OBJECTIVE

BuzzFeed uses the collaboration platform Slack to augment email and its other modes of internal communication. As a result, its legal and IT teams wanted to ensure they were prepared to identify, review, and produce Slack data in response to ediscovery matters and investigations. BuzzFeed needed a tool that could efficiently locate, preserve, and export that data in a review-ready format.

 

KEY ISSUES

  • Quickly and easily search through Slack users and channels to identify relevant information
  • Seamlessly export that information in a reviewable format
  • Confidently state that all relevant data had been identified and considered—demonstrating defensible processes

 

APPROACH

Thanks to Hanzo Hold, BuzzFeed’s legal and IT teams have a tool that they can use to locate all relevant information within their organization’s Slack application in response to any ediscovery or investigation request. Moreover, they can produce that data to outside counsel for further review.

Read the case study to see how BuzzFeed attains greater efficiency and confidence using Hanzo Hold to manage its Slack data for ediscovery.

/by Hanzo

Onna Blog: What is Information Governance and Why Is It So Important?

Every digital interaction between businesses and their customers leaves an auditable trail of data. Sometimes, data is highly sensitive and needs security, privacy, and discovery controls in place. Other times, data has no value and is simply taking up space. Telling the difference between these types of data and knowing where it all lives is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today.

The truth is an overwhelming amount of data is ungoverned making it difficult to know what is of value and what is not. Not only does this mean that sensitive data could be compromised, but also that potentially useful data remains underutilized. Having a robust information governance plan is the solution to these problems. Let’s get into what it is and why it’s important.

What is information governance?

Information governance is defined in a lot of different ways, but at its core, it refers to a strategic framework for managing information at an organizational level. Although we typically refer to information governance in a digital context, it also incorporates physical assets, such as devices and printed documents. This is especially true in the case of more mature organizations, which often have large amounts of information stored locally, in printed or digital form.

There are many regional and international standards for managing information at scale, and the regulatory compliance landscape is evolving every year. However, the core concepts of information governance have largely remained the same. These include security and privacy, integrity and authenticity, information lifecycle management, and business continuity. But information governance is more than just a legal and ethical obligation. Establishing a robust and adaptable framework can help organizations derive greater value out of their information and drive smarter, more informed decision-making.

cloud-services_what-is-information-governance

Why is information governance important?

Data overload is real, and it’s one of the biggest challenges facing today’s organizations. Our collective digital activities have now generated almost 60 zettabytes of data, a figure that’s expected to reach 149 over the next four years. In small businesses, data typically exists in the dozens of terabytes, while many larger enterprises have already reached the petabyte scale. These amounts are expected to only increase over the years to come.

Today’s organizations have the monumental task ahead of minimizing risk and maximizing value across increasingly vast data sets. While business leaders usually recognize the fact that their data is valuable, the overwhelming majority of their digital assets are underutilized and inadequately governed and protected. This isn’t helped by the fact that the average enterprise now uses 1,295 different cloud services, each one leaving a trail of data across a complex array of networks and systems.

The difference between information management and information governance

You might have heard the terms information management and information governance used interchangeably, but they’re actually two different tiers of scale. Information management is a subset of the broader information governance framework, which incorporates the capture, classification, storage, distribution, and preservation of information assets. It’s largely reactive in that it encompasses responding to information requests, such as data subject access requests (DSARs) under GDPR and CCPA regulations. It also includes the secure disposal of obsolete data as required by internal company policies and regulatory compliance.

gdpr-ccpa_what-is-information-governance

Information governance has a much broader scope, and what it encompasses varies from one organization to the next. For the most part, it refers to a company’s internal policies and processes for optimizing information management in line with business goals. For example, this might mean reducing operational costs, deriving insights from big data, or even deploying machine-learning algorithms for automated management and governance. In other words, IG goes beyond the systematic management of records and information to incorporate a wide-ranging approach to supporting an organization’s objectives, policies, and standards.

Information governance as an evolving discipline and a driver of innovation

Some business leaders think of information governance purely as a legal requirement. But it’s not all about building a legally defensible program for managing sensitive information. IG is a fast-evolving discipline, which has become a critical business routine in today’s data-heavy age. There’s now a constant need to re-assess IG in line with the advancement of enterprise technology. It’s not a strategy that’s implemented once and then left to run its course – it’s a journey rather than a destination. In fact, the same can be said of IG’s overarching discipline, which is digital transformation.

Without an adaptable IG strategy, it’s impossible for an organization to innovate without adding risk. Fast-changing enterprise technology landscapes, paired with a rapidly accelerating datasphere, mean that there are new risks and opportunities alike. These both need to be managed at a massive scale in an age when enterprises have their information assets stored across a multitude of cloud-hosted apps and online storage facilities, employee- and business-owned mobile devices, and in-house desktops and servers. Factor in the rise of the internet of things (IoT), and there’s no denying the massive scope and scale of today’s information governance requirements.

Implementing robust information governance policies and processes gives today’s companies the opportunity to innovate without increasing risk. For example, let’s say you’re rolling out a new employee communication platform that will enhance productivity among remote workers:

slack-ediscovery_what-is-information-governance

Overcoming the challenges of scale across business roles

Before any organization embarks on an overhaul of their information governance policies and procedures, it’s important to consider the challenges first. These can include:

  • The complexity and diversity of today’s enterprise technology stacks
  • The rapid proliferation of data across all business roles and departments
  • The new and emerging data privacy regulations at local, state, federal, and global levels
  • The need to derive real-time insights from data to maintain competitive advantage

The above responsibilities apply in almost every business role and department. In enterprise environments, matters become exponentially more complex, especially when factoring in the rise of remote teams and multiple branches. Different departments use a wide range of cloud services. For example, marketing teams use on average 120 different services, while HR use around 100, and finance uses 51, according to one recent study. Since each of these services collects and stores information in a unique way, information governance must apply in every area of the organization.

Information Governance no longer belongs exclusively to legal, compliance, and information security teams. It’s everyone’s responsibility. IG professionals need visibility across the full range of information-based services. Business leaders need to maintain complete audit trails of where their data lives and which controls are in place to protect it.

privacy-policy_what-is-information-governance

Since information governance involves every business-critical role, today’s enterprises need a single, secure, and centralized way to access and manage their entire technology stack and all the data that comes with it. It’s about simplifying large and complex technology environments by bringing everything together under a unified management system where it’s possible to apply and enforce their policies. Maintaining a centralized data repository helps enterprises leverage the information available to them in new and intuitive ways.

6 information governance initiatives every business leader should follow

As one of the integral disciplines of digital transformation, information governance strategies have the potential to drive innovation and empower exponential growth. However, like every business transformation program, there are certain rules and standards to abide by and pitfalls to avoid. Here are our top recommendations to help you supercharge information governance in your organization:

1. Identify an executive-level sponsor

Every business transformation program requires support from leadership. If your information governance initiative doesn’t have someone driving it, it will be far less likely to succeed. Larger companies should establish an IG board or committee that maintains strong links throughout the company and engages leaders across the full range of business roles. Recruiting an engaged sponsor who understands the language of business, and not just the language of compliance and IT, will greatly increase the chances of any changes being accepted.

2. Take an org-wide approach

Many organizations view information governance as nothing but an IT project, but it really takes cooperation from the entire organization. Anywhere data lives, and anyone who touches it needs to be on board for your IG strategy to be successful. Communicating what your IG strategy can bring to different business roles and how they can improve them is paramount to getting participation from all sides of the organization. Eventually, you want your strategy to be integrated with wider corporate culture and become central to everything you do, but first, you must demonstrate value and get buy-in.

3. Educate employees on an ongoing basis

The same way you need to get buy-in from you’re organization, you need to ensure people understand and follow IG company policies. To ensure employees comply with legal, security, and privacy obligations, a suitable training and development program is vital. Education should be an ongoing process, not just a one and done presentation or seminar. By keeping education alive through a cadence, you ensure nothing slips through the cracks. To see policies ingrained in employees’ day-to-day lives, it’s also important to demonstrate the true value of your policies. Whether that means increasing efficiency or making more data-driven decisions, strong information governance can change the way everyone works for the better.

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4. Understand your information lifecycle

Information doesn’t have an inherent lifespan, but it does need to have a predefined lifecycle from the moment it’s first collected to the moment it’s archived or securely disposed of. How long information spends in each stage of the lifecycle and why will vary enormously depending on its content, type, and industry. You should always start by addressing legal factors like privacy regulations to inform what your information lifecycle should look like. After you’ve addressed more pressing legal obligations and business priorities, you can move into standard lifecycle processes that affect the organization at large and document how information should be collected, stored, processed, archived, and disposed of.

5. Choose the right tools and solutions

Due to the challenges of scale brought on by the explosion of data and the increasing range of devices and software used, it’s impossible to achieve full oversight using manual means alone. Every organization needs a powerful, automated approach to managing data throughout every stage of its existence. In enterprise environments, processes that require automation include the application of retention policies, archival, and classification. The main goal should be to implement a platform that brings all your apps and data together under a centrally managed system. Ideally, your IG strategy should adapt seamlessly to evolving technology and corporate environments. An IG initiative that can’t scale and adapt to the future will only end up stifling innovation.

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6.  Incorporate data-driven decision-making

Big data refers to data sets that are beyond human capabilities to make sense of. But big data also presents a wealth of opportunity for businesses to derive valuable insights into their internal operations, customers, supply chains, and more. By centralizing otherwise fragmented and underutilized data from your wider technology environment, you can stay ahead of the curve with informed, real-time decision-making. IG plays a crucial role in making data readily available to authorized parties and enabling them to access and use it in ways that add value throughout the organization.

Curious how Onna can unify your information governance processes? Our Knowledge Integration Platform brings your data together to simplify governance, privacy, compliance, and eDiscovery. Find out more here.

/by Onna

Onna Blog: Unified Information Governance: Reconciling Conflicts Between Stakeholders

Information governance is a critical discipline that encompasses many parts of the business. Compliance, security, legal, and IT all have an important stake in managing information; however, when it comes to handling that information, conflict can arise. Priorities may differ when it comes to data retention, archival, and deletion, leading to difficult decision-making. Add in the pressures of data privacy laws, like GDPR and CCPA, and the perils of disunity only intensify.

So what does the decision-making process look like when legal wants to retain data but IT wants to delete it — both with valid reasons? How can organizations avoid spending on outside counsel to weigh-in on internal decisions? If these questions resonate with you, it might be time to take a hard look at what information governance means in your organization. More likely than not, you are taking a siloed approach to information management that has your people working against, rather than with, one another.

Here are six ways to align information stakeholders and proactively avert conflict.

1. Formalize stakeholder relationships

All too often, information stakeholders are thrust into meeting for the first time because of urgent matters, such as litigation or discovery requests. These matters require cross-functional collaboration, and yet crucial relationships may not be defined. To ensure all stakeholders are connected, you may want to start an information governance steering committee comprising key members from security, compliance, privacy, legal, IT, and other lines of business that hold essential company information — like HR or finance. By proactively bringing stakeholders together and formalizing their roles and responsibilities, you can foster clear communication and coordination from the get-go.

2. Understand information’s value from all perspectives

Company information is multifaceted. It lives in different places and serves different purposes, so its lifecycle isn’t clear-cut — nor is its treatment. For example, while personally identifiable information (PII) may need to be held for regulatory compliance reasons, you might want your year-over-year company performance metrics for business strategy purposes. To avoid miscommunication and conflict, your information governance framework needs to address the value of information from all angles. To start, you can ask questions like: What purpose does this data serve? What department(s) are concerned with this data and why? How might this data pose risk, maximize value, or both? The sooner teams address information from a holistic view, rather than a siloed view, the better.

3. Make a plan for potential conflicts with risk front-of-mind

Once you map out the answers to these questions, you can start to spot overlap and conflict in priorities. Although every organization is different, the most common conflict arises around the question of retention — whether to keep or delete. Although you might be legally bound to retain information, you might also be required to delete information for privacy matters. In scenarios like this, it’s crucial that the necessary stakeholders come together to resolve issues, and not just the ones in conflict. Depending on the situation, you may need the input of separate stakeholders, such as IT, to help you understand what technical solutions are possible. Regardless of the nature of your potential conflicts, identifying them early on will help you get ahead of pain, risk, and confusion.

4. Develop an information governance policy

After you outline stakeholder relationships and identify potential conflicts, you’ll want to bake those solutions into your information governance policy. There’s a lot to consider in developing a policy, but a good rule of thumb is to focus on people, process, and technology. You’ll also want to break it into two portions: minimizing risk and maximizing value.

On the minimizing risk front, narrowing down legal, compliance, and privacy obligations first will ensure the most critical protocols are covered. This could include anything from the who/when/how of handling yearly audits to creating a data retention policy. Once that’s done, you can move on to the data maximization portion, which informs how you will protect and utilize your information. This could be anything from handling eDiscovery to data loss prevention measures. Every company’s policy may look different, but the one thing that should remain consistent is alignment from all information stakeholders.

5. Assign roles and responsibilities

Once you develop an information governance policy, you’ll want to make sure every stakeholder understands their roles and responsibilities. This ensures your framework is put into practice effectively. Every organization looks different, but a good way to delegate responsibilities among each department is branching down from the executive level to working groups. Executives, such as the CIO, CSO, General Counsel, and others can operate as key decision-makers, and different departments, such as security, IT, and compliance, can form working groups to encourage better data stewardship over their own information.

6. Unify your information in one place

You can have all the right people and policies in place, but without the right technology, it can still be a challenge to locate your most vital information — which can lead to stakeholder conflict. Especially when it comes to the scattered, proliferating nature of cloud applications, keeping tabs on dynamic data such as messages, threads, and attachments in so many locations can be daunting. More often than not, teams end up heavily relying on IT to expend more time and resources. Implementing a solution that brings all of your siloed data in one private, secure, and searchable place can make it easier for stakeholders to find what they need at a moment’s notice. Not only can this help you avert future conflict, but also reduce risk, maximize value, and enhance compliance.

Organizations have a huge opportunity to leverage key information to help realize their goals — but first, their governance framework must guide key stakeholders towards alignment. By focusing on the factors we’ve discussed, you can start to transform your information governance plan to work for your people, not against them.

/by Onna

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/by Sean Heck

It is safe to say that 2020 was a challenging and unprecedented year across all industries, not least the legal sector. Yet our altered ways of working have spawned new innovations and different ways of thinking about “business as usual.” For the legal sector, AI has become a key part of many lawyers’ arsenal, allowing them to rapidly respond to new challenges such as remote working, increased market and economic volatility and complex client demands. As we approach 2021, it is clear that this momentum in the legal sector to embrace all things tech shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

‘Technophobia’ is no longer a viable excuse for lawyers

The pandemic has accelerated the pace of technology adoption generally, and has also opened lawyers’ eyes to the possibilities that advanced technology such as AI can herald. Technology has moved from being a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’, allowing businesses and lawyers to keep pace with marketplace changes whilst also driving profitability and growth.

Let’s take the example of M&A due diligence- whilst years ago, the number of contracts to review for a transaction was a lengthy yet reasonable task, an explosion in enterprise data has rendered this process practically unfeasible. Indeed, hiring armies of junior lawyers to manually trawl through endless volumes of contracts in order to find a crucial ‘Change of Control’ clause is increasingly becoming recognised as a waste of resources and an inefficient use of legal talent.

And this is where AI comes in: Luminance is able to rapidly read and form an understanding of legal data, instantly surfacing crucial clauses, datapoints and anomalies at the click of a button. Not only does this instil lawyers with the greatest confidence that nothing has been missed in their review, but by enabling them to cut through the admin-heavy, mundane work, advisors are once again able to focus on adding value where it matters: the analysis. As Gavin Williams, Partner at Holland & Knight said to me at a recent Luminance webinar, “Luminance allows young lawyers to push skills faster, resulting in better quality and better work product which is closer to being ‘client ready’ than ever before.”

Another example is the sudden switch to remote working in 2020. With many offices now remote working for the foreseeable future and some organisations reimagining how offices will function after that, it seems that increased remote working or flexi-working is here to stay. Luminance’s easy cloud-deployment and advanced collaboration tools such as the ability to allocate tasks and track work progression are invaluable for the seamless coordination of legal teams. We have had customers such as VdA, Norburg & Scherp and The 36 Group use the tool to coordinate teams in connection with large review projects.

Clearly, the real, practical value of AI can no longer be overlooked and as we enter 2021, it is clear that AI is integral to the infrastructure of all organisations.

Clients expect more- tech is part of the answer

Client demands and expectations have always been high on the agenda for law firms yet increased economic volatility and steepening competition will once again push these demands into the spotlight in 2021. Indeed, recent research by Luminance found that decreased client budgets are the biggest concern for senior lawyers. Clients are increasingly savvy as to the technology that is available to lawyers as well as the benefits in terms of efficiency, insight and cost.

This year, for example, the Dubai office of Dentons were tasked with a time-sensitive review of 200 documents. This number quickly swelled to over 180,000 documents, all of which had to be reviewed in just two weeks. After consulting with their client, Dentons opted to deploy Luminance and were able to review the entire dataset within the timeline set by the client and with huge cost-savings. Results like this show that by embracing technology, lawyers are able to not just meet but exceed the expectations of their clients and this is something that we predict will continue far into 2021.

The year that in-house teams embrace technology

The last few years have seen a growth in the role and scope of in-house legal professionals. Indeed, in-house lawyers are not just subject matter specialists that are only to be consulted on specific legal matters but are instead now expected to play a significant and proactive role in wider legal matters, including ensuring compliance, examining potential business risk and being key members of the corporate decision-making team.

Consistent with this trend, this year there has been a 65% increase in the uptake of our technology by in-house teams in order to streamline work such as the review of outside counsel guidelines, employment contracts and regulatory compliance reviews in the face of data protection regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. We expect to see a continued acceleration in this trend in 2021, with these lawyers becoming more tech-savvy, efficient and sophisticated in the projects they manage in-house in order to better control costs during uncertain economic times. Recently, we welcomed Featurespace, a market-leader in enterprise financial crime prevention software, as a customer in order to help the company’s in-house legal team to gain more control over their in-house processes.

2021: The year that AI got real in the legal industry?

This year has marked a turning point for the legal industry’s adoption of AI technology. At Luminance, we have seen an astonishing 40% increase in the uptake of our technology since the beginning of the year, with Luminance’s customer base now reaching nearly 300 firms and organisations. In 2021, AI will be a fundamental component of every law firm and business and to that end, the future of the industry.

/by Jason Brennan

More than 80% of lawyers now view technology adoption as essential for the future of their firm and three quarters view the future adoption of AI specifically as key. Yet in increasingly uncertain economic times, the return on investment or ‘ROI’ of any outlay an organisation makes is going to be highly scrutinised. Crucially, lawyers need technologies that they can trust to get the results they need, not only to maintain business stability but also to take their work to the next level.

Take on more projects with Luminance

The legal and business marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive: law firms and in-house legal departments are tightening their belts to maintain profitability while clients are demanding increased expertise, efficiency and transparency from their lawyers.

Luminance brings machine learning to the legal profession, uniquely combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of data, instantly surfacing crucial information such as clauses and datapoints. By reducing the amount of time and legal professionals needed to find the key data within documents, lawyers can choose to spend more time on higher-value analysis work, or can instead redirect resource to undertake additional projects.

For example, Luminance customer, Burness Paull, is using the Luminance ‘Discovery’ platform to conduct DSARs (Data Subject Access Requests) arising from data protection regulations like the GDPR. Without Luminance, the resource needed to fully comply with each DSAR means that the service is often not economically viable for lawyers to offer their clients or, in the case of in-house teams, without the support of external counsel. Yet with the assistance of Luminance’s technology, firms can dramatically reduce the time spend on each review. For instance, the first time that Burness Paull used Luminance to conduct a DSAR of 6,000 documents they saw 50% time savings, thus ensuring profitability when offering this service to their clients.

Meeting the spectrum of client demands

Not only can Luminance help lawyers to attract new business, but it can help provide an enhanced service to existing clients, too. By using flexible machine learning technology, Luminance can be used across a wide range of projects, enabling them to proactively respond to new challenges and in turn, expand their client service offering. For example, ‘Big Four’ accounting firm, Ernst & Young (EY) Law Belgium are using Luminance’s flexible technology to help their clients with Brexit compliance and now LIBOR transition projects. As Stéphanie De Smet, a Corporate Lawyer at EY Law Belgium, put it, “With many of our clients concerned about the impact and cost of a LIBOR review, Luminance’s powerful machine learning is fundamental to our legal practice.”

Flexible pricing for lawyer and client

Luminance has a range of commercial models from pay-as-you-go model to subscriptions options for larger data usage. This ensures that the platform can benefit firms and organisations of every size, from boutique law firms right through to the Big Four. Further, Luminance requires little-to-no set-up time before use, with most customers up and running within a matter of hours. Indeed, with Luminance’s intuitive and easy-to-use system, no bespoke user training is required and legal teams can see real results from day one.

When it comes to recouping their initial outlay on technology spend, some law firms choose to pass on the cost of their investment directly to their clients as a technology fee. Other firms choose to pass on some of the cost savings to their clients, offering competitive pricing in order to win additional business: one ‘Global Top 100’ law firm recently used Luminance to conduct a review of employment contracts and were able to save their client $800,000, representing an impressive 90% cost saving. And other firms might choose to maintain the same fees, keeping lawyers working the same hours on the project but with more time spent on analysis rather than sifting through the data. The range of ways firms might maximise the value of their technological investment is covered in our white paper.

Try Luminance for free today

Legal professionals are at a pivotal point- with advanced technology available and more accessible than ever, lawyers have tools at their fingertips that will allow them to do more with less resources, keep up with the accelerating pace of their business and use time more effectively. Luminance offers a two-week free pilot today so users can the the transformative potential of Luminance’s technology at work in their organisation.

For more information, please read the Luminance Business Case White Paper or contact info@luminance.com.

/by Luminance

Managing risk at an organization is a full-time job, especially for a general counsel (GC) or chief legal officer (CLO). As a company’s chief internal lawyer, they are expected to provide legal advice on a vast range of subjects – legal rights, risk mitigation, compliance with new and existing laws and so much more.

If that weren’t enough, GCs and CLOs are also expected to manage the organization’s legal matters, oversee outside counsel spend, conduct legal research, review internal litigation strategy, and be the ultimate approver and keeper of the organization’s contracts. Despite handling all these critical, sensitive matters, legal departments are often seen as “cost centers” and therefore are forced to do their challenging jobs without all the resources they need to succeed.

Technology, automation and artificial intelligence are key to doing more with less and streamlining processes, particularly when it comes to contracts. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools allow busy lawyers end-to-end control over contracts, freeing up time to focus on other tasks in the process. They can also play pivotal roles in helping corporate legal departments reduce contract management costs. For example, Pearson’s commercial transactions shared service center for more than 10,000 users worldwide achieved a 35% cost reduction and 30% improved contract turnaround time.

Contractual Pain Points

Even the simplest contracts can expose an organization to risk and liability if it’s not handled correctly. GCs and CLOs are tasked with overseeing the crucial job of examining and creating draft agreements, maintaining knowledge of the organization’s operations and legal documents, approving non-standard contract language and more.

Without a centralized solution for managing contracts on an organization-wide basis, legal departments run into countless hurdles, including:

  • Inconsistent language between contracts, often caused by employees using out-of-date contract templates
  • Competing objectives of moving contracts through quickly yet still having enough oversight to effectively manage risk obligations
  • A lack of insight into all the organization’s current contracts
  • An inability to track changes in contracts and ensure that contracts are in compliance with new and existing laws and regulations
  • The risk that contracts might expire or renew without notice because no one’s tracking them
  • Complicated review and approval processes for even standard contracts
  • Manual review and approval processes that create longer contract cycle times
  • Human error and inconsistencies inherent in manual processes, increasing the organization’s risk exposure
  • Lost revenue when add-ons, upgrades and renewals are missed
  • Being seen by other aspects of the business as a barrier to closing deals

The above list is by no means exhaustive. Given the large volume of contracts at today’s modern businesses, the challenges presented by trying to manage those contracts can become overwhelming when you rely on manual processes or basic contract tools that lack automation and AI and a means of creating a single source of truth for the organization’s contracts.

The Benefits of CLM Tools

While the challenges outlined above may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. CLM tools use automation and AI to remove the tedious, manual aspects of traditional contract management, increasing accuracy and efficiency, eliminating errors, and freeing up precious time that GCs and CLOs can use to focus on the many other critical tasks they’re responsible for handling.

Among other things, the right CLM solution will allow you to:

  • Find every contract you need, when you need it
  • Store all your contracts in one cloud location, creating a single source of truth for your organization’s contract data
  • Have full visibility at all times into the status of contract drafting, negotiations, amendments, and renewals, ensuring that nothing’s missed or overlooked
  • Implement uniform templates and playbooks to speed up contract cycle times, reduce manual errors and ensure you’re always using preferred terms
  • Automate approval processes to eliminate bottlenecks
  • Be notified of contract renewals to get a jumpstart on the process
  • Allow for self-service, so that other departments can create standard contracts with the correct language without legal review
  • Better manage risk across the organization
  • Demonstrate that the legal department is a strategic partner of the business, not a cost center

The ideal CLM tool will give you real-time insights into all phases of the contract lifecycle and provide you with actionable intelligence to make informed decisions for the business. More information means a better ability to identify and control risks across the contract process.

It’s time to take control of your contracts and let automation and AI do the heavy lifting for you. Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you implement end-to-end CLM for your organization.

/by

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that its participants don’t realize how manual it actually is. This is commonly the case for contract management and contract review.

Many corporations rely on vastly manual processes to handle contracts, such as cutting and pasting into templates, emailing, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. However, a manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks such as inadequate delivery to customers, failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, time lost from disorganization and errors and additional work due to inefficient processes.

One area of particular concern is contract review. When combined with highly manual or ineffective processes, it has the potential to hinder the execution of powerful agreements that lead to increased revenue, enhanced partnerships and valuable purchases. In short, a nickel – albeit a necessary nickel for legal review – is holding up a dollar.

Contract Review and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Legal teams have long been asked to do more with fewer resources and a shrinking budget – all while taking on more work. This is not a scalable process without technology. Artificial intelligence and advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning are evolving the legal profession as we know it.

While legal professionals’ expertise and judgment will always be the core of legal processes, AI can provide pre-work much in the same way that a paralegal or junior lawyer might mark up a document or run a checklist before a partner’s final review. As a result, corporate legal departments can use AI to decrease the time it takes to review contracts, increase productivity, reduce risk and save time.

Here are five ways AI can accelerate the pre-signature contract review process.

  1. Self-Service Contract Review

With AI, legal professionals can slash the time for a first-pass review from days or hours to mere minutes. A business user can request a standard contract or submit a third-party contract for initial review via email or a web portal. AI learns corporate standards from transaction histories and feedback and then reviews and redlines contracts and returns them in Microsoft Word – often within two minutes.

  1. High-Volume/Low-Edit Contract Review

Some contracts, like nondisclosure agreements, require near real-time turnaround and often do not depart from standard terms. They’re high-volume and low-edit documents – prime candidates for AI review. Instead of an attorney handling contracts like this, AI can review the contract and suggest revisions to bring it to corporate standards if necessary. From there, the NDA or similar contract can be tendered directly to the other party or undergo one last round of internal review if deemed necessary. Lawyers can spend time on projects that bring more value to the company.

  1. Complex Contract Drafting and Negotiation

Master service agreements, statements of works and other complex sales or purchase agreements can also benefit from AI. It leverages the full company playbook and clause library to guide the contract drafter and reviewer along the negotiation at agreement pass.

  1. Third-Party Contract Risk Review

AI assesses the risk of contracts during the pre-signature phase by reviewing third-party paper against corporate standards and checklists. It then summarizes the risks, flags key issues using contract review templates and unique company clauses and suggests proper edits.

  1. Playbook Management

Combined with a user-friendly AI platform, AI-driven contract review allows legal teams to manage, collaborate and use AI to apply corporate playbooks and precedents automatically. Legal professionals can then use the real-time data and insight provided by the platform to improve playbook standards and understand enforcement across the business.

Conclusion

Businesses want as many agreements on their contract terms and paper as possible. When a contract is on “other party paper,” it is difficult to adhere to a company’s playbook and enforce guidelines. Ultimately, it slows down contract execution. However, by relying on AI, corporate legal departments are aptly equipped to pave a rapid path to contract closure and signature and accelerate business while increasing contract compliance.

To learn more about AI and contract management, read a recent study that details how AI and contract review increases corporate legal productivity by more than 50%.

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Each day, the accomplishments of artificial intelligence multiply. AI recently solved Schrödinger’s equation in quantum chemistry. It regularly diagnoses medical conditions, pilots jets and fetches answers for our everyday queries. And now, it might dance better than you do.

The ever-improving abilities of AI are having marked positive impacts on a wide variety of industries and professions – especially corporate legal departments and the in-house counsel and legal operations professionals that run them. So, what can corporate legal professionals expect from AI in 2021?

Ari Kaplan, attorney, legal industry analyst, author, technologist and host of the Reinventing Professionals podcast, recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Nick, who is the 2019 IDC DX Leader of the Year and Talent’s 2018 Most Disruptive Leader Award (as judged by Sir Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak), shared the AI trends that general counsel and legal operations professionals should keep an eye on for 2021, including:

  • Accelerated adoption – The pandemic has greatly affected the use of AI, spurring businesses and their corporate legal departments to recategorize it from curiosity to necessity. For example, 2020 saw many companies having to quickly reassess large numbers of contracts (such as leases). Legal AI allowed in-house teams to quickly assess their contracts and take action, helping their businesses survive and thrive.
  • Banishing the black box – Legal departments have historically been perceived as black boxes – work goes in and decisions come out slowly with little transparency. AI reduces the time spent on individual transactions, increasing transparency by enabling consistent use of playbooks and the ability for the business to self-serve.
  • Focus on solving in-house challenges  – The technology has shifted from a project-based law firm focus toward products that are centered on solving in-house problems like contract lifecycle management and AI contract review. With 71% of lawyers saying they are mired in manual tasks, these AI products can drive a massive amount of value for corporate legal.
  • AI in the near future – In addition to the shift from law firm focused AI services to more in-house based services, corporate legal can expect a greater blending of AI into contract lifecycle management and third-party review as well as AI-assisted document automation and billing management.

Visit the Reinventing Professionals website to listen to the podcast. You can also find it (and subscribe) on Apple podcasts.

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Contract review and drafting can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. The process is often painfully tedious and repetitive – especially if it is paper-based or spread across multiple systems like emails and private drives. Without a more effective digital enablement, the process to review and draft contracts is slow and inconsistent, requires enormous attention to detail and continues to be prone to costly errors. These challenges directly impact a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes and achieve business objectives.

With ever-increasing pressure on legal teams to do more with less, enhancing contract efficiency through automation and the latest technologies represent a significant opportunity to improve business performance.

Artificial intelligence has the power to deliver significant productivity gains and allow lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives. Onit undertook a study of its AI for the pre-signature contract phase, ReviewAI, to determine just how much it can help and found commendable results (you can read more about them here.)

Key takeaways from the study include:

  • Testers found that ReviewAI accelerated contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increased user productivity by more than 50%.
  • New users were immediately 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive. The average midsize company employs 28 lawyers who review 4,850 contracts annually. Unlocking more capacity – up to 51.5% – means those same lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually. It’s like adding nine lawyers to your team.
  • The team leader, a senior lawyer, was able to reallocate 15% of his time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities.
  • The efficiency and productivity gains from using ReviewAI increased over time, allowing corporate legal departments to optimize team performance, reallocate resources to engage the business better and reduce the amount of contract work handled by external counsel.

To learn more about artificial intelligence and contract review and drafting, read about the study’s results.

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