22 January 2016, Iselin, NJ - Ansell, a global leader in protection solutions, garnered extensive recognition for its innovative approach to providing in-house legal services in the Financial Times’ 2015 North America Innovative Lawyers report. The legal team at Ansell, led by Bill Reilly, Senior Vice President, Corporate General Counsel, is a lean team comprised of merely 11 lawyers serving a business that has 15,000 employees across 55 countries.

At this year’s annual awards event, held recently in New York, Ansell received an award for the “Most Innovative In-House Legal Team” by the Financial Times. Bill Reilly was also individually recognized as among the ten most-innovative General Counsel in the North American legal sector. The 2015 North American FT Innovative Lawyers report represents the 18th report published by the FT on the legal sector.

Award winners were chosen from nearly 300 submissions and nominations from over 100 law firms and in-house legal teams. Every submission was assessed for its originality, rationale and impact by RSG Consulting, the FT’s research partner, who sought feedback from and interviewed hundreds of clients and other market referees to assess this year’s entries. The program is widely considered the best researched and most robust investigation into what constitutes innovation in the legal profession.

Ansell’s in-house legal team is made up of seasoned generalists covering a broad geographic footprint and diverse areas of responsibility. Its attorneys (almost half of whom are fluent in at least two languages) hail from, or have spent considerable time residing and working in, countries like Malaysia, China, Brazil, Australia and Belgium in addition to the United States. Ansell’s in-house team employs many innovative approaches to providing legal services, including through its unorthodox “virtual-in-house-counsel” relationship with the Moser Taboada law firm in order to cost-effectively expand and further leverage its IP strategy and initiatives.

“Ansell is a company rooted in leading global innovation; the legal team at Ansell has innovated repeatedly, from its use of technology to the monetizing of the Company’s intellectual property and other assets,” says Bill Reilly, Senior Vice President, Corporate General Counsel at Ansell. “We are very grateful to be acknowledged for these efforts by the Financial Times and receiving external recognition at this level truly shows what a corporate legal team can do with limited resources, and conveys our commitment to operating as efficiently as possible.”