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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Inconsistent language between contracts, often caused by employees using out-of-date contract templates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.

January 27, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

January 27, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

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.

January 27, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

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.

January 27, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

TAR Solutions for a New Decade

These days, it seems impossible to talk about eDiscovery or document review without mention of Technology Assisted Review (TAR). In its broadest use as a technical term, TAR can refer to virtually any manner of technical assistance – from password cracking to threading to duplicate and near-duplicate detection. In its narrower use, TAR refers to techniques that involve the use of technology to predict (or to replicate) the decision a human expert would make about the classification or category of a document. In this narrower sense, TAR often comes with a version number – TAR 1.0, TAR 2.0, and more recently, TAR 3.0. While some are inclined to advocate for the superiority of a single approach, each version has its merits and place, and understanding the underlying process and technology is crucial to selecting the right approach for a specific discovery need.

We recently authored a white paper to offer a discussion of the variables to consider when choosing the right TAR workflow for a specific matter, as well as the main principles behind different TAR solutions. By doing so, we make the claim that true preparedness lies in understanding the range of core technology within the TAR landscape, and further knowing how and where to access the right combination of people, process, and technology to meet any discovery need. If you or your team have had mixed results with TAR, or want some guidance on deciding your approach with TAR in your next matter, you may find this paper helpful.

TAR Solutions for a New Decade

January 27, 2021/by Brian Meegan

Expanding data volumes are having a significant impact on ediscovery, but what are the specific challenges being faced? Lighthouse’s Nick Schreiner outlines six challenges when working with large data sets and offers up insights into how to address these challenges with data re-use, AI, and big data analytics in a recent blog: https://lnkd.in/dYjcY6W

January 27, 2021/by Nick Schreiner

eDiscovery itself is a big data challenge, but recent advances in AI and machine learning can help mitigate risks by breaking down the silos of individual cases and leveraging prior case data. Lighthouse’s Karl Sobylak discusses the benefits of bringing technology to bear to understand large data sets at scale in a recent blog: http://ow.ly/QbzZ50COKK8

January 27, 2021/by Karl Sobylak

As data volumes continue to grow so does the need for AI and machine learning. In fact, adopting AI can be a catalyst for revitalizing your organization’s ediscovery model. Lighthouse’s Rob Hellewell makes the case for AI including cost reduction, lower risk, and improved win rates in a recent blog: http://ow.ly/MoNs50CMwws

January 27, 2021/by Rob Hellewell

Artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, and machine learning are no longer new to the ediscovery field. While the legal industry admittedly trends towards caution in its embrace of new technology, the ever-growing surge of data is forcing most legal professionals to accept that basic machine learning and AI are becoming necessary ediscovery tools.

However, the constant evolution and improvement of legal tech bestow an excellent opportunity to the forward-thinking ediscovery legal professional who seeks to triumph over the growing inefficiencies and ballooning costs of older technology and workflow models. In this article, we provide you with arguments on how leveraging the most advanced AI and analytics solutions can give your organization or law firm a competitive and financial advantage, while also reducing risk.

January 27, 2021/by Rob Hellewell

As the proponents of policy and creators of contracts, it’s well understood that the legal department’s job is, first and foremost, to manage risk. This involves identifying potential legal and regulatory issues as soon as possible, developing a profile of potential legal risks, avoiding those risks with compliance programs, and dealing with the ones that slip through the cracks.

What is perhaps less well understood is how dramatically the concept of “risk” has evolved in recent years. Between digital transformation and technological innovations, new data privacy laws, cyber vulnerabilities, and an increasing spotlight on corporate culture, values and diversity practices — risk management today is not your grandmother’s limitation of liability clause. For today’s legal departments, risk management goes hand-in-hand with data stewardship. What type of information is retained or destroyed is becoming just as important as how information is organized and leveraged. Yet, data disparity is on the rise.

January 27, 2021/by Onna