.”

Learn more about the new Onit CLM features here.

About Onit
Onit is the leading provider of 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 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 family of companies includes SimpleLegal, AXDRAFT, Bodhala, BusyLamp and SecureDocs. Learn more at onitprostg.wpengine.com.