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The Association of Corporate Counsel has named nine legal departments and seven of their external partners as its 2020 Value Champions with departments showing that technology is not always the solution for change and how innovation can expand throughout an organization.

This year's champions are 7-Eleven Inc. and Perkins Coie; Applied Materials Inc. and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Exelon Corp., HBR Consulting LLC and PERSUIT; Fir Tree Partners; Pearson and Morae Global Corp.; PineBridge Investments; TC Energy Corp. and Shook, Hardy & Bacon; VMware Inc. and QuisLex Inc.; and Whirlpool Corp.

"What is really striking to me is that this group of champions demonstrate how innovation propagates in an organization," Catherine Moynihan, executive director of ACC Legal Operations in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Monday.

She explained in many instances an idea started in one part of the legal department and has expanded to other parts of the department. Benton Harbor, Michigan-based Whirlpool, for example, began to focus on continuous improvement methodologies for its legal department's dispute resolution team.

"The transformation began slowly but picked up steam as team members realized they were empowered to correct problems they had previously just lived with. If you have an idea about ways to improve things, it has a multiplier effect. You are making things better and easier for a large group of people," Whirlpool deputy general counsel Aaron Spira said in the ACC's profile of their initiative.

Using those continuous improvement tools, the disputes team was able to reduce the number of external law firms it uses for products liability matters and expand a fixed-fee methodology that ensures 100% budget predictability. Those techniques adopted by the dispute resolution team will now be used by other parts of the legal department.

"Then you have organizations like VMware, which had a championship for making big changes in the legal department [in 2015] and titled this nomination 'Transformation 2.0,'" Moynihan explained.

VMware teamed up with QuisLex to conduct a three-month work-stream analysis to understand the complexity, strategic importance and skill level for over 100 work types.

"This is our third ACC Value Champion award in a row, and we are proud to have been able to partner with VMware's innovative legal team and help them achieve significant, scalable efficiencies," Ram Vasudevan, CEO of New York-based QuisLex, said in a statement to Corporate Counsel.

Another theme among this year's winners was that technology was not a central part of the solutions, Moynihan said.

"We saw that this year's champions understood that technology wasn't necessarily the solution but rather a potential part of the solution," Moynihan explained.

For example, Santa Clara, California-based Applied Materials worked with Orrick on large-scale contract review. Initially, they sought to use artificial intelligence for the project but found it did not suit their needs. However, to aid the human review of the contracts, the team identified 20 data points from the contracts to extract and designed a provision matrix that summarizes those data points.

"Applied Materials has invested in legal operations and is committed to data-driven decision-making," Valerie Barker, senior contracts and project manager of global legal services at Applied Materials, said in an email to Corporate Counsel. "The philosophy in the department is to be more than just legal support. We want to help internal clients come up with creative business solutions."

Over 50 legal departments submitted to be ACC Value Champions for 2020. The submissions were judged by champions from 2019. Those who submit are judged on how their legal department cut costs, improving the predictability of spend, and improving legal and processing outcomes. The judges also look to see if those projects could be replicated by other legal departments.