Vendor onboarding can be inconsistent and time-consuming across clients, leading to inefficiencies and potential issues; the Client Self Service Vendor Onboarding feature introduces a standardized, client-initiated workflow within the Vendor App for beginning the process of onboarding outside counsel vendors.

By enabling clients to kick off vendor onboarding directly, this feature ensures consistency across organizations, reduces administrative friction, and improves the vendor data quality from the start.

Clients will access the onboarding workflow in the existing Vendor App, enter required information about the outside counsel vendor, and trigger internal Onit workflows for provisioning.

Features include:

• Client-Initiated Onboarding Workflow
• Clients access a guided onboarding form within the Vendor App within their existing OnitX ELM product.
• Pertinent vendor details are collected including address details, contact information, tax ID, and spend data.
• Standardized Vendor Request Intake form, ensures uniform information capture across all clients.
• Reduces back-and-forth communication and data gaps.
• Submissions from clients are automatically routed into a standardized onboarding workflow.
• Clients access to real-time updates on their request status (e.g., Vendor Setup Requested, In Process, Active); reducing the need for follow-up emails or support inquiries.
• Audit Reporting
• Full activity tracking for all vendor onboarding submissions.
• Exportable logs for compliance and operational insights.

Matter File Sharing

NOTE: The client MUST enable this feature for it to be available to vendors.

Matter collaboration and communication between legal operations departments and outside counsel is often fragmented across emails, shared drives, and disconnected tools. This results in missed updates, duplicate work, and reduced visibility into the progress and documentation of legal matters.  

By centralizing collaboration into the system, this feature improves transparency, reduces manual effort, saves time, and ensures both parties stay aligned throughout the matter lifecycle. 

Features include:   

• Within BillingPoint, users access a new “Matters” tab containing a list of matters. Each matter will include access to a new section titled Files.

• Documents will be scanned for viruses and malware before upload; files found to contain harmful content will not be processed. 

Legal Departments routinely negotiate rates at the timekeeper (TK) classification level (e.g., Partner, Associate, Paralegal). However, during rate review they must compare negotiated classification rates to each individual timekeeper submitted by a vendor. This manual comparison is a significant bottleneck and a consistent pain point for legal departments.

The Timekeeper Rate Cards feature introduces the ability for vendors to submit standardized rate cards to be used in automatic comparison and approval of individual timekeeper rates. Rate cards reduce the repetitive work of reviewing each timekeeper individually, while still leveraging the Timekeeper Rate Review process.

This feature improves efficiency, ensures greater consistency in approved rates, and provides flexibility to support exception scenarios when necessary.

Duplicate invoices and line items that go missed result in overpayments and compliance issues. To simplify invoice review and improve vendor accountability, SimpleLegal will run validation checks at the invoice and line item level against historical data to flag potential duplications based on matching criteria, such as invoice amount/currency, worked dates, and timekeeper name, to enable reviewers to take quicker action.

To give users better insight into expected spend for a specific matters, accruals will be displayed on the matter details page instead of solely being grouped by vendor, which can be less useful when a vendor is working across multiple matters.

Previously, eBilling.Space offered only minimal self-service features when it comes to user management. Now, staff users can be disabled and then cannot login anymore. They can also be deleted if there is no activity data or blocked if activity data is present.

Applying tags to uploaded documents can be time-consuming for contract administrators. To streamline the process, they will be able to associate templates with predefined sets of tags to specific folders in the repository so that they are automatically applied to uploaded documents and extract the relevant data. The templates can be tailored to specific document types or other business needs.

To improve compliance and security, updates are being introduced to expiration rules for E-Sign packet links. This includes initial links expiring within 24 hours and expired packet links no longer being eligible for automatic extension after 180 days.

Full ContractWorks release notes here.

By creating a temporary index while the app is being reindexed, users can continue searching data while the new index is being created.

Bug Fix: Show-If formlets break on create_launch_url when "Authentication Required" is used.