Over the last few years, global cloud technology company VMware has transformed its legal services to accelerate growth and align with business goals. Working strategically with Harbor and legal technology providers Onit and NetDocuments, VMware’s vision was to implement and integrate multiple technology applications to create an ‘action station’ that enabled users to perform end-to-end processes without taking their fingers off the keyboard.
“With our integrated legal tech stack, we now have a centralized cockpit for legal operations that is simplifying processes for legal and delivering better service to the business and our customers.” Aine Lyons, Senior Vice President & Deputy General Counsel at VMware
The company’s legal technology innovation includes a fully integrated ecosystem spanning matter management, contract management, and document management. Each discrete system is designed and configured to enable VMware’s business processes and connected through a series of custom workflows and integrations under an extensive security model.
This connected legal tech ecosystem provides more streamlined interactions between legal, internal business users, and end customers. It also reduces manual tasks for high-value legal resources and enables legal to monitor and manage activities from a centralized cockpit.
“Legal tech transformation can be daunting,” says Marc Allen, Managing Director at Harbor. “VMware’s focus on leveraging the strengths of Onit and NetDocuments has pushed the edges of process enablement and taken its legal tech stack to the next level.”
Speaking the language of the business
With a rapidly shifting business, increasing opportunities for digitization, a legal mandate and the constant need to optimize resource effectiveness, VMware sought to shift its legal services model from a highly risk-avoidant model to one that would problem-solve and drive value for the business as a whole.
“Data-driven decision-making and tech enablement were central to our strategy to driving business value,” explains Aine Lyons, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at VMware. “By delivering a higher level of performance from legal to our internal customers, we could foster closer partnerships on an ongoing basis to help us better support VMware’s business goals.”
With these efforts, VMware’s legal department has taken significant strides to transform its relationship with the enterprise into a collaborative business partnership, setting a new standard that aligns perfectly with prevailing industry trends. As the 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report clearly illustrates, today’s corporate employees are looking for better communication and faster execution from their legal counterparts — especially in a challenging economic climate – and VMware’s remarkable journey exemplifies thought leadership in action, serving as a testament to the power of collaboration and forward-thinking in today's dynamic business landscape.
Building the foundation for legal value
VMware selected a set of class-leading legal technologies based on their adaptability to the company’s legal process needs and their flexibility to enact VMware’s vision of fully automating its end-to-end legal processes. The implementation journey then followed a multi-step series of deployments:
- A NetDocuments legal document management system was implemented to provide an easy-to-access yet highly secure way to store and manage documents related to legal matters. This effort included aggregation of VMware’s documentation related to legal matters, allowing the company to implement a consistent workspace structure for easy retrieval of these documents.
- Harbor then deployed the Onit Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) solution (one of several solutions from the OnitX platform) to enable a single source of truth for matter management and a spend management solution for law firms and vendors to bill electronically. Leveraging a matter-centric model, Harbor and Onit built integrations to and from its legal software and finance, HR, procurement and compliance tools.
- Harbor assisted VMware to design and build a set of workflows using Onit’s Apptitude solution, creating additional automation and connectivity into and out of the legal department. These highly specialized workflows included automated interactions between Legal, HR and Compliance for personnel issues, as well as with Finance for advance invoice approval and rejection scenarios.
- Harbor and Onit collaborated with VMware to design and deploy the Onit Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution (also part of the OnitX platform) to enable drafting, negotiation, storage and management of all legal agreements. This included a focus on simplifying and consolidating contract templates into a “ONE Customer Contract” portal accessible company-wide, building reports to highlight clause usage to aid clause library management, and implementing a detailed security model to enable the right level of access to contracts and reports for all users.
- Using reporting capabilities from Onit’s ELM and CLM solutions, integrated with Tableau, VMware designed its legal cockpit to provide a single portal that could deliver actionable visibility into Legal’s operational and financial metrics. Key elements of the dashboards such as Matters by Counsel or Region, Spend by Matter Types and Vendor, Contracts by Region and Status (to name a few) have allowed VMware to more effectively track key metrics, identify trends and make data-driven decisions - leading to significant improvements in efficiency, compliance, collaboration, and cost savings.
Following these initial deployments, VMware was supported by Onit, NetDocuments, and Harbor’s legal technology managed services to address system issues promptly and proactively drive adoption and ongoing system optimization.
“We recognize that technology is a journey,” notes Rebecca Caro, Senior Director, Legal Operations of VMware. “As the needs of our business change and technology continues to evolve, we will adapt to ensure we can provide world-class legal and transactional service through a seamless customer experience.”
Having the right information and tools at our fingertips has allowed our attorneys to spend more time with the business, understanding and servicing their needs. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Aine Lyons, Senior Vice President & Deputy General Counsel at VMware
Streamlined customer experience
With its legal tech foundation in place, VMware has focused on partnering with the business to drive results. Key benefits that VMware has begun to realize include:
- Faster contracting times
- Easier access to legal information and services for the business
- Visibility to key transactional, matter and spend metrics
- Access to key data to inform strategic decision-making
- Visibility to contract volumes and status to balance workloads across a globally dispersed team
- Self-service portals to enable speed in compliance, including customer NDAs
- Templates and playbooks informed by metrics on top negotiation blockers
Says Lyons: “Having the right information and tools at our fingertips has allowed our attorneys to spend more time with the business, understanding and servicing their needs. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.”
About VMware
VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future.
About Onit
Onit is the leading provider of legal workflow solutions for enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM). Onit’s comprehensive product portfolio customizes AI-driven workflows for managing matters, spend, vendors and contracts. With Onit, companies can evolve the legal department’s role as a business protector and transform it into a business driver that materially influences the enterprise by improving operational and cost efficiency while simultaneously contributing to faster revenue generation and business growth.
About NetDocuments
NetDocuments is a leading cloud-based content management and productivity platform that helps legal professionals do their best work. Backed by over 20 years of experience in cloud innovation, NetDocuments offers a complete end-to-end platform for document and email organization and management. Learn more about NetDocuments.
This engagement was executed by HBR Consulting, one of the companies that merged to form Harbor.
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