Change management is the process of preparing your legal and surrounding teams for the addition of Unity into your company’s process. It is a critical step in ensuring the proper onboarding of the software and building long-term acceptance of the new system.
Why is Change Management Important?
Successful adoption of a new tool or process sets the stage for how your organization will co-exist with Unity. Change management prepares your team for the “why” and “what” of implementation: why are you bringing on Unity and what problems are you solving by the addition of Unity? If your team understands these two items, the implementation of Unity becomes a goal for the entire organization to work towards.
How to Prepare Your Team
Communication is key! Provide expected delivery dates, system expectations, and training opportunities early and often. If necessary, Unity has communication templates available to assist with starting these conversations. View the Unity Implementation Communications Library and select the “Unity Onboarding, New ELM System” template.
Do you have team members who need extra assistance or are hesitant of a SaaS solution? Provide a list of resources for asking questions during implementation and opportunities to showcase the tool in action. Early exposure lessens the uncertainty of your team members.
Your Unity system will change. As your team grows and evolves, your Unity system will as well. Providing assurances to your team that Unity does not need to function as it does at go-live, nor should it, they can provide insight, feedback, and suggestions as they use the tool. More importantly, allow Unity to mature alongside your needs.
Implementation Recommendation Tips and Tricks
Tell your team why you’ve decided to add Unity to your legal team! What problems are you trying to solve and what are you hoping to get out of the new product?
Provide updates and your progress. Your team will be more responsive to onboarding a new system if they understand the work that is happening to assist them in the future. Updates and progress reports, even milestones you have accomplished, will build excitement for the coming launch.
Give your team ample time to learn about the tool and opportunities to ask questions (e.g. training, documentation) and provide feedback to your implementation team with scheduled Q&A sessions or an inbox to send suggestions.
Change management is the process of preparing your legal and surrounding teams for the swap from an existing Legal Ops e-Billing tool to Unity. It is a critical step in ensuring the proper onboarding of the software and building long-term acceptance of the new system.
Why is Change Management Important?
Successful adoption of a new tool or process sets the stage for how your organization will co-exist with Unity. Change management prepares your team for the “why” and “what” of migrating from one system to another. The most important question to answer for your team is: what problems are you solving by migrating to Unity? If your team understands this, the implementation of Unity becomes a goal for the entire organization to work towards.
How to Prepare Your Team
Communication is key! Provide delivery dates, why your team is making this switch, and training opportunities early and often. If necessary, Unity has communication templates available to assist with starting these conversations. View the Unity Implementation Communications Library and select the “Unity Onboarding, Migrating ELM Systems” template.
Do you have team members who could be resistant to change or need extra assistance? Provide opportunities to explain why this change is occurring, what the benefits are the change, and resources for asking questions during implementation and after launching Unity. Early exposure lessens the uncertainty of your team members.
Your Unity system does not need to match your existing workflow. Your team is making a conscious decision to bring on a new system, ensure that you are not bringing over old processes or data “just because” it was in your old system if it no longer supports your workflows.
Implementation Recommendation Tips and Tricks
Tell your team why you’ve decided to switch to Unity to your legal team! What problems are you trying to solve and what are you excited or eager to implement with this new system? Your excitement will help your team get on board.
Take some time to review your existing data (e.g. matters, vendors, etc) to see what data is working and, more importantly, what is no longer working for your team. Does all data need to be brought over? Should anything be cleaned up or organized in a more meaningful way?
Use contract intelligence to streamline workflows, control costs, and reduce risk.
Contracts hold critical business data, but in most legal departments, it stays siloed instead of driving decisions. When that data connects to your legal operations, your team moves faster, sees risk earlier, and makes better decisions with real context.
Clear visibility into risk, cost, and performance
Faster workflows triggered by contract events
More predictable spend tied to real obligations
A more connected legal function starts with data that actually works for you, not against you. Bring contracts, matters, budgets, and risk into one connected view so your team can operate with clarity, control, and confidence.
Legal shouldn’t have to dig through email chains, spreadsheets, or shared drives to get answers.
When matters are tracked manually—or not tracked at all—it’s hard to understand who’s doing what, what’s urgent, and where things stand. Without a clear system, work slips through the cracks and legal becomes reactive.
Let’s fix that.
Join us for a 20-minute demo of Unity ELM’s Matter Management capabilities and see how legal teams can:
Centralize all legal matters in one searchable, structured system
Track matter status, ownership, deadlines, and key documents
Improve collaboration across in-house teams and outside counsel
Get better visibility into legal workload, trends, and priorities
This is how you bring order, clarity, and control to legal work—without the manual mess.
A reality check for legal teams serious about execution, not just innovation.
Legal teams aren’t short on technology. It’s lacking traction.
They’re investing in AI, automation, and modern platforms. But transformation still stalls when adoption lags, workflows break down, and new systems never fully take hold.
This checklist helps legal operations teams assess where execution is breaking down and why.
Built from real-world insights shared by legal ops leaders, this isn’t theory. It’s a practical framework to help you diagnose friction, align your team, and turn investment into impact.
Use it to see how work really moves across your organization, where it slows, where it fails, and where it never starts.
In this checklist, you’ll learn how to:
Identify gaps in stakeholder alignment and internal trust
Assess whether your processes are ready for change before introducing new technology
Spot where broken workflows are limiting adoption and impact
Understand what operational maturity really looks like in practice
Evaluate your team’s readiness to integrate AI into legal workflows
This checklist is designed for legal ops leaders who want to move beyond implementation and build a function that actually executes.
Legal operations teams don’t stall because they lack tools. They stall because the tools they have don’t share context. Work slows at the exact moments when information needs to move between systems, teams, or decisions — and those friction points are costing more than most teams realize.
This guide identifies where those sticky spots appear, why they persist, and how connected legal workflow management removes them. It examines the transitions that create the most friction: from request to matter, matter to spend, contract tracking to obligation monitoring, and reporting that requires manual reconciliation before anyone can act on it.
You’ll walk away with a clearer picture of where your workflows are losing momentum, why adding more tools or process often makes it worse, and what it looks like when information finally flows with the work instead of lagging behind it.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to:
Identify the sticky spots where work most commonly slows or stalls
Understand why disconnected tools create manual work rather than eliminate it
Recognize the transitions that drain capacity and undermine confidence in your systems
See how AI helps surface patterns, flag risk, and reduce the need for manual intervention
Understand what it looks like when legal ops shifts from reactive to proactive
This guide is for legal ops teams who want to move faster without adding steps, headcount, or workarounds.
Ask better questions. Act with confidence. Automate what slows legal down.
Legal operations teams are playing an increasingly strategic role inside the business. One industry report notes that legal departments now identify technology strategy (80%), financial management (72%), and outside counsel/vendor management (62%) as top priorities for the year ahead.
That shift requires a different kind of legal operations platform.
Most enterprise legal management systems force teams into complex implementations and capabilities they may not need yet.
Unity takes a different approach.
Legal teams can start with the operational foundations they rely on every day through Unity ELM, including:
Matter management
Legal spend management
Vendor management
Robust reporting and financial controls
From there, teams can extend their operations across the Unity platform—designed to help legal teams Ask, Act, and Automate.
Ask with Ask Unity beta, generating instant insights into matters, spend, and outside counsel performance.
Act with Unity Intake, capturing and routing legal service requests through structured workflows.
Automate with Unity ELM, applying billing guidelines, managing budgets and approvals, and using AI-assisted invoice review to reduce manual work.
See how a connected legal operations platform can scale with your legal team today and tomorrow, all without switch tools.
When legal departments rely on disconnected tools for intake, matter management, billing, reporting, and compliance, complexity compounds quickly.
Data becomes fragmented. Integrations require constant maintenance. Reporting lacks consistency. And legal operations spend more time managing systems than driving strategy.
OnitX replaces fragmented point solutions with a single, enterprise-grade legal operations platform designed to scale with your department, align with your enterprise architecture, and adapt to how your legal team actually works.
Want to see how it works in practice?
Watch this on-demand demo to see how enterprise legal teams can:
Unify legal service requests, matter management, spend management, CLM, Legal Holds, custom workflows, and financial governance in one configurable platform
Adapt workflows, approvals, fields, and processes without heavy IT dependency
Connect seamlessly with ERP, HRIS, DMS, and identity systems without integration sprawl
Gain real-time visibility into work, spend, and performance across regions and business units
Access the full demo anytime and see how modern legal teams modernize operations without multiplying tools or sacrificing flexability.
The AI-Native Legal Solution for Seamless End-to-End Legal Operations
Unity is an AI-native legal operations framework that empowers legal teams with automation, analytics and strategic control over legal spend, compliance, contracts, and risk.
Unity builds on the same trusted foundation as SimpleLegal—your core matter management, e-billing, vendor collaboration, and spend management functionality remains intact. The workflows and capabilities your team relies on today continue to exist within the Unity framework.
What’s new is the platform’s AI-native architecture and expanded functionality. Unity is designed to support intelligent automation, enhanced insights, and ongoing innovation—enabling new features and capabilities that were not previously available in SimpleLegal. In short, Unity preserves what works today while unlocking the ability to scale, automate, and evolve your legal operations for the future.
What is “Activation”?
As you expand your use of Onit with Unity, Activation marks the beginning of a seamless next phase—designed to align with your team’s evolving needs and future growth. Unity is Onit’s AI-native legal operations suite, unifying matter management, e-billing, vendor collaboration, and spend oversight into one scalable platform built for the future of enterprise legal.
Activation to the Unity Framework jump-starts your transition to AI-native Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) by embedding industry best-practice configurations from day one—so you can spend less time planning and more time delivering value. Rather than a system migration, Activation is a seamless upgrade of your existing SimpleLegal environment to the new Unity framework, providing a proven foundation while preserving the flexibility to customize and scale as your needs evolve.
What is the activation process?
The Activation process is designed to give your team time, visibility, and support as you transition to Unity—without disrupting your current workflows.
Step 1: Access to Your Unity Sandbox
Your team will first receive access to a dedicated Unity sandbox environment. This sandbox is a copy of your existing SimpleLegal configuration, set up in a separate system so you can safely explore, test, and become familiar with the Unity experience. Your SimpleLegal administrative users will receive an email from Onit with a link to your organization’s unique Unity sandbox URL
Step 2: Sandbox Exploration Period
You’ll have a defined exploration window to navigate Unity, review configurations, and prepare your team for the transition. Details about your sandbox access timeframe will be communicated directly to your administrative users via email. If you’re unsure of your timeline, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager. Change management and training materials are also available in this Success Kit to support onboarding and internal enablement.
Step 3: Activation of Unity Production
Once your sandbox exploration period concludes, your Unity Production environment will be activated. This environment is connected to your existing SimpleLegal production instance, allowing your team to work in both systems if needed while onboarding to the new Unity interface. This ensures continuity and flexibility during the transition.
Step 4: SimpleLegal Sunset
At the end of the transition period, your SimpleLegal production environment will move to the new Unity UI. The transition date will be communicated to your administrative users via email. Once the transition is complete, your team will begin working fully in the Unity Production environment moving forward.
What Happens to CounselGO?
There are no changes to CounselGO as part of Activation. Your vendors will continue to submit invoices and collaborate through CounselGO in the same way they do today. There is no disruption to the vendor experience, no new submission process, and no additional action required from your firms. Activation to Unity does not impact how invoices are submitted or processed through CounselGO.
What Is Required from SimpleLegal Users?
To ensure a smooth and successful transition to Unity, we ask that your team take a few key steps during the Activation process:
1. Review Activation Materials
Carefully read through all Activation communications and resources provided to your administrative users, as well as the materials included in this Success Kit. These resources outline important timelines, expectations, and guidance for the transition.
2. Communicate Early with Your Team
Notify your broader team about the upcoming transition as early as possible. Proactive communication helps set expectations and minimizes disruption. A change management communication template is included below for your convenience.
3. Share Training Resources
While the Unity interface is intuitive and designed to feel familiar, we strongly recommend sharing the available training materials and resources with your team. Preparing users in advance will help ensure confidence and continuity once Unity Production is live.
4. Reach Out with Questions
If you have any questions or need additional support at any point during Activation, please contact our Support team, your Customer Success Manager, or your Account Manager. We’re here to help make this transition seamless.
5. No Technical Set up Required
You do not need to take any technical action for Activation to occur. On your scheduled Activation date, your system will automatically transition to Unity, and Onit will manage the move behind the scenes to ensure a smooth and seamless experience. Your Activation date and new Unity URL will be communicated directly to your administrative users in advance so your team knows exactly what to expect. Until then, you can continue working as usual.
Product Training and Enablement
To help your team prepare for the transition, we recommend sharing the Unity training resources in advance. These cover the updated interface, key navigation changes, and tips for getting started.
To ensure you receive all Activation and Unity-related communications, please ask your IT or email administrator to safelist or whitelisting the onit.com domain. We recommend whitelisting the following:
For teams that prefer a guided walkthrough, Onit is offering an educational session covering Unity activation, key updates, and what’s changing (and what’s not), followed by live Q&A.
Communication is critical to a successful activation. To best support your internal teams and vendors during the rollout of Unity, below is a template designed to guide awareness, adoption, and readiness.
This template is intended to be flexible starting points. You are encouraged to tailor the language, timing, and details to reflect your organization’s voice and internal process. Clear, consistent communication will help ensure a smooth transition, minimize confusion, and set expectations ahead of go-live.
How to Use the Template
Identify the appropriate template(s) based on your audience (internal teams or vendors).
Copy and paste the selected email template into your preferred email system.
Populate any placeholder fields (e.g., [COMPANY], [go-live date], [project sponsor]) and adjust the content as needed.
Review the recipient list indicated in the To field and send the email using your preferred email system.
Best practice: When sending to a large distribution list, send the email to yourself and Bcc all recipients.
Internal Team Email Template
From: Client SimpleLegal Administrator or Project Sponsor
To: Internal Legal Team / Relevant Stakeholders
Subject: [COMPANY] Introducing Unity: Our New Legal Operations Environment
Body:
[COMPANY] is upgrading our SimpleLegal to Unity. Unity will serve as our central hub for legal work and will help streamline how we manage matters, vendors, invoices, and legal spend while improving visibility and consistency across the team.
Unity brings together our legal operations processes into a single, connected experience. This upgrade supports [COMPANY]’s goals around efficiency, standardization, and improved insight into legal activity and spend.
With Unity, internal team members will be able to: – Create and manage legal matters, accessed through the Unity environment – Assign matters to approved vendors for billing and collaboration – Review invoices submitted by vendors and law firms through the Unity vendor portal, CounselGO (LEDES and PDF formats) – Apply [COMPANY]’s approval workflows and billing rules automatically – Ensure approved invoices are processed directly to Accounts Payable – Report on legal matter and spend data from a single source of truth
Unity is slated to go live in [month of designated go-live date]. Ahead of go-live, to prepare for the transition, below are the necessary training sessions. These cover the updated interface, key navigation changes, and tips for getting started.
If you have any questions about Unity or the new legal operations process, please reach out to [client implementation lead or project sponsor].
Updated Subprocessors for Unity
As part of the Unity platform and its AI-powered capabilities, new subprocessors are used to support Spend Agent and Unity e-Billing functionality. These subprocessors are listed in Table 3 on Onit’s Sub-processors page: https://www.onit.com/sub-processors/
Unity includes AI-powered features, and the applicable terms are outlined in Sections 4.6 and 12 of the Terms of Service, as well as in the Product Terms for Spend Agent and Unity e-Billing.
For the most up-to-date information, please refer to the official sub-processors page linked above. If you have any questions about the additional sub processors or the use AI, please reach out to your CSM.
Commonly Asked Questions (Q&A)
Q: What makes Unity different from heritage Onit interfaces? A: Unity introduces an AI-native, modern UI that unifies all Onit solutions—such as SimpleLegal, ContractWorks, ReadySign, CounselGO, and more—into a cohesive, scalable framework. This technical foundation allows us to continuously adapt, enhance, and update our solutions with greater speed and consistency across platforms.
Q: How does Onit ensure I’m not just activated, but adopted successfully? A: Onit’s success model includes continuous Customer Success engagement, community programs, customer advisory boards, roundtables, and feedback loops under the OnitCX umbrella.
Q: How can I extend Unity to meet unique workflow needs? A: Use Unity’s Workflow App Studio for out-of-the-box workflows or build custom automations with no code. Enhance operations further using AI Agent Studio.
Q: Where do I find training materials and release updates? A: Head to the Resource Center. Stay informed via Onit’s blog and newsroom.
Q: What is Spend Agent, and why does it matter? A: Spend Agent is an AI-native invoice review tool embedded in Unity. It automatically validates invoices against your guidelines, offers explainable AI feedback, speeds approvals, and strengthens vendor relations.
Manual invoice review is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone responsibilities in legal operations. When reviews rely on manual checks and disconnected systems, delays, inconsistencies, and compliance gaps are almost inevitable.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
In this on-demand demo, see how Spend Agent, Onit’s AI-native solution, helps legal teams review invoices faster, enforce billing guidelines more accurately, and gain instant visibility into spend.
You’ll see how to:
Process vendor-submitted invoices up to 22× faster than traditional manual review
Enforce billing guidelines using natural-language logic
Catch discrepancies with 35% greater accuracy
Generate instant, audit-ready insights for confident decision-making
With Spend Agent, your team spends less time buried in invoice reviews and more time focused on strategic impact.
