CCBJ: In what ways has Onit’s deep legal expertise influenced the development of its platform and how does this foundation enable the company to deliver smarter, more impactful solutions compared to other legal tech offerings?
Our platform—and the solutions built on it—were designed by lawyers, for lawyers. We have a deep understanding of the intricacies, patterns and workflows that define legal work. This includes not only the operations within the law department itself but also its connections to internal business clients and collaboration with outside counsel.
Because Onit laid the groundwork early by mapping out the full range of legal department workflows, we’ve been able to focus in recent years on making that work easier, smarter, more data-driven and ultimately more impactful to the business.
Describe how Onit adapted its technology to align with the unique workflows and toolsets of modern legal departments and what distinguishes its approach to integration and performance measurement.
Legal departments operate as critical hubs within most businesses, managing a high volume of questions, matters, risks, contracts and compliance issues. Recognizing this complexity, Onit has designed its products to integrate seamlessly with the tools lawyers already rely on—most notably Microsoft Word and Outlook. Through dedicated add-ins, legal professionals can perform their work within these familiar environments while leveraging the power of Onit’s platform.
Additionally, Onit is built with a native understanding of the metrics that matter most to legal teams. It offers out-of-the-box access to commonly used reports, KPIs and benchmarks, enabling legal departments to track performance, demonstrate value and drive strategic outcomes with greater ease.
As the role of the General Counsel continues to expand beyond traditional legal oversight, how is legal technology—such as Onit’s solutions—enabling GCs to lead strategically, contribute business insights and drive organizational value?
Over the past two decades, General Counsels have evolved from legal advisors to strategic business leaders with full seats at the executive table—and expectations to lead from them. This shift requires GCs to bring the same level of business intelligence and data-driven insight to the C-suite as their peers in finance, operations, or marketing.
Technology platforms like Onit play a critical role in enabling this transformation. By equipping legal departments with tools to capture, analyze and report on key metrics, Onit helps GCs demonstrate not only how legal mitigates risk and controls cost but also how it creates value and contributes to competitive advantage.
Where the Office of the General Counsel was once seen as the “Office of No,” it is increasingly becoming the “Office of Yes and… ”—a partner in innovation, growth and strategic decision-making.
How does Onit’s unified platform strategy support legal departments in scaling their capabilities and why is a cohesive approach increasingly important in today’s fragmented legal tech landscape?
As the legal tech market has matured, it has become increasingly fragmented—filled with highly specialized tools that often operate in isolation. To legal departments, this can feel like navigating a scattered archipelago of disconnected systems, making integration, data sharing and consistent user experiences difficult to achieve.
Onit takes a different approach. Our philosophy aligns more closely with a “Pangea” model: bringing as many legal use cases and solutions as possible onto a single platform, built on one codebase and delivered through a consistent user interface. This unified approach is not only more intuitive for end users, but it also enables stronger data aggregation, streamlined reporting and more effective AI capabilities since information resides in one connected ecosystem.
By growing with our customers on a common platform, we help legal departments scale efficiently while avoiding the complexity and inefficiencies of siloed tools.
As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in legal operations, how is Onit leveraging AI agents to deliver real-world value and in what ways are these tools reshaping the day-to-day work of legal professionals?
The primary benefit of Onit’s AI-powered solutions is time savings for legal professionals. Our AI agents—focused on key areas such as Spend, Contracts and soon Matters, Knowledge and Requests—are embedded directly into existing workflows, generating meaningful outputs as part of day-to-day legal operations.
For example, our Spend Agent automatically reviews invoices against outside counsel guidelines or engagement letters, proactively flagging and disputing non-compliant charges. By automating these routine, time-intensive tasks, Onit enables legal professionals to focus on strategic oversight and higher-value decision-making.
While AI in legal has long generated interest, many solutions have struggled to move beyond compelling demos into real-world utility. Onit’s AI agents are different. They consistently perform routine legal tasks at a level comparable to experienced professionals—a capability we’ve rigorously validated with legal industry experts.
A key advantage of these AI agents is that they reduce the friction commonly associated with traditional software: they require minimal onboarding, offer intuitive interfaces and integrate seamlessly into existing processes. The result is fast, measurable impact—time savings, reduced costs, improved efficiency and lower risk.
Given the rapid evolution of AI, how can legal departments strike the right balance between leveraging automation for efficiency and preserving the human judgment essential to legal decision-making?
Automation can often feel abstract—or even unsettling. It’s easy to get caught up in AI hype and adopt solutions too aggressively, or conversely, resist entirely out of fear that jobs are at risk. In reality, neither extreme reflects what’s happening today. AI capabilities have advanced dramatically over the past two years and it’s no longer just a feature—it’s transformative.
That said, not every use case delivers value and chasing them all can introduce unnecessary cost and risk. Legal departments are already managing more work than capacity allows, so the key is thoughtful oversight.
Organizations should treat AI as they would any team member: give it a clear role, establish standard operating procedures, define its authority and ensure full transparency. At Onit, our Agent Studio helps legal teams do exactly that – making it easy to configure, monitor and control AI agents while keeping human judgment at the core of legal work.
The shift from the ‘Office of No’ to the ‘Office of Yes, and …’ reflects legal’s expanding strategic role.
Looking ahead, what excites you most about the evolving role of AI in the legal industry and where do you see the greatest opportunities for meaningful transformation over the next five years?
What excites me most is the emergence of true collaboration between legal professionals and AI agents. We’re moving toward a model where AI handles the process of law—those time-consuming, rules-based tasks— while lawyers focus on the higher-value practice of law.
Over the next five years, the biggest opportunities lie in seamlessly embedding AI into everyday legal workflows. This includes managing invoices, automating bill review, triaging internal requests and auditing for risk—routine but essential functions that often drain legal resources without requiring deep strategic input.
By offloading these tasks to intelligent, integrated AI agents, legal departments can operate with greater agility, free up capacity and focus more squarely on strategic decision-making.