Shutterstock.com Corporate Counsel recently named its 2018 Best Legal Departments. These honorees stood out most from the crowd, but there were other entrants into this year's competition that also deeply impressed us, enough for us to want to give them a shoutout. Here are our 2018 Best Legal runners-up, three accomplished legal departments and one outstanding general counsel. Learn more about them here ... AbbVie

• Aiding in product launch strategy, patient care services, promotional guidance and regulatory support for more than 170 countries where AbbVie does business;
• Assisting with 600-plus procurement and supply agreements globally;
• Increasing licensing and collaboration transactions for 10 new pipeline assets/programs and targeted venture investments in six portfolio companies;
• Providing guidance for more than 50 research and development collaborations, 140 discovery and development-related agreements, and 400 clinical studies or external clinical research projects.

-Sue Reisinger Hulu The year 2017 was one of massive growth for on-demand video company Hulu—and that meant a ton of deals. Luckily, Los Angeles-based Hulu's legal department was up for the challenge. Their handling of numerous complex transactions was a big part of what made Hulu's in-house team a runner-up in Corporate Counsel's Best Legal Department competition for 2018. Last year, Hulu's subscribers grew to 17 million, up 70 percent from 2016, and the company reached $1 billion in ad revenue for the first time. The law department, headed by GC Chadwick Ho, worked behind the scenes to facilitate and manage this growth. Many of the transactions the legal department helped ink were made around the company's live TV service. These were deals with major media companies including CBS Corp., Turner Broadcasting, 21st Century Fox, The Walt Disney Co., NBCUniversal, A&E and Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. The transactions added more than 70 channels to Hulu for users who want to watch the news, sports and other live entertainment. Most of these deals were completed within a nine-month time period, as Hulu prepped to launch its live TV service in May 2017. Separately, Hulu also struck a deal with Home Box Office, Inc. and Cinemax that allows its subscribers to access HBO's platform for a reduced monthly cost. Hulu's legal team also negotiated for partnerships with other entertainment platforms to provide users with combined or discount joint services. In September 2017, Hulu and music streaming platform Spotify began offering a bundled deal to college students, allowing them to purchase both services for a monthly charge of $4.99. It's a deal that Hulu said has boosted its subscriber count. Later that year, in November, Hulu finished a deal with telecommunications company Sprint. The deal gave Sprint Unlimited customers access to an unlimited Hulu plan, which included HD streaming and 10 GB per month of mobile hotspot data. But it's not just deals. While balancing all these transactions, the legal team successfully filed 26 patent applications last year and navigated four patent-related litigation matters. -Caroline Spiezio Dropbox Dropbox Inc.'s 2017 was spent preparing for one of the biggest moments in the cloud-storage company's history—going public. The legal department played a large role in that move, spending the months prior to February 2018, when the company filed for an initial public offering, attracting talent to Dropbox's board. The company landed Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise—so the lawyers' work clearly paid off. The San Francisco-based company's legal department, led by GC Bart Volkmer, managed to juggle the demands of a pending public filing with many other duties, including around patents and litigation. The group's willingness to rise to the occasion and exceed expectations at a crucial moment for Dropbox earned them the runner-up spot in Corporate Counsel's Best Legal Departments competition for 2018. In 2017, Dropbox's IP team increased the company's organic portfolio by 45 percent with the addition of 50 new organic patents. Dropbox also filed 222 new patent applications last year, to build on its portfolio of 600 global patents, most of which revolve around file sync, sharing and collaboration. The company currently has approximately 600 pending patent applications worldwide. Dropbox's legal team also used some of the company's own software to reduce the number of emails exchanged and simplify revisions, ultimately saving the department overhead costs. While preparing for Dropbox's launch, filing patents and adopting new software, the legal department also won a litigation battle against file sharing company Thru Inc. The latter brought a patent infringement case against Dropbox, which argued that the suit was barred on the ground of laches. Dropbox's argument was successful, and the company was awarded $2.3 million for fees and additional costs. -Caroline Spiezio John Finley, Blackstone Group Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Kirkland & Ellis Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, -Sue Reisinger