Featured Programming

As legal departments race to add technology and automate as much as possible, the next frontier is integration across point solutions and enterprise systems. These 2021 ACC Value Champions, ranging in size from more than 500 to 5 in-house legal professionals, will share how they have adapted business and legal-specific applications, plus AI and bots, to deliver the right contracts faster, get legal service requests out of inboxes and into smart workflows, and more. Join this session to learn how you too can shape apps you can buy or get your hands on into the platform you need.   

Speakers:  

• Ron Wills, VP of Legal, Crowdstrike

• Bill Deckelman, EVP and General Counsel

• Steven Kresak, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, IBI Group

We all know there’s no such thing as “one size fits all,” and this session will demonstrate how you can set up decision trees to select the right resources, internally and externally; how you can leverage a single law firm to help you revamp your whole portfolio of litigation or IP; as well as how you can adopt some innovative techniques to effectively manage a preferred panel. What do these use cases have in common? Pricing and outside counsel engagement models designed to ensure the relationships stay on track and costs are contained. 

Speakers:  

• John Burke, Global Head of IT, Contracting & Shared Services Legal, UBS

• Dion Harrington, Chief of Legal Operations, Rio Tinto

• Matt Kellam, Global Director IP, Nouryon

• Mike Roberts, VP, Associate General Counsel, Compass Group

Want to spark innovation in your legal department? Join these three women, each of whom has more than one ACC Value Champions trophy on her shelf, for a discussion about the different models they have used, and the leadership attributes in common across their award-winning initiatives. Their stories span setting up “Innovation Labs” to foment process improvements internally, collaborating with multiple partners to create an eye-popping contract approval workflow tool, and using their influence to forge a goals-driven approach to improving law firm diversity – plenty of ideas and inspiration, plus advice about how to move from vision to impact.  

Speakers:  

• Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal Innovation Counsel, Marsh McLennan 

• Jessica Vander Ploeg, Senior Legal Operations Manager, Net App

• Jennifer Lagunas, VP, Corporate Legal, Governance, Operations and Assistant Corporate Secretary, AbbVie Inc.

Sometimes you just can’t get the big impact you need quickly by pursuing one (or two) key initiatives at a time – you have to scrap and replace your structure and stand up a new operations function, or completely revamp your outside counsel management model, or dramatically impact compliance and ethics practices, or … do pretty much all of the above at once. These Champs will tell their stories of wholesale change management on aggressive timetables that got big results – and provide practical advice on leading transformations, whether by partnering or going it alone.  

Speakers:  

• Joe Blasko, General Counsel, James Hardie Industries

• Jan Sbarbaro, Managing Senior Counsel, Change Healthcare

Presented by the ACC Compliance & Ethics Network

How do you establish metrics, utilize data analytics, and demonstrate value to the business and to regulators around the world? What are “table stakes” data sets in the U.S. and elsewhere? How does a compliance program move beyond the low-hanging fruit of available data and dig deeper into the business to identify risk and prove it has been addressed? How do you quantify the value of compliance? Hear practical examples from in-house colleagues who generate and use facts and data to tell a tangible story of compliance success. 

Speaker:

• John Lamb, Bilingual Senior Counsel, Caterpillar

Presented by the ACC Middle East & North Africa Chapter and ACC Women in the House Network 

This special replay of a 2021 Women in Law & Leadership Month program shares valuable insights from four leading GCs in the Middle East & North Africa region about their career journeys, motivations, and recommendations for creating an environment that supports more women in finding their seat at the table. This highly regarded program was originally presented in March 2021 as a collaboration between the ACC Middle East & North Africa Chapter and the ACC Women in the House (WITH) Network.