Meet the Champions

Celonis

“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 and UpLevel Ops

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 and DocJuris

Contract management is a common organizational challenge. For the Flex 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 and 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

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 and doeLEGAL

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

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

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.  

Cognizant

Cognizant’s legal operations enhancement project saw six successes in 2021/2022. The organization was able to expand its legal operations department from one to seven associates. They increased visibility into legal department spending by designing and distributing monthly outside counsel spend reports, quarterly budget reports, quarterly business reviews and annual budget presentations, which overall improved the legal department’s financial reporting. The enhancement project also saw the development of the legal department’s knowledge, vendor, and invoice management programs along with investments in technology that saw the department’s outside counsel fees reduce about 60 percent from the previous year.

Craveable Brands

Nicola Gannon, senior manager and corporate lawyer at Craveable Brands, sourced and managed the implementation of a document and contract management system, LawVu. LawVu provides their business with greater access to the legal team, greater access to information and legal knowledge in a user-friendly way, while also allowing the legal team to have full visibility across the legal team to all information linked to a matter. Nicola has also overseen the creation of 'contract wizards' for their franchising documents which allows the suite of franchise documents to be automatically populated saving the team significant time in the drafting of each set of required franchise documents. For this legal team, the BAU work is retail leasing and franchising as they handle the leasing and franchising work for the restaurant network for three iconic brands across Australia, totaling nearly 600 restaurants. With a growth strategy being employed by the business, the implementation of the new system has allowed the legal team of 6 lawyers to continue to provide a quality service to the business, despite the increasing volume of work

CrowdStrike

Scaling legal support to keep pace with CrowdStrike’s industry-leading growth required launching an entire portfolio of cloud-based legal workflows in 2021, spanning nearly every practice area in its legal department. This now two-time value champion partnered with FactorLaw to stand-up a flexible, multi-time zone staffing solution consisting of both attorney and non-attorney legal professionals who were cross-trained on multiple workstreams. CrowdStrike and Factor identified specific workflows (for example, eBilling and negotiation of NDAs) that could be assigned exclusively to Factor, while in other cases Factor was able to take on discrete tasks or phases of a larger workflow (such as third-party diligence), serving as a force-multiplier for the core legal team. The result was a 75 percent reduction in time-to-delivery of new workflows, and an estimated 60 percent decrease in development costs.

Equitable and Wolters Kluwer

In 2019, Equitable’s head of legal operations, Mike Lordi, laid out a strategy for an aggressive five-year modernization strategy with the primary goal of transitioning the company’s law department into a modern, innovative, proactive, streamlined, and highly efficient organization through: stabilization of existing infrastructure and elimination of risk, replacing inefficient or ineffective legacy technology, reducing and reinvesting 3rd party spend, process efficiency and reduction of manual hours, operational centralization of all vendors, projects and technology, and enforcement of Equitable’s diversity policies for procurement. To date, this technology modernization project has yielded several cost-saving results, including; reduced outside counsel expenses by 5 percent YTD, reduced time of invoice review by 25 percent for invoices over $5,000, reduced time of invoice review by 100 percent for invoices under $5,000 (~2,400 hours annually), 100 percent offshore reduction, increased speed to payment by 20 percent (YTD), and ensuring 5 percent quick pay discount applied to invoices.  Not to mention several other additional beneficial outcomes beyond the cost savings detailed above.

Nanyang Technological University

As part of the legal and compliance team's (LSO) vision to be Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) legal architect, LSO constantly explores initiatives to innovate, improve, and simplify legal and compliance processes. Taking into consideration feedback received from their stakeholders, LSO embarked on various initiatives to improve efficiency and overall effectiveness of the legal and compliance function. These initiatives included: the implementation of the board portal, a board and meeting management platform, the LSO chatbot (Just Ask Law, which provides accessibility to routine legal and compliance solutions), electronic request for approvals and signing of contracts (eRAS), online whistleblowing forms, LSO intranet revamp project, and robotic automation processes. These all focused on supporting NTU’s digitalization efforts. Since creating and initiating the launch of an online and mobile legal services solution (“LSOnline”) in March 2020, LSO continues to successfully maintain and manage, record, and track the University’s legal requests in a streamlined fashion. The platform has received 100% adoption and support from stakeholders, there have been significant operational efficiencies – with over 117 meetings a year involving over 311 attendees, the Platform saves over 1,872 man-hours per year in preparing Board meeting packs, and lastly the implementation of the Platform is aligned with NTU’s sustainability manifesto by enabling paperless meetings and board resolutions.

UBS

UBS’s Legal Regulatory Change team launched a RegChange Digital Center of Competence in 2020. The small team of lawyers based at the bank’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland drove the initiative with support by its legal operations unit. It consists of easily and independently readable Q&A’s of collected and curated legal know-how, tailoring the often heavy-to-read, time-consuming, highly technical and abstract legal documents to the needs of the daily business. It also combines various ways of getting the required legal advice via an intelligently structured browse function providing results of legal advice that are applied to specific UBS scenarios, explaining how the regulation was implemented. It is estimated that a single Q&A saves at least 15 minutes of lawyer’s time. As per May 2022, and calculated over a period of 17 month, the total usage was 150 unique users a month, with around 3,550 hits or 200/month, creating 890 number of saved hours or 50 hours/month.

Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. (Herndon, VA) and Thomson Reuters

The legal team launched a new initiative to process rate increase requests more effectively for 2022 and beyond. First, they established a more centralized, uniform approach, managed by legal operations with strategic guidance from the legal department’s leadership team. They then improved the intake process. The firms were asked to submit increases within a designated window of time and through Legal Tracker (now Legal Tracker Advanced), which has powerful analytics to assess past rate increase history, as well as internal and external benchmarking comparisons. Within this framework, the team also applied an enlightening new metric - Compound Annual Growth Rate. This figure shows a multi-year view of a law firm’s rate increase history, accounting for past increases and rate freezes. The VWGoA Team also found it very helpful to use Legal Tracker data to model the dollar impact of the requested increases per timekeeper for the coming year. This was instrumental in identifying the specific timekeeper increases most impacting costs. Using these metrics, VWGoA’s legal leadership and legal operations teams were able to implement more effective governance and decision logic to streamline the rate decisions in light of portfolio metrics and company financial considerations.

Western Union, Husch Blackwell, and Evisort 

The Western Union (WU) legal team knew a change was imperative to keep up with the speed of the functional areas and business units it supported. Specifically, gaps in its prior review process, such as lost time recreating legal documents or language due to the lack of strong systems and processes to preserve such resources. Led by in-house counsel Debbie Hoffman, that change came in the form of a multi-stakeholder CLM (contract lifecycle management) initiative that brought together members of WU’s legal and procurement teams, technology vendor Evisort, and law firm Husch Blackwell. To address the above, WU Legal engaged Husch Blackwell to develop a library of contract templates, playbooks, and processes. Legal also engaged Evisort to implement a modern CLM platform with integration into the company’s workday system. Evisort allowed procurement to build a contract with the appropriate template and playbook to send to a vendor. In the first year of the collaboration, the team decreased outside legal spend by 18 percent. The savings in year two are forecasted at almost 70 percent. Concurrently, they’ve broken volume records on contracts reviewed by the company, all while reducing average contract execution time by 65 percent. Not only saving time and money, but also strengthening relationships with procurement and turning it into a competitive advantage.

AbbVie

A 2019 ACC Value Champion, the company resolved to use its influence to increase diversity among its outside counsel and in the greater legal industry.   In 2018, AbbVie partnered with its top law firms to develop measurable goals to increase meaningful work by underrepresented attorneys (in particular, partners) on its matters.  By 2020, female partner hours rose 64 percent, minority partner hours 87 percent, and underrepresented lawyer hours 18 percent, exceeding the initiative’s five-year targets.

Change Healthcare

In 2020, Change Healthcare launched “Project Jupiter” (farther than a moonshot) to revamped sales contracting and establish rigorous outside counsel management practices, along with a new approach to compliance and ethics. Change Healthcare’s outside counsel spend has since gone down 27 percent; costs of sales contracting has dropped 25 percent, and staff training processes are both faster and more effective.

Compass Group and Shook, Hardy & Bacon

When Compass Group’s docket of auto and general liability lawsuits had more than doubled in five years, the law department turned over its liability claims to Shook, Hardy & Bacon, transforming it from a plethora of matters handled by 65 firms to a single portfolio. The pair moved from triage through early resolution and on to prevention through risk-calibrated dispute handling and litigation strategy. Compass and Shook have reduced claims and lawsuits by more than 50 percent. All-in legal spend is down by 30 percent.

CrowdStrike and ScaLegal

CrowdStrike teamed up with ScaLegal to build a platform that integrated legal and enterprise applications and harnessed knowledge, data and workflows to modernize the legal function for the cloud era. Comprising e-billing, eDiscovery, contract lifecycle management, and compliance, the new legal services platform manages and tracks a host of repeatable legal tasks, and flags steps that can be omitted or more efficiently staffed. Over 75% of legal work shifted from inboxes to monitored workflows; eDiscovery administrative overhead was reduced by 80% while data processing volume was halved.

DXC and UnitedLex

After transforming and collaborating on a new managed services model, these now two-time co-Champions used technology to enable high-velocity, risk-calibrated contracting.  What emerged is a smart triage and workflow platform that supports the team on everything from risk assessments and contract approvals to capacity management and chats. The results: An estimated annual cost savings of 41 percent in 2020 on the Legal operating budget, zero budget forecast variance, and data quality improvement of 70 percent.

IBI Group

IBI Group’s five-person legal department created a practical, outcome-focused global legal services platform, integrating legal tools with adapted enterprise technology. Among many changes in the transformation, they applied automation to high-volume, low-risk contracts, reducing external legal spend on contracting and leases by 100 percent in the past five years. Simultaneously, they focused on insourcing high-value, high-reward work. In 2020 alone, managing two large transactions and 15 smaller projects, the department reduced external legal spend by 70 percent.

James Hardie and PwC's NewLaw

These co-Champions’ strategic review of JHI’s legal and compliance function resulted in a departmental restructuring and grassroots innovation forums to tackle specific problems using a continuous improvement framework. PwC also supplied a legal operations specialist, to provide hands-on support while instilling new practices, eventually enabling the PwC team to render themselves obsolete. In the first twelve months, JHI had achieved 25 percent savings against average annual external legal spend and was set up to move forward with a new operations model.

Marsh McLennan

Guided by its Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) team, Marsh McLennan created its “LIT Lab” to drive new ideas and better outcomes for its 600+-person law department.  Marsh McLennan reimagined its approach to technology and innovation across four major categories: automation and standardization, advanced technology, alternative fee arrangements / right-sourcing, and business alignment.  Their approach resulted in a multi-faceted set of accomplishments, including dramatically reducing spend 80 percent for global contracting, 70 percent for data processing and hosting and 50 percent for document review, while also improving efficiencies and colleagues' satisfaction.  Further, the LIT Lab developed core principles to measure and frame innovation value, including time, money, quality, risk and – the critical, yet oft overlooked – joy.

NetApp, Keesal Propulsion Labs, LexCheck and QuisLex

NetApp procurement contract data revealed a disproportionate amount of time needed for approval, so they assembled this collaborative team to help. The tool they created uses artificial intelligence (AI) to put all necessary information for contract approval at the approving VP’s fingertips: an overall risk rating, a risk report including mitigation measures, and a list of prior approvals and comments from Legal and other stakeholders. This collaborative effort has reduced approval time by 80 percent, and reduced the escalation rate from 80 percent to 10 percent..

Nouryon and LKGlobal

Nouryon wanted to close the gap between business and the IP legal department, so the general counsel brought on LKGLOBAL to reorganize and streamline their portfolio. Through an innovative budgeting matrix tool, selective outsourcing and more, this partnership has helped Nouryon reduce its global IP budget, with both internal and external spend, by 41 percent. By removing low-value patents from the Nouryon portfolio, the total number of patents has decreased by 48 percent, and the number of patent families by 23 percent.

Rio Tinto and Elevate

Already on a transformation journey when required to accelerate cost savings for legal services, Rio Tinto turned to Elevate for help creating the “Spend Excellence Program.” Elevate provided an outside counsel concierge (OCC) and an e-billing support desk to support end-to-end management of tendering, engagements, spend management and reporting. By the end of the first year (2020), 94 percent of OCC request for proposals (RFPs) have resulted in some portion of fees under alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), and 88 percent of those have all fees under AFAs. The average savings realized on RFPs are around 30 percent, and range as high as 94 percent.

UBS

The Outside Counsel Management team at UBS implemented a smart sourcing program, in which numerous factors are combined to inform strategic decisions about the engagement of external resources and to assist in pricing. The OCM team implemented decision trees for the external engagement process end-to-end, from the inception of a legal case through settlement or dismissal; they supplemented this new framework with machine learning tools and a centralized database. UBS’ legal fees are now consistently down 15-20 percent, year to year.
 

7-Eleven and Perkins Coie

Demonstrating how innovation radiates, past Champion 7-Eleven applied a value-based sourcing model it had developed with a different partner to a challenge in another area, this time collaborating with Perkins Coie (a fellow past Champion) to address exponential growth in contract volume. Perkins adapted third party tools to build a platform for intake, triage, document sharing and reporting. A fixed fee renders budgets 100 percent predictable, despite a 300 percent increase in work volume, and the model has reduced per-matter legal costs by 66 percent for merchandizing contracts and 18 percent for digital/IT contracts.

Applied Materials and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe

Upholding its culture of legal innovation, Applied Materials worked with longtime partner Orrick to create a scalable, efficient solution to evaluate and update supplier contracts. This exemplary client-firm operational collaboration involved analyzing and testing various options and then implementing an innovative, highly-structured, bot-supported approach that provides the same value as conventional contract review at significantly lower costs and project completion in a fraction of the expected time.

Exelon, HBR Consulting and PERSUIT

Facing cost-optimization and pressure to streamline after a series of mergers, Exelon engaged HBR Consulting to help reduce external spend while upholding quality, diversity, and sustainability goals. Under the resulting new program, Exelon utilized PERSUIT’s online bidding platform to balance pricing with qualitative attributes. The result of these combined initiatives was a 31 percent savings from matter-level bidding and a 60 percent reduction in overall outside budget variation in 2019. Exelon also saw a 27 percent increase in spend with minority and women-owned business enterprise (MWBE) firms, and an eight percent increase in spend with diverse associates at majority-owned firms. The savings funded investment in Exelon’s internal legal team and professional development opportunities.

Fir Tree Partners

Not letting its small size impede its innovation, Fir Tree has  streamlined its legal operations by using many of the same processes and technology solutions adopted by large corporate law departments. Using the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model as a roadmap, the team targeted legacy pain-points and leveraged data, alternative legal service providers and ingenuity to add tech solutions. The legal department has improved productivity by about 60 percent. They utilize a connected ecosystem of 12 tech-enabled legal operations systems, monitor 65 KPIs on their dashboards, and have saved the company more than a million dollars to date.

Pearson and Morae Global

Partnering with Morae, Pearson’s legal team created a transformational shared service center to support commercial transactions around the world. The innovative center brings together standardized processes, workflows, and templates; scalable resourcing; a common technology platform plus web-based self-service portals powered by Onit; and dashboard analytics. This legal department initiative contributed to the company achieving a £300 million cost reduction goal. Morae now dedicates 21 people across its Houston, London, and Bangalore offices to the TSC, including attorneys, project managers, technology experts, and an engagement manager. Turnaround times on contracts have improved by 30 percent, and only 1.6 percent are escalated due to non-standard clauses. The annual cost of service delivery was reduced by 35 percent.

PineBridge Investments

The legal team of rapidly growing global asset manager PineBridge Investments obtained data on how its 30-plus member legal team, in offices across six countries, used its time. The team decided to implement a legal ops function that replaced core technology systems in a remarkably short period of time. Exceptionally strong change management practices, from system selection through roll-out, led to 100 percent adoption of the new systems in only four months. The team took a DIY approach to implementation, maintenance, training and user support, reducing costs by 50 percent compared to the previous bespoke platforms. These cost savings self-funded the addition of a document management system.

TC Energy and Shook, Hardy & Bacon

This North American energy company decided that innovation was needed to be nimbler in the delivery of jurisdictional licensing opinions to its engineers. TC Energy engaged (past Champion) Shook, Hardy & Bacon to design a secure, scalable, easy-to-use online tool that is accessible around-the-clock. The tool cuts time spent on licensing by 95 percent, and is on track to save US$100,000 per year in legal advice, while also reducing risk by improving consistency. A three-stage flat fee arrangement with reductions in each stage to reflect efficiencies and provide value and budget predictability.

VMware and QuisLex

A 2015 Value Champion, VMware Legal did not rest on its laurels. To keep up with a rapidly growing $10B+ business, they needed to scale how they operated.  To redefine the way they worked, and to elevate their value, they focused on three core areas: (i) taking their technology and data analytics strategy to the next level; (ii) expanding their outsourcing and insourcing capabilities; and (iii) building a team with diverse skills, competencies, and talents. Working with longtime partner (and past Champion) QuisLex, VMware conducted an in-depth analysis of over 100 transactional work types. These analytics led to increased outsourcing, creation of a new global internal state-of-the-art transactional team, and development of 13 self-service portals that target high-volume workstreams and compliance areas. These portals are accessible 24/7 from any device, processing thousands of requests which have reduced Legal touch on some workstreams to as low as nine percent.

Whirpool

When the legal department at the Whirlpool Corporation was charged with adopting the Continuous Improvement (CI) methodology sweeping through the company, the Disputes team went first. Extensive training and documentation of “Standard Work” supported improving processes to eliminate waste, and everything from physical layout to technology and outside counsel, was fair game. Skepticism was replaced by culture change, as the CI mindset generated a multiplier effect. The projects that came out of that lab would ensure 100 percent budget predictability, reduce costs associated with product liability disputes by 18 percent, raise employee engagement scores by nine percent, and significantly reduce outside counsel expense. 

AbbVie

Shortly after AbbVie’s formation in 2013, its legal operations team decided to address run-away data costs associated with e-discovery. They brought all data collection, processing and hosting in-house, saving US$4 million per year. Significant intangible value followed, as AbbVie’s internal eDiscovery group became internal consultants, assisting with early case assessments and adapting processes to get better results.

Anglo American & Exigent 

After the 2015 collapse of commodity prices in the mining sector, the Anglo American Group legal team in Johannesburg lost 60 percent of its in-house staff. They moved low-value, high-volume work to Exigent, freeing the in-house team to handle complex legal issues. Contract turnaround time dropped 86 percent. Exigent also developed a custom legal spend tool that supported Anglo in converging to a panel of law firms and better managing pricing. This resulted in a 35 percent decrease in outside counsel spend over three years.

Deutsche Bank & Quislex

Deutsche Bank partnered with QuisLex to create a Center of Excellence for e-discovery, standardizing processes and implementing sophisticated, AI-enabled tools to find relevant documents, automate redactions and translate foreign-language documents. The Bank saved millions of Euro, with the cost of 18-month reviews down 49 percent and 90 percent of managed reviews completed on time and on budget.

Hatch & Lexvoco

Hatch’s Australia-Asia legal team used design thinking in collaboration with Lexvoco to build a global, legal information platform, mapped against Hatch's project life cycle. The platform empowers clients to self-serve for routine legal issues. This has led to a drop in the response time for document requests, from an average of a week to a few hours. The legal team also implemented key change management techniques as part of design thinking, including enhanced visual communications and training practices.

MassMutual

Leveraging its data scientists and Lean expertise, MassMutual put some new twists into an old concept - employing a national coordinating counsel. From selecting the pilot portfolio of litigation, to conducting the RFP, structuring the alternative fees and onboarding the law firm, MassMutual applied a data and process improvement driven approach. In its first year, this new model reduced legal spend by 12 percent and matter duration by 40 percent.

McAfee

To overcome backlogs, inconsistent service and miscommunication stemming from using email to provide legal services, McAfee created a digital platform that deploys decision trees to deliver advice to clients and route unique, impactful issues to in-house counsel. Costs dropped 60 percent and the number of completed reviews per year rose 300 percent.

Rabobank & Thompson Coburn

Bucking the in-sourcing trend, RAF partnered with Thompson Coburn to handle its large agricultural loans. Together they redesigned the process using an innovative data model to predict how long review and revision of such loans should take. Three of the firm’s commercial finance attorneys were stationed onsite at RAF, and fine-tuning adjustments were made to other staffing and support, with a value scorecard created to evaluate results — all under a monthly fixed-fee arrangement. Turnaround time has dropped 70 percent, from an average of five days to a day and a half.

Sonae

Reengineering the proceedings processes for 1,250 stores across Portugal required ingenuity for the five-person Sonae Employment and Labor Law team, which supports 40,000 employees. They partnered with IT to develop a software solution that streamlines communications with 970 interlocutors, registers and tracks all labor and social security proceedings, complies with GDPR, and integrates with enterprise resource planning and a knowledge management platform. Further embracing technology to conduct training, those costs fell 90 percent. With the duration of proceedings cut by a crucial 30%, the legal team now handles more cases, and received favorable decisions in 92 percent of proceedings in 2018.

Telstra

In need of greater flexibility and reduced resources, as part of a plan to simplify operations, Telstra’s legal team re-imagined its operating model, moving away from a traditional business-aligned model to organizing lawyers into enterprise wide legal practice areas. To operate more efficiently, they applied Agile practices and also designed an online tool, Engage Legal, to guide users to the practice area team best positioned to handle their requests. Operating costs fell 15 percent and demand management has dramatically improved.

Toyota Motors, N.A. & The Counsel Management Group

After converging to a preferred partnering program and harnessing and curating spend data, the TMNA legal team partnered with CMG to come up with a sophisticated, sustainable way to price legal matters. By establishing unit costs for key items of works – from depositions to significant motions – TMNA is now able to adjust matter budgets based on scope changes as matters evolve. Budgets are now more reliable, and savings average 17 percent per year.

7-eleven and Seyfarth Shaw Llp

With the help of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, 7-Eleven streamlined its law department to better support the company's real estate portfolio of more than 10,000 properties. They applied a value-based sourcing and staffing model, realigning workflow based on type of matter. Through flat fees and lean six sigma process improvement initiatives, 7-Eleven saw outside spend drop, and new store deal fall-through rates plummeted from 25 percent to near one percent.

Aarp

Enables compliant self-service through its "Train & Trust: Content QuickPath," a two-hour training and certification program. AARP reduced legal service requests by 36.7 percent, while achieving significant time savings. Clients waited 1,403 fewer business days for content approvals in 2017.

Andeavor and Counsel Management Group

Andeavor Legal restructured, creating "centers of excellence" — one of which is legal operations. The legal operations team centralized all matter creation, bill review, and reporting and analytics, resulting in a 28 percent reduction in legal spend. Teaming up with Counsel Management Group, Andeavor also launched an RFP initiative fixated on value-based fees and comparative cost models. The RFP initiative identified more cost-effective firms and increased use of fixed fees by 30 percent in one year.

Danaher and Seyfarth Shaw Llp

Built a three-tier service delivery model to optimize efficiency and effectiveness in addressing labor and employment issues. The model includes toolkits on critical areas of the law, best practices, templates and process maps; an internal portal for easy access to the toolkit for Danaher HR clients; and a Global ER4HR Helpline for real-time legal advice on routine labor and employment issues, as well as knowledge management. Through this model, the Danaher labor and employment legal function re-captured over 17 work weeks of attorney time, yielding a cost savings of almost 60 percent.

Dxc Technology and Unitedlex

An industry-first partnership dubbed "Legal 2.0," DXC engaged UnitedLex to take over most of the law function — leveraging technology, process innovation, and managed services to reduce operating costs by 30 percent. More than 150 DXC lawyers across the globe became UnitedLex employees, retaining institutional knowledge. By implementing UnitedLex's contract management platform, DXC also experienced faster, more competitive contracting — increasing new business wins from 64 percent to 84 percent.

Eaton

Restructured the legal department, adding strategy-focused teams to drive learning, develop best-in-class people, promote efficiency, increase innovation, and enhance client focus. The "Cost-Out" team revamped its outside counsel strategy and built sustainable, value-enhancing processes to manage outside counsel and maximize spend predictability. The company significantly consolidated outside litigation counsel by 80 percent over the past four years and decreased litigation report cycle time by 40 percent. Eaton's legal team also reduced legal costs by 11 percent year-over-year.

Monsanto and Husch Blackwell

Designed and launched an innovative national coordinating counsel model for toxic tort litigation. The multifaceted approach includes use of a proprietary algorithm that uses data to accurately assess the risk profile and probable outcomes to channel resources towards more complex cases. As a result, the number of active cases declined by 53 percent and settlement costs were reduced by 30 percent. Husch Blackwell also built a knowledge management platform that shares expertise and work product across the local outside counsel network. With the help of a fixed fee arrangement, Monsanto enjoys predictable spend, down by 10 percent.

Ocwen Financial, Hunton Andrews, Orrick Herrington & Quislex

Ocwen collaborated with its partners to re-engineer its due diligence delivery model, coming up with a technology-enabled process that defines roles for each of Ocwen's in-house and external legal teams to fit the unique value they bring to a specific project. Documents were prioritized and fed into a custom platform that utilized artificial intelligence to streamline the review with automated responses and guided help text. Using the re-engineered due diligence delivery model, the team efficiently generated accurate data, delivered significant savings over traditional methods, and provided a database that Ocwen's business and legal teams still reference today for other needs.

Pure Storage

Automated contract management and implemented new, integrated intellectual property management tools for a cost savings of over $1 million from increased responsiveness, leaner head count, and an end-to-end order fulfillment process. At the same time, Pure engineers enjoy a highly interpersonal, efficient patenting process. IP productivity increased 160 percent year-over-year with annual savings of $60,000.

Software Ag

Saved nearly 3 million Euros after its lawyers developed the "External Legal Manager" application to make sourcing and management of external legal services smarter, faster, and more transparent. Software AG also grew use of alternative fee arrangements nearly 50 percent, dramatically improving budget predictability. The legal team now has built 12 active legal applications, and other Software AG departments, such as human resources, use applications developed by the legal team.

Tahal Group B.v.

Through efficiency, advanced technology, team empowerment, standardization, and internal training measures, Tahal Group was able to bring the majority of work in-house while adding only one person to its internal staff—cutting legal spend by 67 percent and achieving total budget predictability, while improving response time and client satisfaction. The company also implemented cloud technology to handle all corporate and managerial issues of its 30 subsidiaries around the world.

Walmart

Demonstrating that watched behavior improves, Walmart Legal transformed itself from an in-house law firm to a legal business unit by creating the "General Counsel Insights Platform," an ecosystem of dynamic and connected dashboards on actionable key performance indicators. Through close monitoring, Walmart saw improvements in firm/vendor spend, work allocation, and matter oversight, as well as gender and diversity. By partnering with IT to build the solution, the legal team yielded an estimated $1 million cost-savings, compared to using an outside vendor.

ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND AND ONIT

An agricultural processing company doing business in 160 countries with 35,000 employees, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) has a far-flung legal department of 80 lawyers in 16 countries. When Cam Findlay (an ACC Value Champion in 2012 when he was GC of Medtronic) joined ADM as General Counsel in 2013, he was frustrated that the company couldn't easily locate basic information about the number and type of legal matters facing ADM, how many law firms it was using, or how much it was spending on particular matters or in aggregate.

AVIS BUDGET GROUP INC.

When General Counsel Michael Tucker took the helm of the legal department at Avis Budget Group in 2010, he found "chaos": a company using almost 700 law firms globally, often hired by local managers at the mobility company that includes such brands as Avis, Budget, Payless and ZipCar. "It was almost impossible to get my arms around the legal budget," says Tucker, who heads up a department of about 30 attorneys.

BANKRATE

When you start a new in-house legal department, you can construct it the way you want, taking advantage of best practices and current thinking, informed by history and data. That's the approach James Gilmartin took when he became General Counsel and the first member of the in-house legal department at Bankrate in 2012. Founded in 1976, the company had passed through several phases of public and private ownership, but had always relied on external legal resources.

BASF

A key way to get greater value for legal spend is harnessing and analyzing data to understand where the dollars have gone in the past, and to make evidence-based decisions on where they should go in the future. BASF Corporation leveraged data analytics as part of a multi-pronged cost containment and efficiency initiative that also included revamped relationships with outside counsel, governed by new engagement guidelines; focused budgeting and decision-making; and increased insourcing.

CABELA'S AND LITTLER MENDELSON

Fortunately, Brad Lundeen is a tinkerer. Lundeen, who joined Cabela's Inc. as senior corporate attorney for labor and employment law in 2010, had become very familiar with electronic case management and e-billing at his previous posts. He understood the power of innovation and how it is changing the practice of law. Unfortunately, he found none of that legal technology at Cabela's and an uphill battle to secure it.

EXPRESS SCRIPTS AND HUSCH BLACKWELL

In the description of their project named "Rethinking Square Zero," Express Scripts and co-Champ Husch Blackwell suggested that, while most projects begin at "square one," good legal project management begins well before that, before a new lawsuit comes in the door. Keeping that premise in mind, the company and the law firm began working together in 2012 to completely revamp Express Scripts' approach to managing litigation, when the company's litigation portfolio grew after a corporate merger in April 2012.

NETAPP AND ELEVATE SERVICES

Data management and storage company NetApp garnered a Value Champion award in 2013 for its data-driven, technology roadmap project. Not satisfied to rest on their laurels, General Counsel Matt Fawcett, Senior Director of Legal Operations Connie Brenton, VP of the Innovation Services Group (IP Group) Beth O'Callahan, recognized that innovation in silos wasn't enough. "We had to find a way to integrate individual innovations into a cohesive program that would create greater spend and value alignment," says Brenton.

RICOH AMERICAS AND REED SMITH

As in so many other organizations destined to become ACC Value Champions, a major acquisition and a corporate transformation initiative aligned to drive significant change in the legal department at Ricoh USA. Long known as a copier sales company, Ricoh USA is transforming into a services company, acquiring one of its largest dealers and associated field force to bring momentum to the change.

ROYAL DUTCH SHELL

In their quest for value, many in-house legal departments have added new roles to their rosters: legal operations manager, controller/budget specialist, efficiency expert and so forth. Such is the case for Shell, which brought on Vincent Cordo as global sourcing officer for the legal department. An MBA with a background in economics, Cordo deploys niche expertise in pricing, compensation and profitability to provide pricing support for the legal department. His background and skills are very important to the department, says Gordon McCue, Associate General Counsel, Litigation – Strategy & Coordination, because Shell's AFA program was initially a "real challenge. 

TELSTRA AND HERBERT SMITH FREEHILLS

Although Mick Sheehy was working on innovation projects within Australian telecom company Telstra as early as 2013, the main result of those efforts had been local business unit and transaction focused improvements. "It was difficult to get outcomes on a whole of Telstra Legal Services scale," says Sheehy, General Counsel, Finance Technology Innovation and Strategy for the company. He wanted to "supercharge" legal project management. Attending a Harvard University design thinking program, Sheehy found a new source of energy.

VERIZON

The goal of Verizon Legal's Purposeful Contracting initiative was simple: to take the best of current thinking in technology and process improvement—simplicity, clarity, and efficiency—and apply it to contracting. This is not an easy challenge for a large global multinational company that contracts with large, multinational companies and governments for services that are complex, critical, and specialized. But it was its challenging nature that made this project attractive to Verizon lawyers Woodrow ("Woody") Jones and John Veilleux.

WOOLWORTHS GROUP

When Richard Dammery was named Chief Legal Officer and Company Secretary at Woolworths Group in New South Wales, Australia, three years ago, the opportunity to effect positive change in this well-regarded company, one of the top 10 in Australia, was appealing. "I received a strong invitation from the CEO to look at Woolworths' legal services model and move into closer alignment with the business," Dammery says. "It was presented as a great opportunity, but it was also made clear that we needed to fund our own initiatives through cost reductions."

AEGEAN MOTORWAY S.A.

Solved a business-wide problem at this highway operating company: government protest-inspired toll violations by up to 40 percent of drivers, causing a €7 million ($8.05 million) annual loss. Lawyers built a nimble team by adding and training non-legal staff to assist with department work and creating templates and a database to track and notify toll violators. Efforts saved more than €2.5 ($2.9) million in outside legal costs, while legal-led publicity and stringent follow-up dropped violation rates to 0.7 percent and recouped funds, as revenue lost due to toll infractions dropped 42 percent.

AON

Deployed a Law Department Strategic Improvement Project with four elements. First, the company’s in-house and firm lawyers attended joint LEAN/Six Sigma training to map processes and identify areas of improvement. The team also partnered with the procurement department to standardize the RFP process, transferring 40 percent of all U.S. legal matters to flat fee arrangements. Contracts work remained in-house but moved to India and Poland, reducing costs by 50 percent and turnaround time by 66 percent, and Aon created a global rotation program to boost employee engagement.

AXALTA COATING SYSTEMS AND HUNTON & WILLIAMS

Seized an opportunity to start anew after Axalta became independent from DuPont. The law department, with help from Hunton & Williams, built templates and playbooks to overhaul procurement, a crucial part of the business. Lawyers provided training on using the playbooks; as a result, the procurement department now processes 62 percent of contracts without engaging the legal department, approaching an 80 percent goal. Due to these initiatives and AFA-based spending with Hunton & Williams, annual spend for commercial contract review by outside counsel has dropped 80 percent.

BT GROUP PLC EMPLOYMENT LAW

Replaced a reactive labor dispute and litigation mindset with a focus on proactive prevention. The team redesigned many legal processes with the help of IT solutions and offered training to HR and business colleagues, who are now frequent users of self-service systems. Thus, the law department freed its time for strategic projects, directly handling 267 transactions in 2014, including an $18 billion acquisition of EE (the largest corporate acquisition in UK history. With more high-value work performed in-house, outside legal spend dropped 73 percent between 2013 and 2015.

GE DISCOVERY CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Built the GE Discovery Center of Excellence (COE), a shared services center to support fast, efficient and effective discovery practices. The COE established a panel of discovery service providers and transferred more than 95,000 hours of document review from law firms to the panel. Average annual savings are 25 percent. The COE constantly adjusts its value levers and has seen 400 percent client growth as additional business units utilize its capabilities – strong adoption of a shared service in a decentralized corporate structure.

HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

Handled the largest corporate separation in history when Hewlett Packard (HP) split into HP and HPE in 2015 – and came in on time, millions of dollars under budget and without significant interruption to day-to-day business activities. The team utilized a suite of technology already employed in the Office of the General Counsel (OGC), leveraging it for new uses, like “cloning” contracts. Even prior to the separation project, the OGC relied on outside counsel and resources only for exceptions, laying a strong foundation for its ability to lead the separation.

HHGREGG AND OGLETREE DEAKINS

Revolutionized the process for labor and employment claims by consolidating outside counsel and selecting Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak, & Stewart, P.C., as its partner firm. Aligned through a value-based fee arrangement, they crafted a preventative approach by analyzing past litigation and company policies to identify a need for further training or policy changes. New technology platforms allowed employee relations staff to manage many requests without legal assistance. Questions can be directed to Ogletree, Deakins, and response times have dropped from 8-9 days (under old firms) to minutes. Litigation has dropped by 74 percent, claims by 60 percent, and hhgregg saved 44 percent on outside legal spend.

HUSKY INJECTION MOLDING SYSTEMS

Concentrated value efforts on controlling intellectual property costs by identifying and quantifying its most important technology and products. By creating a comprehensive set of tools in-house, collectively known as Husky’s Holistic Legal Strategy, including an opinion tool to determine when to seek outside counsel, Husky ensured budget predictability (within 1.5 percent) and cut patent procurement costs by 15 percent annually.

MICROSOFT PROCUREMENT & CONTRACTING

Focused on continuous improvement in its Procurement & Contracting legal team allowing in-house attorneys to focus on the most strategic contracts while partnering with two law firms interested in new delivery models for high-volume, high-complexity transactional work. The agreement includes intensive use of client-focused success metrics, and the fixed fee arrangement has improved budget predictability while generating savings of 18 percent. Clear, consistent processes established through new workflows have improved service to internal clients, and the team meets weekly to review data and brainstorm paths to further progress.

PALACE ENTERTAINMENT

Brought personal injury and workers' compensation litigation under control with a focus on prevention. The legal department became a ring-leader in driving safety: hiring a corporate safety expert, reviewing all work processes, redesigning warnings and partnering with an insurance company that exclusively covers amusement parks. The robust culture of safety has reduced claims by 80 percent and litigation by 75 percent, while workers' compensation incidents are down 55 percent. Case settlements, previously at 40 percent, are down to 10 percent, and outside legal fees are down more than 85 percent through smart hiring of personal injury defense counsel.

RED ROBIN AND BRYAN CAVE

Took a holistic approach to the company’s contracting processes, including building playbooks and a comprehensive contract management system (CMS) with law firm Bryan Cave, now the company’s single provider under a value-based, flat-fee structure. One aspect of the CMS, a “green sheet” offering a contract and approvals summary, has brought needed clarity to the system, making it popular across the business units. The rollout has improved timeliness (90 percent of contracts are completed on time) and lowered risk (100 percent of high-impact contracts are approved via the CMS).

STAPLES AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

Created Project Reinvention to support business drive to diversify. The legal team led a cultural shift away from risk aversion and towards risk tolerance and risk management and fostered an environment of teamwork and accessibility. By educating the sales team on legal matters and simplifying contracting processes, the legal team cut its workload on low-risk transactional services by 40 percent, yielding more time for high-value projects. With less high-value work being outsourced, Staples cut outside legal spend by over 50 percent. Recognizing that changing consumer behavior and decreased demand for its traditional products meant that Staples had to adapt or die, the company has spent the last several years reinventing itself and its offerings.

3M

3M leverages its in-house Litigation Technology Services team to provide such effective technology-driven solutions as e-discovery, internal document review, and predictive coding to lower costs and improve quality.

AIG

Creating a new global legal operations center for both enterprise legal needs and those on behalf of its insureds permitted AIG to leverage vast quantities of data and enormous buying power to transform its relationships with law firms, vendors, and internal clients.

BENDIGO AND ADELAIDE BANK LIMITED

A leading advocate for value-based pricing in Australia, Bendigo Bank channels demand to the lowest-cost legal solutions and developed the infrastructure for better legal service delivery. Innovative pricing approaches coupled with disaggregation and insourcing have resulted in significant cost savings.

BMO FINANCIAL GROUP

An internal innovation challenge engages employees in BMO's Legal, Corporate, and Compliance Group in a spirited but serious competition to develop and implement process improvement projects. Gains in momentum in BMO's adoption of value-based fees are an additional benefit.

FEDEX GROUND PACKAGE SYSTEM, INC.

By applying exemplary change management tactics and quality driven management principles, FedEx Ground analyzed and improved existing litigation processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

FIREMAN'S FUND INSURANCE & NOVUS LAW

Through internal improvements such as reorganizing and adopting new technology, smart fee structures, and a robust partnership with Novus Law, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company dramatically reduced total legal spend, achieving a three-year cost savings goal.

JUNIPER NETWORKS

In this patent budget transformation project, the legal team at Juniper Networks worked to protect the company's innovations while optimizing and proactively administering patent spend to achieve target budgets and maximize value.

SSM HEALTH

SSM Health established its first in-house legal department emphasizing value from the start. A centralized team of in-house attorneys leverages standard operating procedures and robust metrics to achieve a 90 percent customer satisfaction rate.

THE HEICO COMPANIES AND SHOOK, HARDY & BACON

Heico applied a Lean Six Sigma formula to evaluate outside counsel spending, efficiency, and value-added legal services. After initial evaluations, Heico identified Shook, Hardy Bacon as its Most Valuable Partner and now works with the firm to achieve even better results.

VMWARE

Undertaking a three-year transformational strategy to meet the challenges of dramatic business growth without increasing headcount or expense, VMware enhanced legal operations to improve operational efficiency across all geographies while also elevating internal and external client satisfaction.

XCEL ENERGY

By creating empowered working committees that effectively represented the legal department, Xcel Energy identified and implemented recommendations in areas from budgeting to fee arrangements, reducing outside counsel costs while improving client satisfaction.

YAZAKI NORTH AMERICA, INC.

In its quest to become best-in-class, the Yazaki North America legal department demonstrated its value, doubled its size, expanded to Mexico, established bilingual capabilities, and transformed its relationships with internal customers and external providers.

ACE GROUP

ACE Group developed a cool intranet tool used for knowledge management (KM), agile staffing for projects and a balanced scorecard for internal performance. Their approach is innovative, and hits across multiple business lines.

CATERPILLAR, BAKERHOSTETLER, PANGEA3 & HEYL ROYSTER

Caterpillar allocates legal work across a variety of internal and external resources based on complexity, using the lowest level of expertise and cost required for each task. Tools include play books, escalation processes, quality reviews & metrics tracking. Strategic work is better handled, costs are lowered and clients get faster service.

CSA GROUP

CSA's general counsel took an ACC Value Challenge tool and put it to use to get alignment with the enterprise strategic plan and on resourcing legal work—within her small department, with all business units, and with the C-suite—and saved money by reducing burden on her attorneys.

EBAY, INC.

eBay reengineered its contracting from cradle to grave, using risk-calibration and smart staffing—a pooled approach in a Center of Excellence.

EMBRAER S.A.

This Brazilian airplane manufacturer applied KPIs, process improvement ("Lean"), contract standards and more to gain efficiency and control. The eventual 10 percent reduction in legal expense and 30 percent reduction in contract cycle time is impressive, as is the cost avoidance through root cause analysis and steps taken to reduce disputes.

HUNTINGTON INGALLS INDUSTRIES, INC.

Huntington Ingalls built a compliance system from the ground up, focusing on leveraging internal resources more effectively. The key: getting the business to own compliance.

HYUNDAI MOTOR MANUFACTURING ALABAMA, LLC

Hyundai's GC started up a legal department and automated a ton of legal processes to meet demand for legal services with a tiny legal staff, delivered training to its clients to address root causes and reduce demand for legal work, and reviewed outside counsel quarterly to manage performance.

JPMORGAN CHASE & COMPANY

Powerful results from a proactive assessment of cases demonstrate the value inside counsel can bring, especially when teaming up internally to apply business solutions. This legal department also borrowed from social media, deploying an intranet-based knowledge management and collaboration platform that connects its far-flung team.

MICROSOFT CORPORATION & PERKINS COIE

Although it is sometimes argued that M&A transactions are immune from value-based techniques, Microsoft & Perkins Coie prove this wrong.  Value concepts work everywhere and on any matter type, and this collaboration delivered big improvement in predictability of spend.

MSA SAFETY INCORPORATED & REED SMITH

This small law department was able to implement a lot of value tools, resulting in improved costs, predictability and outcomes. They focused on use of technology, process improvement and improved reporting, and deployed a national coordinating counsel model.

ZS ASSOCIATES

The effective use of LPOs and playbooks allowed more expensive on-shore resources to focus on high-value matters. This small legal department uses every value tactic available.

ACEA S.P.A.

ACEA reminds us that in-house counsel must focus on communication and responsiveness internally, as we request our external counsel to do with us; and shows that the enhanced partnership that value billing fosters extends to business clients. Further, this Italian company indicates the pervasiveness of value billing.

BANK OF AMERICA

This example shows a commitment to the journey toward a more effective legal department and relationship with external counsel. B of A's "Litigation Roundtable" also demonstrates the extent to which having external firms understand the need to partner for common clients is valuable and creates efficiencies for the firms and their client.

BRITISH TELECOMMUNICATIONS PLC

Using this alternative methodology for legal work in-take and allocation assists in-house counsel to become more strategic without impacting the risk-based advice received by the company, and demonstrates an innovative legal process outsourcing model. The "Legal Value Index" is an interesting success measurement tool as well.

CHINA STATE CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING CORPORATION

This small, middle-east based legal department provides further evidence that clients globally are pursuing value-based solutions. China State also borrowed from social media tactics, leveraging new technology to assist in the departmental communications.

HIROC & BORDEN LADNER GERVAIS LLP

Value arrangements deliver predictability to the client, which is important for all corporations and their budgeting. Also this long-term partnership, relying on disciplined use of project management to ensure profitability of the fixed fee arrangement, provided a number of benefits to the law firm, including performance bonuses.

HOT FUEL GROUP & SHOOK HARDY BACON

Having a law firm look for synergies amongst a client group, rather than differences, to the advantage of the entire group and managing the group interests is a great advance which also opened up more opportunities for the client group.

MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL & AXIOM

Using innovative thinking and careful planning at the beginning of a transaction can open up new and improved ways of managing a situation. This huge spin-off affected multitudes of contracts, trademarks and patents, and was managed on a fixed-fee-per-agreement basis, delivering cost savings, predictable spending, and a nifty new contract management system.

MARSH & MCLENNAN COMPANIES

MMC attacked value challenges on a broad range of fronts, including convergence to a law firm panel coupled with convergence to value-based fees. Simultaneous initiatives undertaken included automating processes and re-deploying savings to meet growth in demand, becoming a more client-focused legal department.

NETAPP, INC.

So often the lack of analytics is said to prevent innovation, it's great to see an in-house group use technology to enable bringing real analytics forward, and applying it to performance management, such as through its quarterly business reviews with outside counsel. Net App's technology roadmap helped them make advances in all areas of their work.

NIKE, INC. & SEYFARTH SHAW LLP

Nike needed a solution for high-volume, routine transactional work and teamed up with Seyfarth Shaw to deploy a technology-assisted process model that allocated services across a shared services platform for cost-effectiveness, while centralizing management to ensure consistent quality.

OFFICE DEPOT, INC.

Noteworthy commitment to using value fee arrangements, portfolio by portfolio, to obtain more strategic relationships with external counsel and manage spend - reaching a tipping point of more than 50% of spend on non-hourly fees and savings of 30%. Office Depot even assembled joint patent troll defense groups, using value fees to control costs.

UNITED TECHNOLOGIES

UTC demonstrates laser-like focus on one metric: adoption of value-based fees. Law Firms, practice groups and attorneys, both inside and outside, are measured on progress against that one metric, and assisted through training and a toolkit. With more than 70% of spend on value-based fees, the goal of 100% is in sight.

GLAXOSMITHKLINE

The clear objective to move all of GSK's legal work to value-based fee arrangements and the use of technology and a scorecard to select outside counsel are novel and have led to substantial cost savings.

THE HOME DEPOT

An example of focusing on one specific area of practice at a time and delivering truly significant results: 45 to 55 percent reduction in some areas, and with near certainty in many. And this isn't short-term: the company has been doing this for years and no doubt is getting better and better at it, along with outside counsel.

LUCCHINI S.P.A.

This Italian company took a first step of establishing terms and conditions for its legal services providers and ensured that they were followed, resulting in substantial cost savings. Then they added the rigor of evaluating the type of work and the steps/procedures to help them better price the legal services they consume.

MEDTRONIC

An important focus on no longer being reactive; thinking through the legal issues, how they are managed and how the processes can be improved. Through its multifaceted approach, Medtronic achieved significant savings even as outcomes improved.

PFIZER INC.

Pfizer's Legal Alliance is well known. This is an example of devotion to continuous improvement. Innovations since the launch of the Pfizer Legal Alliance include appointment of relationship managers on both sides, a virtual communications hub and the Associate Roundtable to improve collaboration, and a joint training program for new law school grads.

RBC CAPITAL MARKETS & MORGAN LEWIS

An interesting mix of approaches for employment litigation, no doubt with the understanding that one size doesn't fit all, but with consistency on how to approach each matter. Also, an emphasis on managing and monitoring.

ROCKWELL COLLINS & SEYFARTH SHAW LLP

Applying "lean" practices, Rockwell Collins teamed up with Seyfarth Shaw and deployed sub-teams to reengineer how it selects, engages, manages and evaluates outside counsel. Tools include template engagement letters for value-based fees, a short-form RFP, checklists and a decision tree. 

SHERWIN-WILLIAMS & GALLAGHER SHARP

An excellent example of how the use of a single firm to coordinate designated types of matters nationwide can result in significant savings, improved predictability and improved outcomes. Deep collaboration included outside counsel participation in technical training to better understand the product, a boon to defense effectiveness.

TARGET & NILAN JOHNSON LEWIS P.A.

Target's Employee and Labor Relations Department and Nilan Johnson applied different value fee approaches to each of four types of work. Performance scorecards emphasize not just cost savings, although they logged truly significant savings without degrading the quality of the legal work.

TYCO INTERNATIONAL & SHOOK HARDY & BACON

Tyco's partnership with Shook Hardy shows that value-based arrangements aren't a short-term fad. They have been on a flat fee arrangement since 2004, demonstrating that a firm that puts its mind to it, and a focused in-house department, can make major improvements in how legal work is handled. Note that the annual cost is routinely coming down while outcomes are continuing to improve.

UNITED RETIREMENT & PORTER WRIGHT

This partnership enabled United Retirement to establish a predictable legal budget for securities and leasing matters, while preparing for the unpredictable nature of legal work through risk probability and risk sharing strategies.

WHIRLPOOL & WHEELER TRIGG

Whirlpool shows that value-based fees are uniquely suited to target specific results, in this case earlier resolution of product liability cases. And the seven member firms of Whirlpool's National Product Council now constitute a brain trust for Whirlpool's in-house lawyers - a "virtual law firm" producing significant savings.