Onit, Inc. announced that it appointed Chris Fields as Chief Technology Officer. Co-founder Eric Smith previously held this role and will now transition to the role of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Security Officer. This new addition adds another industry veteran from the legal technology space to the company’s executive management team.
Chris most recently served as CTO for Innovative Interfaces, where he led the engineering and product management team and was responsible for converting client/server-based technologies into a multi-tenant system leveraging cloud-based microservices for global library systems.
As CTO at Onit, Chris will be responsible for overseeing the technical vision of the company and leading product research, engineering and development efforts. He will also be responsible for evaluating and implementing new systems and infrastructure and ensuring technologies are used efficiently and securely. Additionally, he will build quality assurance and data protection processes and communicate the company’s technology strategy to our consulting and business partners and customers.
Chris’s background includes serving as vice president and chief technology officer for Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, where he led the technology strategy and direction for the business and was responsible for all aspects of product engineering, including the application development platforms and all applications and modules. He directed research and development, including evaluation and integration of new technologies that deliver additional value to the company’s clients. Chris was one of the key inventors named on the patent for the Passport®technology platform. He led the development of one of the company’s initial spend management offerings, as well as the portal for collaboration between corporate legal departments and legal service providers. He also drove adoption of agile development practices to improve overall product delivery and quality.
During his broad career, Chris also held several key management and executive positions at various high-growth companies, including Datacert and Digicontract.