Group of winners from around the world (Bermuda, United Kingdom, USA) set the standard for legal innovation for corporate legal departments.
Washington - The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) announced its 2023 ACC Value Champions, recognizing eight law departments with four external partners for their innovative approaches to increase efficiencies and cost savings. Faced with consistently changing global regulations, combined with law departments continually being asked to do more with less, these winning teams found ways to apply well-leveraged data, streamlined processes, innovative technologies, and creative new operating models to help their departments and organizations meet new and emerging challenges.
“The winners of the 2023 ACC Value Champions are from a variety of companies that highlight the global impact and critical importance of legal innovation in today’s modern corporate law departments,” said Tori Payne, vice president and chief global membership officer for ACC. “The only constant for law departments today is that they must continuously adapt to an ever-changing business landscape, by thinking creatively, embracing innovation, and developing the necessary relationships. This impressive group of law departments and partners demonstrated multiple ways to achieve those goals by developing and implementing transformative solutions to increase the scope and efficiency of the legal services they provide.”
Since 2012, the ACC Value Champions program has highlighted corporate law departments that innovate to optimize legal service delivery for corporations. This year’s Champions hail from around the world in a variety of various sectors, including health, energy, technology, and are all first-time winners of the Value Champion award.
A panel of past honorees and expert Legal Operations professionals selected the following 2023 ACC Value Champions:
Celonis (New York, NY, USA) - “CELOcity: Increasing Deal Velocity Through Reducing Friction Within the Sales Cycle”
“CELOcity is velocity, Celonis style.” In 2022, following a phase of hyper-growth for the process mining company, Celonis Commercial Legal and the legal operations team came together to form a cohesive team of legal business partners, able to equally advise on legal and business matters. The requirement: to create a function that is deeply woven around the business requirement for velocity, which supports deal governance and risk control. The result: reduced friction and effort in the company’s go-to-market cycle. Mission accomplished.
Enstar (Hamilton, Bermuda) and UpLevel Ops (Redwood City, CA, USA) - “Implementing a Legal Operations Function to Increase Department Efficiencies” - Implementing a legal operations program from scratch is quite an undertaking. For Enstar’s legal department, it was important to not only positively impact and serve staff, but to also solidify the team’s role as a value-driven department and strategic partner to the business. To that end, the team knew it had to prioritize growing this capability, as well as focusing efforts on collaboration, alignment, and innovation. Working with consulting firm UpLevel Ops, Enstar began what would be its award-winning journey to innovation.
Flex (Austin, TX, USA) and DocJuris (Houston, TX, USA) - “8 Days to 5 Minutes: How Flextronics Reshaped Contract Review”- Contract management is a common organizational challenge. For the Flextronics team (GPSC Legal), tasked with overseeing thousands of complex contracts with its global supply chain every year, the time required to review and negotiate them resulted in the need to overhaul its review processes. Partnering with DocJuris, the teams developed an AI-driven contract review tool which has done the seemingly impossible — transforming their days-long turnaround time into mere minutes.
Haleon (Surrey, UK) and UnitedLex (New York, NY, USA) - “Haleon Optimizes Legal Operations with Help from UnitedLex”- As a global consumer health company, Haleon understands the importance of embracing technological advancements that allow it to better serve its customers, internal clients, and all stakeholders. To that end, they partnered with data and professional services company UnitedLex to create a Contracting Center of Excellence (CoE). Not simply an outsourcing model, the CoE is described as an “organic approach to process, technology, and resource design.”
Liberty Mutual (Boston, MA, USA) - “Holistic Legal Services Value Measurement Strategy” - Determining the value of legal services is a common challenge for legal departments, especially when working with limited or anecdotal information, inconsistent data, and metrics. To combat this common departmental issue, the Legal Strategic Services (LSS) team at Liberty Mutual brought together a collaborative group of attorneys and data analytical professionals to develop and implement a “holistic value measurement strategy.”
Suburban Propane (Whippany, NJ, USA) and doeLEGAL (Wilmington, DE, USA) - “Our Journey to Innovation” - The Suburban Propane legal department had been dependent on manual processes to perform functions related to billing, matter management, legal holds, and contract drafting. The team, ready for change, leveraged the previous experience of its new GC as well as insights from internal clients and staff to explore technology-based solutions, which included the implementation of an automated platform that streamlined processes and increased efficiency.
Unisys (Blue Bell, PA, USA) - “Unisys Legal Department Transformation” - The legal department at Unisys Corporation set out to transform itself from a cost center into a data-driven partner to the business in May of 2022. Focusing efforts on innovation and diversity, leadership established a dedicated legal operations team who focused on better leveraging technology to create efficiencies and support the growth of organizational initiatives.
ZoomInfo (Vancouver, WA, USA) - “In-House Legal Support Intake Process”- While rapid growth is something companies want, it can create challenges and result in the need to review practices that no longer work due to increased volume. For example, simple practices like sending legal requests via email or internal messaging, which lack critical details like status, age, or priority, as well as cross-departmental (or organizational) visibility can cause delays in the ability of the legal team to effectively do its job. In response, the ZoomInfo legal team developed a legal support system to manage the volume and help the company continue to thrive.
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About the ACC Value Challenge: The ACC Value Challenge, launched in 2012, has provided resources and training for in-house counsel, legal operations professionals, and law firm lawyers to help affect change within the legal industry. By re-aligning relationships and promoting value-based fee arrangements and other management tactics, such as project management, process improvement, efficient use of technology and knowledge management tools, the market for the delivery of legal services benefits from the same insights and wisdom upon which every other service industry relies to provide world-class value to their clients. For more information, visit www.acc.com/valuechallenge.
About ACC: The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is the premier global legal association that promotes the common professional and business interests of in-house counsel who work for corporations, associations and other organizations through information, education, networking, and advocacy. For more than 40 years, ACC has set the standard for in-house counsel and raised awareness regarding the value of the chief legal officer in the C-suite and boardroom. With more than 45,000 members employed by over 10,000 organizations and spanning 100+ nations, ACC connects its members to the people and resources necessary for both personal and professional growth. By in-house counsel, for in-house counsel® remains the foundation for ACC’s market leadership. For more information, visit www.acc.com and follow ACC on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.