Standout
Honeywell: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 9; Total: 25
Management of sanctions compliance for transactions has been improved at Honeywell, the engineering and technology conglomerate, thanks to a new tool. It automates processes to update documents, approve requests, and identify and report on any frozen assets, and also helps ensure that compliance continues if sanctions change. The tool has cut the compliance team’s response times to new sanctions-related requests from the business. The team has also trained a machine-learning technology to predict tariff codes for imports and exports, which has more than doubled the team’s capacity to classify 10,000-plus parts exported each month.
Highly commended
Flex
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
Electronics and diversified manufacturing company Flex built an in-house tool to expedite the process for sealing agreements with customers. The contract lifecycle management software tracks metrics on more than 3,000 contracts, and live dashboards are available to the senior managers, business units and legal team to manage risks and spot trends. For example, the tool provided hard evidence that lower-risk contracts are correlated with higher margins. Separately, an ethics and compliance scorecard provides detailed comparisons and data on compliance-related activities on more than 10 Flex sites.
Intel
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The legal operations team at Intel is making sure the computer chipmaker’s legal team is both fully equipped, and ready, to use artificial intelligence as it develops. Legal operations staff spent two years cleaning and ordering the legal department’s data, which allowed them to start testing more than 40 practical applications for generative AI. The in-house team is also working with law firms to test use of AI assistants in litigation e-discovery processes.
Marsh McLennan
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
As part of a strategic push to modernise the legal and compliance team of more than 650 people, professional services group Marsh McLennan has created extra legal roles and introduced new technology. The new jobs include a chief legal innovation counsel and legal innovation and tech (LIT) team members. The new tech has helped to halve the time the team spends manually reviewing contracts and has automated financial crime alerting, as well as the way requests from the business relating to sanctions are handled. The LIT lab is now working with other teams in Marsh McLennan to develop tools to speed up data privacy, procurement and M&A processes.
Commended
Accenture
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
Working with AI tech company BlackBoiler, the legal team at professional services group Accenture has overhauled how it reviews contracts. Low-risk contracts are now reviewed, edited and sent to the relevant person for signature within five minutes. For more complex documents, the tool ensures a human reviewer focuses on the most important clauses, which cuts manual review time by up to 90 per cent. The approach has cut the number of contracts that need legal review by nearly two-thirds, improved turnaround time and made it easier for clients to do business with Accenture.
General Motors
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
Supply chain disruptions caused a flood of new requests to General Motors’ global purchasing and supply chain legal team. It worked with other departments — legal operations, operational excellence, and IT — and drew on management methodologies, such as Agile and Six Sigma, to create a new process and a tool to manage requests.
Equitable
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
Each year, financial services provider Equitable manages 100 or so legal “holds” — instructions to preserve often large volumes of data ahead of an expected litigation. The legal team led a project to automate the previously manual process and to stop storing data in multiple locations. As a result, it has saved more than 1,500 manual hours and cut both data costs and the risk of missing data.
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