2021 Virtual ACC Xchange

In the world of virtual conferences, networking can be both easier and harder. This workshop will provide reasons as to why and how networking can be better online. And you will have the opportunity to experience networking effectively in the world of Zoom. Come join some of your favorite people, plus meet new individuals to build professional relationships and expand your network.

Sneak Peek: You know those groups you can't break into at an in-person conference? They don't even exist virtually!

Speakers:
In this half-day intensive seminar, learn from corporate legal operations professionals with experience establishing a dedicated legal operations staff function. Discover how to assess and prioritize legal department needs and create a legal operations roadmap to advance along the Maturity Model for the Operations of a Legal Department. Explore the basics and best practices in the areas of directing work to the right internal and external resources, managing law firms and vendors, and applying process improvement and automation to improve efficiency in legal service delivery. Plan to have your video and mics on for an interactive session.

*Please note:

• This program is appropriate for legal executives (dedicated legal ops professionals and the GCs to whom they report) in large/medium legal departments.
• This program is not eligible for CLE/CPD.
  

Speakers:
These days every legal department, regardless of size, must deliver best-in-class legal services in a timely manner. This often involves doing more with less resources, enhancing efficiency, and using data analytics and technology to drive value-enhancing legal advising. The ACC “Maturity Model for the Operations of a Legal Department,”  is designed to assist legal departments with assessing and benchmarking their legal operations, and offers a foundational toolkit. Join us in this interactive session for a guided tour of the Model and associated resources and benchmarking data. Then warm up for the conference by participating in a discussion with peers about how to advance efficiency and cost-effectiveness in legal services. 

Speakers:
We’re ditching the traditional keynote speech for an informative, inspiring experience that will set the tone for the rest of the APAC event. Hear our panel of General Counsel who will deliver a TED-style presentation on the keys to leading transformation within the law department, followed by a fireside chat. Don’t miss this invigorating opening plenary session.

Speakers:
Legal innovation, NewLaw, legal tech and now, legal design thinking. These buzzwords have entered the legal industry lexicon but what is legal design thinking and when is it best to apply it in your legal department? This session will explore the rise of design thinking in the context of legal innovation, legal operations and legal tech, what it is, and when to apply it as a problem solving framework. You will walk away with  a practical understanding of how to get started applying design thinking in your legal department, a how-to guide to start a design thinking project, and examples of how to use design thinking to more effectively understand complex legal information.

Speakers:
An organisation’s legal claims are valuable assets. If leveraged, these assets can be transformed into a revenue source that boosts the bottom line. However, taking steps to realise this value needs to be balanced against the cost to the business of doing so. In the current economic climate, reserving capital for business continuity has become more critical than ever. Organisations are increasingly looking for financial solutions to enhance growth and sustainability, to innovate new business and legal approaches for the business and to positively bolster the bottom line. This lunch-time interactive session, will examine how dispute finance can help in-house legal teams untap legal assets to realise value while reserving capital for continuity and growth.

Speakers:
If only we didn’t have to deal with people - a phrase often heard when change projects are being planned. The goal of every process change or change in the way business is done is to make it simple and easy. The reality is that the human element or the people responsible for working on the change, are often the very reason it can fail. But why? The list of reasons is often complex, but in reality it comes down to our inability to recognise the different emotions, behaviours and reactions of those who are impacted. So what can you do? Join us for a highly interactive and informative session where, together with a panel of leading regional GC's, we will explore a number of the core principles that will help to harness the human elements of change.

Speakers:
We’re ditching the traditional keynote speech for an informative, inspiring experience that will set the tone for the rest of the event. Hear our panel of chief legal officers who will deliver a TED-style presentation on the keys to leading transformation within the law department, followed by a fireside chat. Don’t miss this invigorating opening plenary session.

Grab a beverage and engage face-to-face with fellow attendees for this casual, small group video chat experience. We encourage you to turn your camera on, engage in conversation, and leave with new connections.

Speakers:

• Do you have difficulty justifying headcount and budgets to management? 
• Is it challenging to contain the number of law firms your department engages and control external spend? 
• Is your department struggling to reduce costly legal incidents like litigation, penalties, fines, or cybersecurity incidents? 
• Do you wish for better metrics to prove performance and earn a place at the business table? 
• Is the legal team over-stretched at times? 

Using the Smarter Law methodology proven in over 250 department transformations, this workshop will help you identify, measure, and improve your route to maximum legal coverage, compliance, and client satisfaction with minimal cost and headcount resources. The instructor and CEO of Smarter Law Solutions, Trevor Faure, demonstrates the methods and results and then opens the floor to participants to share, analyse, and act upon their specific challenges. 

This workshop has three parts:  

• An 18-minute video of overall principles provided for you to watch in advance of the workshop as preparation 
• A live session with only a handful of participants in the virtual room walking through the key aspects of the methodology and discussing how to apply it with a peer cohort, learning from each other’s guidance
• a separate, 1:1 consultation (optional)

“By combining cutting-edge insights from management theory, economics, psychology and linguistics, [Smarter Law] demonstrates how general counsel can collect and apply empirical data to significantly improve their company's legal coverage, while dramatically reducing overall legal costs - all the while raising the satisfaction of business clients and improving relations with outside counsel.” 
- Professor David Wilkins, Harvard Law School. 

*Important Notes: 

• This interactive workshop is full with a waitlist. If you are interested in being notified about upcoming Smarter Law workshops, please contact webcasts@acc.com.
  
• Please arrive on time and prepared to stay for the duration (three hours). This is not a drop-in session.
• Please be prepared to be on camera and interacting with other participants.

Speakers:
Join us for a discussion on how a legal team can maximize reliance on technologies, and hack your business team's resources to help Legal achieve its needs. Certain questions must be asked to start process, like: What method do you use to pick technologies? And what is the approach to selecting, researching, and determining which priorities are most important? Can you deploy existing technologies in a different fashion? Though many individuals seek specific questions on the value of software, each department is different. As a consequence, many software systems available may, or may not, be suitable. This dialogue will walk you through how the decisions you make for your legal team can maximize your outcome.

Speakers:
The ethical use of AI should not be considered only as a legal and moral obligation but as a business imperative. This session will give you practical guidance on understanding and governing the use of AI within your organizations before it becomes a potential problem (or headline).

Speakers:
In this interactive session, speakers will review data and insights from the Wolters Kluwer LegalVIEW database focused on the trends and key factors influencing hourly rates and law firm selection. In addition, two legal business leaders from UBS will stimulate discussion with their story of law department transformation, including their use of the ACC Maturity model as well as their new “smart sourcing” framework. Attendees will then break out into discussion groups focusing on the topics above as well as adjacent topics like panel management, knowing the expertise within your own legal department, and trends in insourcing.

Speakers:
eDiscovery was originally modeled after paper-based Discovery in order to entice lawyers to make the move from paper to digital. eDiscovery was never engineered for efficiency from the ground up. eDiscovery platforms had to be created as representations of physical discovery processes in order to entice a reluctant legal community to begin adopting eDiscovery. Now, over 20 years in, are there differences between our current practices and innovative new practices if we were to distance ourselves completely from paper-based processes?

Take a few minutes to relax your mind and move your body. Once you are refreshed, rejoin us and explore our sponsor partners. Catch up with your existing contacts and meet new representatives while learning how they can help with your legal department needs.

Speakers:
An emerging trend in the procurement of legal services is the development of an "integrated legal delivery model." This increasingly popular model involves law firms establishing partnerships with alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) to create joint solutions for complex contracting, data privacy, litigation, and multiple compliance mandates which are then offered to in-house legal departments on a single platform. A panel of legal operations experts with a wealth of diverse experience in this area will test out the trends, drivers, and governance model that facilitate successful adoption of this model across the spectrum of legal departments.

Speakers:
In the last few years companies have learned so much about the realities of using AI in legal review processes. But this knowledge isn’t widely shared across companies, and new AI users still struggle to filter through a crowded landscape of AI vendors and best practices. This panel will seek to overcome these challenges by sharing practical experiences and lessons learned. Discussions will include where AI can reliably replace manual steps in a process, where it can be used to augment human intelligence, and where it may struggle to perform in a helpful way. The idea is to empower the audience with practical examples they can action for their artificial intelligence goals/challenges. Panel will also discuss some common use cases like contract abstraction/analysis, first pass review of contracts/markups and managed document review for eDiscovery.

Speakers:
Conga has created an end-to-end maturity model assessment to enable customers to see where they are on their contract lifecycle digital transformation journey. The objective is to ensure selection of the correct technology to drive the right business outcomes when the organization is ready. Conducting a maturity model assessment allows you to determine exactly where your organization is on the contract lifecycle management maturity curve and discern concrete steps to continue transforming your contract management processes. 

In this session, you will learn about each stage of the contract lifecycle management maturity model and participate in a workshop, using exercises to help you identify where your organization falls on Conga's CLM maturity model and understand how to start your legal operations transformation journey by reviewing the business protocols, simplifying processes, and applying technology efficiently. 

Speakers:
Working remotely has shined a spotlight on the importance of inclusiveness to collaboration with the right mix of people "in the room." What are the decision-making processes required to approach this challenge correctly? Join this session to learn to review (or establish) decision making processes to ensure that you consistently invite the right people to the table, actively secure their input, get buy-in to the collaborative work of the group, and produce measurable outputs.

Speakers:
Starting with ABA Resolution 113 in 2016 through the civil unrest of 2020, corporate law departments today are even more acutely focused on the diversity of their outside counsel, and they expect their law firms to support corporate diversity initiatives.

To achieve diversity goals, law departments and law firms must work collaboratively to understand corporate expectations and create strategies for firms to meet those expectations. This panel of experts will lead an interactive thought-provoking discussion on how corporations are measuring, tracking, and reporting on the diversity of their outside counsel, and how they are using that data to measure firm performance and uncover what the data sometimes does not say in order to improve diversity objectives.

Speakers:
By leveraging the ACC Legal Operations Maturity model, the session will provide insights into how to build a strategic plan for legal operations. Templates will be provided that you can use to establish a baseline assessment of your legal operations strategy, a simple 5-year plan, and for tracking and reporting progress toward the goals articulated in your strategy. Additionally, the session will touch upon some of the basic concepts to think about before starting your strategic planning. We expect this to be an interactive session with presenters and attendees discussing the concepts and templates. 

Are you ready to learn a little more about your fellow attendees? Join us for short bursts of fun, small group video networking and leave energized to tackle the final session of the day.

Speakers:
Organizations across the globe have experienced incidents and data breaches for the past 10 years. Yet with all of these dangers, many organizations still treat data breaches as rare events, using ad-hoc processes, on-the-fly communication, and cobbled-together toolsets. There is a better way to deal with these situations. This workshop involves hands-on exercises and evaluations to help address key requirements to ensure compliance, mitigate risk, and optimize your response process now. Attendees will work through a hypothetical real-life scenario of a global organization responding to an incident.

Speakers:
Working effectively across multiple levels within the organization and with people from different cultures and backgrounds is an essential skill set for modern legal leaders. What is your emotional quotient (EQ)? In this session, EQ gurus from across different industries will impart their most valuable lessons learned for developing these critical skills. Attendees will learn how to obtain the prowess needed to lead diverse workgroups which will, in turn, amp up your team's innovation and decision-making abilities, and ultimately produce better outcomes.

Speakers:
Hear from a panel of senior corporate counsel, representing law departments in different industries and of disparate sizes, on how COVID-19 has impacted their operations and the fundamental changes they expect to persist post-pandemic. Faced with tight legal budgets and limited headcount — plus expanding workloads and an onslaught of novel legal issues — panelists will share lessons learned and offer insights on new processes and innovations that helped their legal departments emerge from the past year even stronger.

Speakers:
Kickoff your day by getting to know more about your fellow attendees. Join us for short bursts of fun, small group video networking. Take the energy from this experience and use it to dive into the next hour of sessions.

Speakers:
The contracting process has remained painfully manual and inefficient. Too often, it drives the perception of the legal department as the “Department of Slow” or worse, the “Department of No.” This panel of legal department leaders and innovators will discuss how leading departments are transforming their static agreements and antiquated processes to turn contracts into strategic advantage for both their legal department and businesses. We will explore what process improvements your department can employ to stop “contract leakage”, the data you are mining to mitigate risk and improve compliance, and how you can use contract data to demonstrate the value of the legal department.

Speakers:
The past two decades have seen dramatic changes in how legal services are delivered. Innovation has played a significant role in their delivery including the introduction of a variety of legal technologies offered by traditional law firms, legal tech companies, and alternative legal service providers. Clients now have options, with competing legal service delivery models and technologies offering transparency in practice, better ability to manage legal spend, and actionable insights in identifying risk. Concurrently, changes in the very nature of the workplace, such as the advent of artificial intelligence, algorithmic hiring practices, and robotic process engineering have introduced new levels of complexity and risk to how companies manage their workforce. Join us as we look at the evolution of technology and innovation in the legal industry and the impact on the role of in-house counsel to learn how you can anticipate these significant changes and take advantage of some of the leading platforms that can help you manage your matters, relationships with outside counsel, and legal department operations.

Speakers:
Boot up your Microsoft 365 suite! We’re going off-piste to explore lesser-known components of MS 365 suite and how they can be used in legal operations. This interactive session features live demos and practical insights on using MS 356 in an in-house environment. Specifically, we will explore its use for matter management, task assignment, automated approvals, and surveys to get immediate feedback from your colleagues and clients. For your apres-ski treat, we invite you to follow along on your screen to set up your own Outlook-based clause library for emails in real time. (TIP: If you have time, check with your IT team about getting access to the ‘My Templates’ MS add-In in advance). Suitable for all levels of MS 365 experience and for snowed-under in-house counsel seeking a warm glow of inspiration.

Speakers:
Banking, technology and customer behaviour have all changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Westpac, one of Australia’s major banks, has also undergone significant change in that period. Against that backdrop, Westpac’s legal team has supported the bank in dealing with significant regulatory, reputational and legal matters. In order to do this, and to prepare for future challenges, they have re-wired the company's legal function to have a much greater focus on innovation and change. In this closing keynote address, we will reflect on the changing role of in-house counsel, and why it’s essential (and how) to build innovation and transformation culture and capability into the legal function.

Kickoff your day by getting to know more about your fellow attendees. Join us for short bursts of fun, small group video networking. Take the energy from this experience and use it to dive into the next hour of sessions.

ACC is pleased to offer a one-on-one resume consulting opportunity for event attendees.

Resume writing can be a daunting task, even if you're just updating your resume let alone creating an entirely new one. ACC is proud to offer X21 attendees the chance to connect with a career expert and receive professional coaching, help building your personal brand, and advice for crafting your resume. Ready yourself now to seize future career growth opportunities that come your way.

Speakers:
Three years into an ambitious transformation plan, Heather Torres shares the practical tools and candid conversations that helped solar energy innovator Sonnedix gain clarity, increase efficiency, and take control of its legal costs.

Speakers:

• Do you and your team struggle to translate complex legal issues into everyday business solutions?
• Does your team suffer stress and work/life balance issues?
• Are they highly motivated, but not necessarily doing the right work and moving forward in their careers?
• Do you wish you could find time for more performance and productivity improvement?
• Do you know your internal client satisfaction rating and how to raise it?

The instructor and CEO of Smarter Law Solutions, Trevor Faure, demonstrates the methods and results behind 250+ successful transformations and then opens the floor for you to share, analyse and act upon your specific challenges, using a range of improvement techniques, including soft skills and hard data.

This workshop has three parts:

1. An 18-minute video of overall principles provided for you to watch in advance of the workshop as preparation
2. a live session with only a handful of participants in the virtual room walking through key aspects of the Smarter Law methodology and discussing how to apply it, learning from each other’s guidance
3. a separate 1:1 consultation (optional)

“ ‘Smarter Law’ provides us with the working manual to transform ourselves into business leaders.” 
- Patrick Dransfield, Co-Director of the In-House Community 

"Based on sound theory and considerable personal experience (the GC of a Big 4 firm), this work gives readers an advanced toolkit, a methodology, for the transformation of legal service." 
- Professor Richard Susskind, OBE 

"[The] best roadmap for the modern general counsel.” 
- Paul Lippe, Legal OnRamp founder 

*Important Notes: 

• This interactive workshop is full with a waitlist. If you are interested in being notified about upcoming Smarter Law workshops, please contact webcasts@acc.com.
• Please arrive on time and prepared to stay for the duration (three hours). This is not a drop-in session.
• Please be prepared to be on camera and interacting with other participants.

Speakers:
Making process flows a part of building fruitful collaborations is not a new endeavor. However, process evaluation, review, and enhancement is vital to the foundation of successful projects and initiatives in law departments. Process maps are great training tools to identify and eliminate waste, and building a journey map with your internal and external customers will improve and solidify relationships. Through focused discussions around a shared journey, you will engage with counterparts and add value for flows in ways never previously identified. This session will provide an overview for the framework of journey mapping and share best practices and lessons learned so you can build a best-in-class process and foster greater business relationships.

Capacity for this session is limited and available on a first come, first served basis only.

Speakers:
Many are attempting to measure outside counsel diversity, and some firms are issuing edicts, but precious few can say they are moving the needle — and that the movement they are seeing in diversity of staffing on their matters is benefiting the profession and under-represented groups within it. Join this session to brainstorm and align on better metrics, targets, and tactics to achieve real and sustainable change, while avoiding unintended consequences.

Speakers:
In the wake of the pandemic and the shift to remote work, weaknesses in contracting and commercial management were on full display. Join this discussion to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced contract and commercial management capabilities and processes, with a focus on the value of humans working alongside technology.

Take some time to refuel and hydrate, relax your mind, and move your body. Once you are recharged, join us and explore our sponsor partners. Catch up with your existing contacts and meet new representatives while learning how they can help with your legal department needs.

Speakers:
As a leader in your organization, you can be tasked with knowing the numbers and how they affect the business. Hear insights on tax and finance issues from the perspective of an accountant or financial analyst. Attendees of this quiz show will participate with your smartphones to interactively test your knowledge so you can be ready when you're called on to: provide counsel on financial matters, assist clients with their problems, help meet financially-based objectives and goals, and negotiate and litigate with an understanding of the advantages.

This session is geared to upper level legal law department managers, including those who report to CFOs or closely work with CFOs in cross-functional areas, to enhance your interactions with colleagues who have financial backgrounds.

Speakers:
Predictions and exhortations abound. Let’s turn some of them — like data driven risk management, contracting cycle times, and the connection between legal tech and enterprise tech — into useful scenarios to stimulate planning. Collaborate with peers in a breakout group to foresee an audacious challenge and brainstorm ways to arrive at the future you envision through future-focused leadership. You will appreciate the mental exercise as well as the read-outs from other groups addressing different change scenarios.

Speakers:
Building upon yesterday's panel discussion, this interactive workshop focuses on how to improve decision-making and other business outcomes through Smart Collaboration. Using your own Smart Collaboration Indicator results, attendees will create a personalized plan to maximize the success of their own collaborative initiatives within the legal department, across their organization, and with outside partners such as law firms or regulators. 

Prior to joining this session, please complete this online assessment and screenshot your results. Please have your screenshot handy when you join this session on June 17.

Speakers:
How do you level-up your spend management in 2021 to transform your department from price-taker to a price-maker? This practical session lays out the latest thinking in Empowered Spend Management. Discover the tools, techniques, analytics, and technologies enabling legal departments to develop granular visibility into their external spend environment, negotiate fees with providers, and drive the behavioral outcomes you want to see throughout the legal supply chain.

Grab a beverage and engage face-to-face with fellow attendees for this casual, small group video chat experience. We encourage you to turn your camera on, engage in conversation, and leave with new connections.

Speakers:
Adoption of advanced technology by both in-house law departments and law firms remains slow, yet across the legal industry, we are told we need artificial intelligence, robotics, data analytics, and other techniques in order to get the work done. This panel discussion will explore some of the real-world use cases for advanced technology in legal operations, as well as addressing some of the barriers to adoption and leadership techniques to overcome those barriers. Speakers will also dispel tech myths and bring clarity for those in legal departments by identifying ways to drive key strategies and deliver results.

Speakers:
Companies often show resistance to legal ops because the organization is “too small.” But naysayers will be impressed with the cost savings and efficiencies you’ll be able to introduce without a big budget or a team of legal ops personnel.

This session will begin with a short panel on how the panelists have implemented legal ops in their small law departments. Attendees will be split into groups based on department size, company size, and industry to discuss strategic plans that can be taken back to the company for implementation, as well as some longer term plans for improving maturity levels at a pace that matches the risk tolerance of their respective organizations. Take-aways will include workflow models, tool assessment checklists, and materials on how to win internal approval for adding legal ops resources.

Speakers:
Sophisticated buyers of legal services know that if you’re using rates hours to measure costs and price matters, you’re leaving an important variable out of the calculation: outcomes. It’s true that quantifying outcome costs is challenging, but speakers will attempt to tackle it anyway. Harnessing the experience and ingenuity of the legal executives convening for the Xchange, whiteboard sources of data, metrics, and benchmarks to arrive at better methodologies to assess the value of legal services so we can make more informed legal strategy decisions.

ACC Research provides the data you need to help you excel in your role, make more informed decisions, and efficiently use your company's resources. This on-demand info session will shed light on how the unmatched depth and breadth of ACC's treasure trove of data — strategically organized to support your decision making on spending, work allocation, compensation and operations investments — can help you gain critical insight about where you stand now, so you can lead your legal department during these unparalleled times and clearly show the positive impact of your initiatives.

This session will be beneficial to any legal function seeking to build capability of their administrative support staff to take on higher value work for the department beyond basic support tasks. GSK has centralized administrative support into the operations function and implemented a standard support model to drive consistency in support expectations, as well as to create opportunities for assistants to take on higher value work and further their development. This session will present a case study and provide examples of tools used to support implementation, including change management/communications, standard work model, competency model and related assessments, and success criteria.

An on-demand encore from X20, this well-received session examined practical tips, tools, and real-world examples on building a strategic plan for Legal Operations. Expert strategists explained processes an best practices for aligning Legal Ops initiatives to the immediate needs of the Legal Department and the longer-term goals and strategic priorities of the GC’s leadership team, which are all connected to the mission of the Company.

Speakers:
ACC members at Zimmer Biomet have begun conducting in-depth reviews of annual law firm rate increases. Starting with the largest spend firms and working to lower spend ones, they have started to review the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of each timekeeper and the law firm itself. In this session, get a review of their process that helps to identify the highest billers and timekeepers with the largest increases over time as well as the history of increases of the firm. Identify methods of how to set targets and utilize the data to strengthen conversations/negotiations with both in-house and outside counsel.