Resource Library

Meaningful, effective, and enduring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives require an organization-specific approach. Learn about how inclusive leadership, structural changes, and psychological safety are critical to the success of DEI initiatives.

How to make a strong positive impact when starting a new job as general counsel? Find practical tips and strategies shared by experienced in-house counsel and condensed by ACC in this toolkit. Nine checklists that distill insight from general counsel, from acing your first 90 days to developing your leadership and business skills and retaining talent on your team.

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, a team of researchers showed that 78% of transformations fail. Their analysis showed that “people are the catalysts of successful transformation.” Check out this article to find out how to move beyond working in silos, incremental improvement, and isolated innovation to achieve transformation and why it’s important to have a structured process to engage leadership in setting objectives and guiding transformational change.  

In this article we take on some common myths with Julie Johnson, Senior Manager of Legal Operations at Align Technology. Julie and her team were faced with an incomplete repository and tools that were not designed with legal in mind, which caused a lot of frustration for Legal and their stakeholders. With Julie’s leadership and the guidance of consulting firm UpLevel Ops, the Legal Ops team selected and implemented Checkbox, a workflow automation tool, to tackle the problem of the incomplete repository and lack of search functionality Julie provides insights on how her teams have achieved success by utilizing and customizing tech solutions at Align. 

Savings is not a strategy. Imagine a CEO opening an earnings call by celebrating the money the company “saved” on deal counsel and due diligence by not moving forward with an otherwise strategically vital acquisition. The stock would crater because leadership would rightly be judged as majoring in the minors.

As a line item, legal spend is a minor consideration. Rather, legal spend is better characterized as a relatively small investment that enables the business to execute on what matters.

Legal spend should be dictated by business needs. Those business needs are only escalating with the explosion in legal complexity. The increasingly law-thick environment in which businesses operate is having a profound impact on corporate top lines, bottom lines, valuations, and strategic opportunities. Trying to save money on legal is myopic—and excruciatingly common.

The ACC-Smarter Law Solutions free benchmarking and consultation service (acc.com/smarterlaw) has proven to be a hit since its launch in 2019. While we are thrilled at the positive feedback we’ve received from our clients, we thought that it would be interesting to respond directly to a few widely held hesitancies expressed by those considering a basic benchmarking or performance improvement process. We gathered some of these questions and sent them to Smarter Law Solutions CEO, Trevor Faure for his candid counsel. We were particularly interested in his perspective on concerns about taking on a consultant agreement in these turbulent times for legal operations.

This Privacy Capability Maturity Model provides a detailed maturity model for all aspects of an organization’s privacy program, including its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) using personal information.

It seeks to gauge program capability across a variety of program elements, taking a “big picture” view on an organization’s readiness to comply with these requirements.

Sample Retention Incentive Agreement Contract

This article discusses how President Biden's Executive Order on artificial intelligence and follow-up actions by federal agencies will impact federal risk-management practices, likely serving as a model for AI risk management by private-sector employers.

What compensation do your in-house peers get? Check out the 2023 Law Department Compensation benchmarking survey results.