Standout examples of in-house lawyers’ work

Read the other FT Innovative Lawyers Europe ‘Best practice case studies’, which showcase the standout innovations made for and by people working in the legal sector:

Practice of law
Business of law

Standout

World Bank: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 9; Total: 25
Historically, vulnerable and poorer families in Turkey have been unable to access its mortgage market to retrofit or rebuild housing that is at risk from earthquakes. So the legal team at the World Bank led in advising on the design of the Climate and Disaster Resilient Cities Project, to help support such households. With $512mn of financing, the scheme offers qualifying applicants favourable financial terms via participating commercial banks, to widen access to cheap loans.

Highly commended

Anheuser-Busch InBev
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
Building on its proprietary risk assessment tool Lighthouse, which focuses on data processing, the digital ethics team at the global drinks company has consolidated multiple sources of risk data — such as privacy, people, cyber and security — into a single point of reporting. This will achieve a faster and more nuanced understanding of potential risks.

Carlyle
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
In response to the US regional banking crisis this year, the private equity group’s legal team helped to develop Cast, a tracking tool to assist staff in assessing portfolio exposure to relevant distressed lenders. The tracker gives Carlyle’s global credit team a better understanding of their positions when negotiating investment deals.

Wise
O: 7; L: 8: I: 7; Total: 22
The UK fintech’s legal team has made several improvements to how it manages the risks when dealing with suppliers and other third parties in its foreign exchange services. These enhancements have enabled a reduction in approval times for signing up new partners from as much as three months to as little as two weeks.

Boston Consulting Group
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
Launched in early 2022 after a 24-month pilot period, the consulting firm’s digital legal team was quick to offer clients help with the development of “responsible” artificial intelligence tools. The service tracks the relevant legislation and development of rules globally, and aims to help clients reduce risk and failures in expanding their AI activities.

Commended

FedEx
O: 6; L; 7; I: 7; Total: 20
Lawyers at the package delivery group are streamlining their contract approval processes by standardising common agreements, such as those with courier businesses in big conurbations. Once fully implemented, the team expects this change to cut the number of contracts needing legal review by half.

Ilunion
O: 7; L: 6: I: 6; Total: 19
The legal team at Ilunion group — whose businesses include a hotel chain, security and call centres — has customised a litigation management tool, which enabled team members manage thousands of court actions in 2022. The customisations make the tool more appropriate for Spanish litigation processes.

Standout

OneWeb: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
UK-backed satellite company OneWeb was forced to abandon launches from Russia’s cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last year, days after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

But its legal team played a central role in helping the business recover by securing new launch sites in the US and India — gaining approval from US regulators and negotiating new contracts in half the normal time. This enabled OneWeb to resume its satellite launches sooner than expected.

The company, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in late 2020, is expected to complete a merger with fellow satellite operator Eutelsat this year.

GSK
O: 7; L: 9: I: 8; Total: 24
The drugmaker’s legal team played a significant role in spinning off its consumer healthcare division to create Haleon last year, in a deal that created a £7bn dividend for the parent group. More than 100 lawyers from GSK were involved in negotiating the hundreds of agreements required to disentangle the two businesses, as well as drafting documentation required to present to shareholders voting to approve the split.

London Stock Exchange Group
O: 8; L: 8: I: 8; Total: 24
The exchange owner’s legal team advised on the terms of its 10-year strategic partnership with Microsoft announced last December. The deal involved the US tech giant taking a 4 per cent stake in LSEG worth £1.5bn and agreeing a 10-year cloud computing tie-up to help improve the 300-year-old exchange’s data and analytics. The legal team had to address several complex issues, such as how to share the intellectual property generated from the collaboration.

Highly commended

Chanel
O: 8; L: 7: I: 8; Total: 23
The online global protection team of the French luxury group worked with a software company to design and deploy image recognition applications that can spot the growing number of counterfeit sales online. The result has increased the speed and accuracy of identifying and removing counterfeiters online and the approach has been adopted by other brands in the luxury sector.

Standout

Iberdrola: Winner
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The Spanish energy group last year became the first major company to join the Fundación Pro Bono España, a network of legal professionals offering services to charities and campaigners pursuing the public good. In parallel, members of its in-house legal team are being encouraged to undertake voluntary pro bono work with company support.

Highly commended

Anheuser-Busch InBev
O: 8; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 22
After recent developments in generative AI, the digital ethics team at the drinks company has updated its “fairness toolkit”, to address a range of issues such as fair use copyright questions. The toolkit was set up to assess risk, from regulatory to customer data handling, in new tech projects. The team also launched tailored training for different areas of the business including procurement, developers and the rest of the legal department.

Rolls-Royce
O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22
The legal team at the UK aerospace and defence group has launched several initiatives to improve awareness of corporate compliance processes across its business, and issues related to human rights concerns. The team is also developing an app that will allow employees and suppliers to report potential human rights risks immediately.

Via Transportation
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The software business’s legal team has helped extend on-demand local bus services in Cheshire, north-west England, to improve public transport in remote rural areas. The team came up with bespoke terms of agreement with local councils as an alternative to unsuitable standard contracts used for conventional fixed-route bus services.

UNHCR
O: 7; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 21
The legal team at the UN’s refugee agency has launched an online platform called NotOnlyMe where staff wanting to report sexual harassment at work can log their experiences and seek guidance from a victim care support officer.

Vodafone Ukraine
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

To provide network coverage across Ukraine and help refugees who had fled the country after Russia’s invasion, the legal team supported the telecoms business’s Roam Like Home initiative. Vodafone, along with rival mobile phone networks in the region, jointly committed to providing affordable telephone rates to Ukrainian refugees. The agreement, which is still active, was up and running within a week.

Commended

Diageo
O: 6; L: 6; I: 7; Total: 19
To improve the drinks group’s commitments on environmental, social and governance issues, the legal team obtained a “B Corp” certification — demonstrating enhanced commitments to environmental and social goals — for the Baileys brand, which involved amending the subsidiary company’s constitution to make it possible.

Standout

Bupa: Winner
O: 8; L: 9; I: 8; Total: 25
The legal team at the private healthcare group has created a “legal academy”, providing training and tool kits for each business unit so that more of them can advise across more areas. In a push to improve customer experience, the team developed a platform that searches all UK feedback to help identify potential improvements to processes. The team has separately developed a way to link up with external counsel’s billing systems, in order to review and manage these costs.

Santander and Konexo
O: 7; L: 9; I: 8; Total: 24
In the past year, the legal operations team at the bank has led an overhaul of the legal department in collaboration with consultancy Konexo. Separate legal teams have now been centralised under one general counsel. The overhaul has led to an expansion of the team, bringing e-discovery operations in-house and plans for further adoption of technology.

Highly commended

Carrefour Spain
O: 7; L: 8 I: 8; Total: 23
The legal team at the Spanish subsidiary of the French supermarket chain has identified technologies to simplify processes for document generation and for collaboration. As a result, the team has improved its working practices, standardised processes, and resolved matters for the business faster.

Chanel
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The French luxury group’s legal team is deploying new technologies and implementing process improvements. These include a new system to manage contracts and ongoing legal matters better, and the appointment of “stewards” whose job is to use the legal data to develop insights and improve the team’s decisions.

Diageo
O: 7; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 23

The legal department restructured last year into five divisions based on the international drinks company’s strategic priorities. One, “brands, innovation and commerce”, brings together legal expertise across intellectual property, marketing, digital, commercial and data privacy to assist the business in responding more speedily to challenges.

HSBC
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The digital business solutions part of the bank’s legal team, comprising about 45 lawyers and other ancillary professionals, has adopted a new structure that allows the team to create dedicated groups to work on specific goals. An example was a group set up to handle to the rapid purchase of the UK arm of distressed Silicon Valley Bank of the US earlier this year.

Revolut
O: 7; L: 7: I: 7; Total: 21
The fast-growing fintech’s legal operations team is using internal data to measure and improve efficiency across the team and in legal spending. Measures such as overdue service level agreements, stakeholder satisfaction and external legal spend have been introduced to improve performance as the private fintech addresses cultural, operational and regulatory challenges in its move from start-up to licensed bank.

Commended

CLS
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
Faced with large volumes of licensing deals and other contracts, the biotech group’s legal operations team designed bespoke new systems to manage the businesses’s contracts and continuing legal matters better.

Ilunion
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The legal team at Ilunion group, whose businesses include a hotel chain, security and call centres, led a training initiative called “A tu lado” (“By your side”), designed to familiarise the relevant staff across the business with contract automation tools that have since been made available for self-service.

Cepsa
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
As Spain’s second biggest oil group shifts its activities towards renewable power, the central legal team has shrunk in order to disperse more lawyers directly into the company’s business lines.

Nationwide Building Society
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
Since 2022, the legal department at the building society has improved its processes. These changes have freed up its lawyers to do more valuable work such as supporting Nationwide’s venture fund, NBS Ventures.

Standout

Octopus Energy: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
The UK energy company’s legal team advised on the acquisition and integration of 1.5mn customers inherited from rival provider Bulb, which went into special administration in 2021. In March, the UK’s High Court upheld Octopus’s purchase of the business, throwing out a judicial review brought by rivals Centrica, Scottish Power, and Eon in November 2022, and finding that the price paid in the novel sales process was fair. An in-house legal team of four continues to advise on the integration of the business which has helped to create the UK’s third-largest energy retailer.

Grupo Visabeira
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
Following the closing of Goldman Sachs’s €200mn investment in Constructel Visabeira, a subsidiary of Portuguese conglomerate Grupo Visabeira, the legal team has driven reforms demanded by the new shareholder structure in the entity. This involves the formalisation or redesign of policy on environmental, social and governance standards, workplace equality, diversity and inclusion, and wider compliance.

KX
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The legal team at the financial data analytics business, a division of FD Technologies, has been integral to helping it automate processes. The team cites the use of artificial intelligence in contract creation and the extension of “click-wrap” authorisation — which allows immediate customer acceptance of legal terms online — as examples of how it has increased capacity and speed in completing deals with customers.

Highly commended

Onfido
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
Work by the legal team at Onfido, an identity verification company specialising in facial biometrics, has helped speed up sales growth in new markets. Contract automation has led to shorter sign-up times, while the legal team’s supply of regulatory “one-pagers” to clients has helped support their understanding of privacy and policy issues.

Telecom Plus
O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21
After the UK’s cost of living crisis prompted a surge in customer demand for its discount bundles of gas, electricity, mobile, broadband and insurance contracts, the legal team supported the business — which trades as Utility Warehouse — in its disposal of non-core operations and helped it implement government-backed consumer subsidy schemes to deal with spikes in gas and electricity prices.

Commended

Delivery Hero
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The legal team of German food delivery platform Delivery Hero helped lead the acquisition of a controlling stake in Spain-based peer Glovo, which was completed last year. It worked to streamline work across 25 countries in implementing the deal, which lifted the parent group’s stake in Glovo from 44 to more than 94 per cent.

Coca-Cola HBC
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
The legal team at the international soft drinks bottler worked with clients, distribution partners and local lawyers to introduce beer to its portfolio, leading negotiations to work with global brewing group Anheuser-Busch InBev in several European territories.

Standout

Accenture: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 9; Total: 26
The consultancy’s legal team has rolled out a training programme to sharpen work on contractual negotiation with its clients, to cut unnecessary delays, and to encourage a more balanced, commercially-minded approach to accepting minor business risks.

The initiative, which was launched in 2022, involved providing lawyers with advice and feedback on improving practical client negotiations. Since then, monitoring suggests deals worth more than $50mn have been closed 20 per cent faster than they would have previously.

Coca-Cola HBC
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
Members of the legal department spend six months in the sales team with responsibility for specific customer accounts, including retail chains. This has given the lawyers a wider understanding of the needs of the beverage distribution business, which operates across more than 20 countries, and has also opened up the possibility for career moves for legal team staff into other departments across the business.

Iberdrola
O: 8; L: 8 I: 8; Total: 24
The Spanish energy group’s legal team set up an academy to help train lawyers, which has included collaboration with legal teams at banking group Santander and telecoms provider Telefónica.

The training covers topics such as legal technology, operations, project management, and sustainability. At Iberdrola, this has resulted in several initiatives to improve digitisation and contract automation in the business.

Highly commended

Nokia
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The telecoms group suffered from higher rates of staff losses in the wake of Covid lockdowns, despite the introduction of permanent hybrid working for its employees. In response, its legal and employment team helped pilot and extend a company-wide initiative to improve morale and engagement across its 85,000 workforce.

This included programmes to tackle the dangers of isolation for people opting to work from home and the encouragement of mentoring and careers networks for junior staff.

Diageo
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The drinks group’s legal team offers a twice-yearly course to develop a range of leadership and personal development skills. It trains cohorts of eight people, selected from among more than 200 staff in the global division. Several participants have subsequently achieved promotions or secondments to other departments. Staff completing the course are encouraged to then share these skills and mentor other colleagues.

Zurich Insurance
O: 7; L: 8 I: 7; Total: 22
The insurer’s legal team has launched compulsory training in customer experience for all staff. It also offers members access to a voluntary “drop everything and learn” week to attend other online courses. It runs twice-yearly crisis management simulations covering scenarios such as responding to cyber attacks and other reputational threats.

Commended

NatWest
O: 7; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 20
The banking group’s legal team has adopted a new programme to help lawyers respond to anticipated workplace changes including wider adoption of hybrid working and of digital technology. Training focuses on protecting levels of customer service and giving team members guidance on career development. Since the programme launched last year, the team has improved its in-house ratings for service from other departments.

Bupa
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The healthcare provider and insurer’s legal team has worked on two initiatives — the “legal lab” and the digital skills academy — to drive improved delivery of its services. The legal lab is briefed to develop a pipeline of ideas, ranging from extending contract automation to new deployment of artificial intelligence. The digital skills academy focuses on helping in-house legal team members improve delivery of their work with better use of IT and other digital systems.

GSK
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
The legal team has taken several actions to refine its selection of outside counsel. These include increasing the emphasis placed on outside firms demonstrating their commitment to diversity and inclusion policies when tendering for work.

Standout

World Bank: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
The World Bank’s in-house legal team created a flagship financing plan to secure funds for Ukraine and maintain public services during the current conflict.

Lawyers devised, negotiated and implemented bespoke financing methods to enable international donors to send funds to the country through its flagship “Peace” project. By July this year, this had dealt with $20bn of the more than $37.7bn mobilised by the World Bank since last year’s invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Aviva
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The insurance company’s legal team advised on the development and implementation of MyDrive, a feature of the MyAviva app that gathers data about driving habits and is integrated with participating drivers’ insurance policies. The team drew up all customer documents and reviewed online content to support its launch in April this year.

Highly commended

Dentsu
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The European legal team at Japanese advertising giant Dentsu co-developed a platform to guide clients’ involvement in a range of digital activities, including crypto services, disaster recovery and the creation of non-fungible tokens. The team also helped initiate the business’s Web 3.0 governance committee, accountable for the legal and regulatory compliance of its metaverse-related services.

Cepsa
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The legal team advised on the relaunch of a loyalty programme that gives customers of the Spanish oil company’s petrol stations loyalty points, which can be redeemed with large companies. The team advised on data privacy and partnership agreements with businesses including Amazon and Europcar.

Octopus Energy
O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22
In 2020, the legal team at the UK energy retailer helped develop Kraken, a customer billing platform that has now been licensed to other, rival energy providers such as Eon in the UK and overseas markets. Following its rollout, the team is now supporting further expansion of the platform into other utilities, such as water and broadband, this year.

Commended

AlphaSights
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
Last year, information services company AlphaSights began offering online access to proprietary business research content — rather than providing it through one-on-one telephone conversations with experts. The legal team created a new legal and compliance framework and reviewed all content shared on the platform.

Standout

GSK: Winner
Originality: 7; Leadership: 9; Impact: 9; Total: 25
GSK’s legal team has been transformed to support a smaller, more focused pharmaceutical business, following the group’s spinout of its consumer healthcare division, Haleon, last year — in the largest demerger in Europe for two decades. The reconfigured team redesigned its global contracting operating model, analysing contracting activity to determine which volumes and types of legal work could be based abroad. The team established a new global contracting centre in Bangalore, India, one of GSK’s four overseas back-office centres.

Highly commended

Nokia
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The telecoms company’s legal and compliance team has made several improvements to help sign up new customers more quickly. For example, its online quoting tool offers automatic acceptance or rejection of requests by organisations to buy its campus wireless network systems. A contract is automatically generated when approved. The tool is linked to other Nokia systems and designed so that routine agreements can be struck at speed.

Bupa
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The private healthcare and insurance group’s legal team is working on several projects to streamline its work. To date, it has introduced a range of automated contract-generation systems, covering the medical suppliers treating the company’s privately-insured patients and the hiring of new clinicians.

Iberdrola
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The Spanish energy group’s legal team has accelerated the rollout of its contract and work management system to triage better the 150,000 legal matters that it deals with annually. The system has been adopted across its global business, with standard contract requests resolved within 24 hours. The tool gives the business better visibility over the department’s workload.

Vodafone
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The telecoms group’s privacy team worked with its in-house legal tech colleagues to develop a “one-stop-shop” for data protection and privacy advice across its business. The resource aims to ensure Vodafone’s local telecoms businesses meets its global ambitions of protecting customer privacy while abiding by evolving obligations in different jurisdictions. The project has markedly cut the time it takes the legal team to resolve related queries.

Delivery Hero
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
German food delivery platform Delivery Hero set up a dedicated legal technology team last year, to help cope with legal demands across its rapidly expanding international business. The specialist team has deployed various technologies, including new document and work management tools, a ticketing system for prioritising legal queries, and a chatbot to address recurring questions.

United for Ukraine
O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21
To help more Ukrainian refugees displaced across Europe, the aid organisation’s legal team adopted a workflow automation tool last year to help process new requests for legal help. As a result, the lawyers at the organisation were able to resolve many more requests per day than previously.

Commended

Eon UK
O: 6; L: 7 I: 7; Total: 20
After improving its matter management and work allocation processes, the in-house legal team at the energy utility has continued to improve its operations. The team is using data visualisation tools to track compliance trends and improve reporting to the board and to shareholders in Eon, which — along with other energy suppliers — has recently faced criticism and fines from regulators for poor customer service. The team estimates that its efforts have resulted in efficiency savings of around 300 hours per month within its department.

Standout

Nasdaq: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
Earlier this year, the US exchange operator’s in-house team helped Puro.earth, a carbon crediting and trading platform, to obtain full endorsement from the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance — an international body that validates the credentials of durable carbon reduction and offset providers. The move has allowed the venture, majority-owned by Nasdaq since 2021, to move beyond operating its own trading platform and join a broader recognised marketplace in interchangeable, tradable carbon reduction credits.

Accenture
O: 8; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 24
The legal team at the consultancy has launched a platform to assess suppliers’ performance across a range of ESG measures. The tool is global and assessments can be customised depending on the country and size of the business. The firm is adding its approximately 60,000 suppliers to the platform, which is being developed into a product that Accenture can sell to clients.

Highly commended

Lonza
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
Leading a team of ESG and procurement experts, the legal team at the Switzerland-based healthcare manufacturing company structured a 10-year virtual power purchase agreement from Spanish integrated renewable energy group Ignis. Under the agreement, Lonza will source solar electricity from Ignis, initially for its operations across Switzerland and the EU followed by the US and Asia. Ignis will invest in developing its solar facilities.

Anheuser-Busch InBev
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The legal team at Budweiser Brewing Group UK&I advised on privacy issues raised by the company’s collaboration with personal safety app WalkSafe+ for the launch, in 2022, of the nationwide “Get every bud home” campaign. The brewer’s backing enabled WalkSafe+ to make improvements to the app, allowing users to plan their safest route when walking, leading to more than 20,000 new downloads in the months following the partnership.

Commended

Ikea
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The legal team in the retailer’s Portugal office negotiated contracts and licensing agreements to extend the installation of solar panels across Ikea’s stores in Portugal in 2022.

Dyson
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The appliances maker introduced new ESG requirements last year, including a forced-labour assessment, after one of its suppliers in Malaysia, ATA, faced allegations of forced labour (Dyson cut ties with ATA, in 2021). The legal team is working with suppliers to ensure they meet the new standards.