With the impending Labor Day weekend upon us so ends another summer. In Texas, this is somewhat of a blessing as temperatures finally start to drop below triple digits. September brings a return to school, football season and hopefully cooler weather. At Onit, the fall will bring a number exciting new updates, announcements and feature upgrades to further enhance your user experience.
Virtually Onit – Visit us Online Sept. 23 & Sept. 30
Join us this month at Virtual Legal Tech on Sept. 23 and Virtual Corporate Counsel on September 30 for an opportunity to learn more about Onit, our team and the upcoming launch of our premium subscriptions. You’ll even have a chance to do some early holiday shopping – register to win a $200 Apple gift card at our booth.
Click Onit – New UI Coming in October
This fall we will be launching our new user interface that is unlike any in the industry. The new UI was designed with each user in mind. Now, you’ll be in control. You will have the power to decide how you view and manage your projects, legal and otherwise. Stay tuned for more details.
Launch Onit – Premium Subscriptions Coming in November
We’re pleased to announce our premium modules are coming this November. Sign-up now for a free trial and join the thousands of legal and business professionals already using Onit to manage their projects. Registration only takes a few minutes.
As always, please continue to send us your comments, questions and concerns. You can also visit our community to see what other Onit members have to say.
Not really. But the process that the legal industry is going through to define legal project management is exactly like the process the industry went through to come up with standards for electronic invoicing in 1997 and 1998, which yielded the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standards, or LEDES for short.
In the mid-1990’s, companies like AIG, GM, DuPont and countless others were creating their own formats for law firms to submit their invoices electronically. It made sense because there were no standards. Then electronic invoicing vendors like Examen and TyMetrix started writing their own formats and proposing that companies adopt them so that there would be less formats in the market. The short term result was more formats.
The solution was to have the industry get together and agree on a unified standard that may not necessarily cover everyone’s complete wish list, but was enough for law firms, corporations and vendors to start communicating in a common language. Until that happened in 1998, electronic invoicing was only a trickle. After that, the flow of data became a flood.
Today, there is a lot of chatter about legal project management. There are lot of ideas about what it means and why the legal industry needs it. There are also a growing number of definitions of legal project management. I find that they are predominantly from the law firm perspective, though. Not wrong, but our perspective is very much from the buyer of legal services perspective, not the seller. In my view, until the industry finds a way to come together and agree on a definition, legal project management will make little headway.
How the industry gets together to do this is a bit more challenging. In the earlier example of electronic invoicing, PriceWaterhouseCoopers funded the initiative and really facilitated the outcome. They did this, presumably, because they wanted to be seen as thought leaders and to generate fees eventually based on the implementation of electronic invoicing and spend management. And I think they were successful. Who will step forth for legal project management is less obvious. It can’t really be a vendor like Onit. And it can’t really be a law firm. And it can’t really be a corporation. I think it will take a forward-thinking, thought-leading consultancy that understands that investment is necessary here and that it will yield benefits in the future. Any takers?
Finally, in the interest of moving the ball forward, here is my top-level take on what legal project management means for corporate legal departments. Feel free to comment….
As we prepare for our new website launch and begin work on our premium product tailored at the legal vertical, we continue to struggle with how we talk about what we do. Although we designed Onit specifically for lawyers, we quickly realized that Onit is a universal project management tool that any professional, or non-professional for that matter, could use.
At the highest level, a lawyer’s project management needs are not that dissimilar than most people’s needs. On the one hand, we have a great, general project management tool that we will continue to grow for all professionals. On the other hand, our business plan predicts that 100% of our revenue will come from the legal vertical in the next five years.
It is the classic “depth verse breadth” battle that most software companies encounter. So far, we have tried to straddle both: Onit is for everybody; Onit Premium will be for lawyers and people that work with lawyers. Now, we have to find a middle ground that clearly articulates Onit’s value proposition to both audiences.
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