Onit Collab Lets Corporations Manage Legal Expenses

To provide third-party legal invoice review for the legal departments of corporations, legal workflow and business automation, tech company Onit has teamed with Sterling Analytics, according to a Thursday (July 8) announcement.

Onit’s Fortune 500 clients and prospects can shore up and supplement their invoice review through the collaboration with a consultancy that looks at over $2.5 billion in legal expenses each year.

“In-house teams should focus on legal issues, not legal invoices,” Sterling Analytics President Marci Waterman said in the announcement. “We’re excited to join Onit in this alliance and help their customers realize greater insight into spend and increased productivity and efficiency.”

While innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) and billing rules have made much headway in finding charges that might not be in compliance, gray areas will exist that require further review, according to the announcement.

To that end, legal departments inside of corporations, which many times have to do more work with fewer resources, can have experts in the field handle that review, according to the announcement.

“Sterling’s third-party bill review complements Onit’s technology, creating a partnership that allows us to continue to honor corporate legal departments’ relationships with their law firms,” Onit Senior Vice President of Global Sales Matt DenOuden said in the announcement.

The news comes as companies are loosening the purse strings on legal expenses to make sure that their companies remain safeguarded and complaint. However, relaxed budgets have a downside, Onit CEO Eric Elfman said in a previous report.

Companies have struggled for decades to sufficiently evaluate the intricate and lengthy invoices that outside counsel and other legal vendors provide, bringing about inefficiencies and overspending.

In a previous conversation with PYMNTS, Elfman explored the largest hurdles to ensuring that legal departments are sufficiently linked to accounts payable (AP) workforces and that their legal B2B payments are going toward the right services.