The Association of Corporate Counsel has announced that 7-Eleven and the law firm Perkins Coie have been named one of its annual 2020 Value Champions, a national honor that recognizes innovative technology and the use of creative operating systems to enhance efficiency and value in corporate legal departments.
Facing exponential growth in contract volume due to new store expansions, increases in branded merchandise and digital commerce, the corporate legal department at the Dallas-based convenience store chain needed help fast and scalable.
Perkins Coie, a west coast firm with offices in Dallas and Austin, stepped forward to develop a platform for intake, triage, document sharing and reporting.
Using third party tools, Perkins Coie and 7-Eleven developed a matter intake and collaboration system that handled triple the volume of matters, while also offering the company’s legal department full predictability in its budget costs.
The ACC actually honored 7-Eleven as the 2018 Value Champion for a similar value-based sourcing model related to its massive real estate matters. “We were looking for something loosely based on the real estate model, which allows us to manage significant volumes of work through outsourcing with appropriate levels of inside lawyer involvement,” 7-Eleven Deputy General Counsel Lillian Kirstein stated in the ACC award announcement.
Perkins Coie used 7-Eleven’s formula for real estate to reduce time spent gathering information needed to open matters, locating matter-related documents, assessing the status of each matter, and quantifying key portfolio metrics, according to the ACC.
The submission by 7-Eleven states that Perkins Coie customized third-party tools to build a matter intake and collaboration system that included automatic customized notifications, activating internal legal processes and assigning matters to the Perkins Coie legal team.
While technology is important, process is paramount, according to Dean Harvey, managing partner of the Perkins Coie office in Dallas.
“People think they’re going to buy an IT solution and it’s going to fix the problem,” Harvey said. “The reality is that if you want to drive efficiencies, you have to look at the process end-to-end in order to streamline it and reduce the amount of effort at each step.”
Kristen Cook, who is 7-Eleven’s associate general counsel, said involving the business client from the outset and ensuring that they had a voice in the project design were effective change management techniques.
The result is a more mature procurement model, according to Harvey, replacing a process that previously relied heavily on email. Now, at least 84 percent of all new digital/IT and merchandising matters originate through the portal.
Perkins manages the portfolio on a fixed monthly fee.
“We were trying to provide pricing certainty with high volume. We were going to take the risk for a defined scope of work, which freed us to drive efficiency. And the portal and the process improvement is what enabled us to provide that pricing certainty,” Harvey said. “The tools enable data capture that reveals other efficiencies that can be realized. For example, we found a high abandonment rate on contracts being submitted for a certain type of matter. That visualization allowed us to see that we could put additional upfront controls in place to avoid the expense of sending contracts to outside counsel that were going to be abandoned.”
As a result, 7-Eleven has reduced its per-matter legal costs by 18 percent for digital/IT contracts and 66 percent for merchandising contracts, year over year since 2018.
“The alternative fee arrangement gave Perkins flexibility in ways to staff the work,” Cook said.
Most important to 7-Eleven’s legal team is that the data supports proactive, improvement-focused interaction with internal clients.
“We can drive discussions with corporate leadership regarding increasing efficiencies and influencing change,” says Kirstein.
ACC also gave the Value Champions award to eight other corporate legal departments and six other law firms.