It's a cliché that we journalists love it when bad things happen. Sure, natural disasters, terrorism strikes (I write this a few days after the Paris attacks) and scandal give us something to write about. But we don't go looking for this stuff. Okay, maybe we do relish a juicy scandal. But it depends.

In this magazine, we do write about the bad stuff, but it's mainly in the context of helping you, as in-house counsel, avoid it. There are cybersecurity threats, economic threats (nothing like a class action filing to ruin your day), and just the friction between employees and their companies.

But this month, we're taking time off from most of that to celebrate some good things. To coincide with the holiday season, we're recognizing legal department innovation, in fact. If it's December, we take the time to step back and look at what 10 innovative departments are doing to make their work lives better, faster, cheaper, and more clever.