Hunton Andrews Kurth and Client Ocwen Financial Recognized as 2018 ACC Value Champion

Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP and client Ocwen Financial Corporation, a leading residential and commercial mortgage loan servicer, have been named 2018 ACC Value Champions by the Association of Corporate Counsel.

The ACC recognized the firm for its role in partnering with Ocwen on the development of a new due-diligence delivery model, which uses a technology-enabled process to define roles for each of its in-house and external legal teams, saving millions of dollars in legal costs over traditional processes and delivering a complex and document-intensive project on time.

The process was developed in response to Ocwen’s opportunity to transfer existing mortgage servicing rights with $110 billion in unpaid principal balances to another company as the named servicer. The due diligence process required Ocwen to review 15,000 agreements and documents and analyze 300 data points from more than 2,000 mortgage servicing deals in only two months. The new due-diligence model enabled documents to be prioritized and fed into a custom platform that utilized artificial intelligence-enabled automatic text summarization and guided review.

A team of lawyers, including Hunton Andrews Kurth partner Mike Nedzbala and counsels Vicki Tucker and Sherry Yeatts, collaborated with Ocwen and QuisLex, a legal process outsourcing firm that Ocwen had hired to assist with creating the process, which can be replicated for other diligence projects.

“Ocwen was able to obtain substantial savings in legal costs by utilizing an innovative approach to a large document review and data collection diligence project,” Nedzbala said. “Ocwen also fundamentally lowered the cost and increased the benefit it expects to receive from future diligence projects.”

ACC also recognized Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and QuisLex in connection with the project, and the four co-champions were honored in October at the 2018 ACC Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

The partnership was one of 12 collaborations between corporate legal departments and law firms recognized as ACC Value Champions.