Watch the full interview with adidas' Alex Herrity.
If you don’t know Alex Herrity, adidas’ legalops superstar and Director of Legal Solutions, now’s your chance.
When he’s not sharing the stage with Josef Co-founder and COO Sam Flynn in London, Alex is busy making sure adidas leverages its world class legal team with the best technology around. He’s content so long as “every week or two, we’re getting better and more focused and delivering better things in Legal.”
In a recent fireside chat, Alex and Sam caught up to discuss the current state of legal operations, the future of knowledge management, and get his take on the biggest question in legal GenAI today: build or buy?
Watch the interview to hear their conversation in full, or read our recap below.
“Right now there’s so much activity in compliance and regulatory and beyond that in IP (intellectual property). It’s a great time to be interested in legal ops,” Alex says.
“But, if you really boil it down, legal ops is essentially questioning what it is that we’re actually doing,” he adds.
“When Jenn McCarron talks about Legal Ops 3.0, she reminds us of the artificial silos we’ve placed upon ourselves that prevent us from getting s*** done.”
“Up until this point, it’s been, ‘You focus on your area of the business and you focus on that.’ But ultimately, your goal, particularly if you’re in corporate, should be that we’re all aligned. That would be the ideal end goal.”
“I would say build GenAI internally, but some of the harshest realities come from building something that then doesn’t get support afterwards. It gets really buggy and dies a death. You’ve pumped a lot of cash into it, and it doesn’t deliver.”– Alex Herrity, Director of Legal Solutions, adidas
“I definitely think the generative AI boom in the last 18 months or so has started to put knowledge management on the map,” Alex says. “It’s turned people’s attention toward the idea that there should be a more structured way that we deal with knowledge.”
“Before this, it was largely just in the heads of everybody who needed to know it, and it’d be a huge lift to try and get that out. And what do we even do with it once we’ve shared it? Put it in a Word document? That’s a prison that no one’s going to read anyway.”
“Generative AI has opened things up and has started enabling us to surface relevant information to the right people in the right way. It’s really exciting! I can’t get away from talking about it at the moment. Previously nobody wanted to touch KM, but it’s great to see it become unshackled now.”
“From a corporate legal perspective, I think it’s a really difficult decision,” Alex says.
“I would say to build internally, but, you know, some of the harshest realities come from building something that then doesn’t get support afterwards. It gets really buggy and dies a death. You’ve pumped a lot of cash into it, and it doesn’t deliver.”
“I’m in the camp of wanting something that’s sustainable and scalable. You don’t want to get in the development game, generally speaking. You learn from the mistakes and leverage those of other people because developing is an expensive game to play.”
Right now at adidas, “We’re getting people up to speed on what AI tools can do, what they can’t do, and pointing people to where other tools might be a benefit.”
“That’s what we’re spending a lot of our time on: education. Looking and really interrogating our processes so that we use the right tool for the right part of the process in the right way,” Alex explains.
“I’m interested in seeing how some of these automation and workflow tools will do certain things and how generative AI will do others. How it all becomes knitted together.”
“The one piece of advice that I’m on at the moment revolves around assumptions being a killer,” Alex says. “Like, assumptions on everything!”
“You know, it’s a natural way of being as a human. We have this reptilian brain or whatever, which keeps us alive. But I think when you’re in the world of business and operations, nothing’s going to kill you, so you can kind of ditch that.”
“I’ve seen so many projects, particularly ones that I’ve done as well, where I’ve got things wrong because of one tiny assumption that just sent us so far off-piste, and it was a huge amount of effort to come back.”
“It might not always make you popular, but challenging things definitely pays off if you can get to the actual true reality of things.”
Weighing up your own GenAI options?
Learn from legalops heavyweights Claire Nuske (Head of Legal Operations at Bupa) and Matt Duncan (Legal Operations at Australian Retirement Trust).
At the CLOC APAC Summit, the region’s top legalops conference, the duo discussed the biggest question in legal GenAI today: build or buy?
Book a demo to see first-hand how easy it is for your whole team to get up and running with legal automation.
We'll be in touch soon to arrange a time to speak.
