China State Construction Engineering's (CSCE's) team of five in-house lawyers serve the legal needs of almost 5,000 staff at the real estate and construction giant, working across eight countries. To do this successfully requires ingenuity and resourcefulness. Measures such as a 30-day guillotine period for all disputes to be resolved convinced the judging panel to make this team Legal Department (Small Team) of the Year. 

The team is made up of lawyers from China, Singapore and Egypt, affording the company knowledge of both common law and civil law jurisdictions. The team says its biggest challenge is the fact that the laws within the countries where CSCE operates are "relatively nebulous and nascent". A priority is the tracking of court judgments and arbitration awards to ensure know-how is kept up to date. 

The legal team makes use of technology to ensure it keeps abreast of legal developments and passes on its knowledge to the business units. Legal updates are tweeted, in-house lawyers make themselves instantly available to staff via a real-time messaging system, and cases are closely monitored with regular updates fed through to senior management. 

The team has created a library of 20 regularly used contract documents to save redrafting time. It operates a strict online system for monitoring disputes to ensure they do not drift and it closely monitors country-by-country legal spend, providing management with real-time graphical representations of the legal resources being devoted to each jurisdiction. When work is outsourced, it is done to a closely supervised panel of law firms that are instructed using value-based billing. As a result of these initiatives, CSCE's legal team is able to demonstrate significant savings on its legal spend.

The legal team at CSCE also received The Innovation Award. Also shortlisted in this category were Dell, Dubai Aviation City Corporation and Herbert Smith Freehills.