Top-10 innovative In-House departments think about this stuff a lot.
Analytics. Process automation. Cloud computing. Proactive management of contract contents. Seamless integration of document collaboration tools. Segmenting work and apportioning it optimally among inside and outside resources. Maximizing speed and minimizing cost. What are we talking about? Is this some list of benefits realized by one of Brightleaf’s in-house legal department customers? Certainly could be. But instead, today, we’re talking about this: Inside Counsel just dropped their 2013 IC-10: Inside the legal profession’s top innovators.
The winners:
1. DuPont (for E-Discovery Excellence) – Implemented an internal discovery center, making the company’s discovery processes more proactive and saving $10.8M in outside spend–and countless more in avoided litigation costs–so far this year. As the famed DuPont Legal Model enters its 3rd decade, the company recommits to legal department management innovation.
2. NetApp, Inc. (for Evolving Legal Ecosystem) – leverages Elevate for on-call legal support and contract management services and our wicked smaaht Beantown homeboys at SkyAnalytics for deep insights into legal spend. As Connie Brenton, NetApp’s director of legal operations and chief of staff notes, “Capturing and measuring behavior changes behavior…You can’t attain sustained improvement without measuring.”
3. Cisco Systems, Inc. (for Optimizing for Excellence) – A familiar face on the honor rolls of legal department management and innovation, Cisco’s secret for legal department efficiency distills neatly down to this one lesson: don’t have your highly-skilled attorneys doing repetitive, low-complexity tasks. Toward that end, Cisco created its Legal Global Center for Excellence. The GCOE combines process experts with process automation technology to segment, apportion and track work. Attorneys handle attorney-level tasks; GCOE staff handle the rest; the system keeps project moving.
4. Adknowledge (for Growing Strong) – The article says the in-house legal department at this 9-year-old email marketing company makes the list for proactivity. We’d call it “proactively proactive proactivity.” CLO John Herbst overhauled the company’s entire contracting process, providing language standards and clearly communicated guidelines. Instead of dropping a fortune on an enterprise-class contract lifecycle management platform, Herbst engaged Advologix to extend Adknowledge’s existing system. And the entire company pushed the legal department to be leaders, to take ownership.
5. Energy Transfer Partners (for Curbing Contract Claims ) – Inside Counsel claims that ETP reduced litigation expenses 580% from 2011 to 2012. We’re not sure that’s mathematically possible: how do you get from , say, $10M in expenses to negative $48M in expenses? Maybe they’re just really great at always getting counterparties to pay fees and costs and penalties. Whatever. Math aside, these folks sound impressive. They built their own homegrown Contract Management System aimed at simplicity and transparency and usability. And they did something that sounds obvious, but seems rare: they instituted project close-out meetings to reduce the disconnects that might later become litigated matters.
6. Motorola Mobility (for Über-efficient Document Generation and Workflow) – As you might expect from a company owned by Google–a company that builds Android phones–Motorola Mobility turned to technology to make its global commercial contract processes faster and more policy-compliant. By collaborating with frontline business teams, MM’s legal department created Agreement eXpress (MAX), an online document assembly tool that allows the business teams to automatically generate contracts. With MAX, Motorola business people can create their own compliant contracts, auto-route those contracts for internal approvals, and execute them electronically. MAX also gathers deal progression info as contracts move through its stages, allowing the company the opportunity to refine their processes in the future.
7. 3M (for online lawyer training and resource sharing) - In 2012, 3M’s legal department created mandatory training for its legal staff. ”So what?,” you say. “Doesn’t everyone do that?”
Here’s what’s different: 3M engaged subject matter experts in various disciplines (say, FCPA monitoring). Then they captured the teachings by those experts and published them as portable, shareable web-based training tools. And 3M augmented its sessions with guides and forms and checklists and other presentation materials. Not only have they improved training and lowered training (read: travel) costs, they’ve also formed a closer global legal culture.
8. TIAA-CREF (for inclusion) - TIAA-CREF general counsel Jonathan Feigelson saw an opportunity to increase his department’s commitment to the values of diversity and inclusivity. And he took that opportunity. The company set up an inclusion committee, collected data on its past diversity efforts, and pushed its outside firms to provide demographic data on their composition. They also committed to more speaking opportunities and internships aimed at providing the starting point for future diversity efforts.
9. The Hartford (for social media management) – To better support requests for social media guidance they were receiving from business units, The Hartford’s legal team created a Social Media Review Team to act as a clearinghouse . SMRT’s goals are two-fold: to examine each business unit’s social media initiatives for potential risks, and (2) to work with those business units to find less-risky alternatives.
10. University Hospitals Health System Inc. -Hospitals receive a lot of complaints. So why did UHHS develop a system that made it easier for patients and workers to submit even more complaints? Because that system allowed for efficient, transparent complaint management, which led to a 50 percent decrease in the number of lawsuits filed annually against the hospital. Where the old system was a cumbersome black-hole to navigate, UHHS’s new system (called PASS) is almost frictionless.