“Lawyers love producing documents, policies, frameworks. But nobody wants to read those anymore.”– Katherine Roseveare, General Counsel (Functions, Operations & Solutions), adidas
Watch Sam's chat with adidas' Katherine.
After two decades at adidas, the Amsterdam-based GC has seen the business from nearly every angle. Her latest challenge: making legal knowledge even more accessible to a workforce of 65,000+.
Sam Flynn, Co-founder & COO at Josef sat down with Katherine to hear how she’s tackling this with Josef. Katherine shared the challenges that “infobesity” poses to big business, and why she’s always reaching for “super-duper-wow-wow” when it comes to implementing new tech in Legal.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or read our recap below.
Ask Katherine what Legal is actually for and she’ll share wisdom from an old sales director: “Your job is to either clean up the mess or to stop me creating the mess.”
“Legal is about enabling and protecting,” she says. “We have to be there as guardians, to act as that line of defence… but we also counsel.”
But how do you counsel a business that touches every corner of the globe? It’s safe to say Katherine and her team have a unique set of challenges.
The content was never the issue. Getting people to engage with it was.
“The biggest users of Word in the whole business are the legal team. Lawyers love producing documents, policies, frameworks. But nobody wants to read those anymore.”
Yes, they had the beautiful SharePoint sites and perfectly structured FAQs, but Legal still found themselves telling people one on one: the answer’s on the intranet, here’s the link.
adidas’ people needed alternate ways of accessing legal and compliance guidance, ways that aligned more closely with how they actually work.
“We knew that a chatbot was the way that people communicate in natural language. There’s a way that you can make people feel as though they’re getting to the right place themselves.”
“Lawyers love producing documents, policies, frameworks. But nobody wants to read those anymore.”– Katherine Roseveare, General Counsel (Functions, Operations & Solutions), adidas
Katherine’s team reviewed their knowledge libraries and began identifying key areas that could be improved with AI Q&A tools the whole business could engage with.
First up: compliance. Specifically, an AI Q&A tool timed to launch alongside the release of the company’s new Code of Conduct. Not only did the launch give a boost to their change management efforts, it was also a good candidate for Josef as the topic was sensitive enough to demand a serious approach to accuracy.
“I don’t want to see a hallucination, thank you very much. This is too delicate a topic. I want people to be able to come and have certainty in the answers. We have to. It’s too risky.”
Before commencing, the adidas Legal team ran a bake-off between Josef and other internal tools, like Microsoft Copilot and LLM APIs, to make sure whatever solution they launched was going to be reliable enough for Legal’s needs.
After making the switch to self-service Q&A, the team got a result they hadn’t fully anticipated: visibility into the questions people weren’t asking out loud.
“There’s actually a hidden benefit,” Katherine explains. “People use the chatbot when they’re asking questions they’re too embarrassed to ask a human.”
Can I accept this gift? Am I allowed to do that? Questions that seem obvious to a lawyer, but that an employee might never raise with a real person.
The tools have also made it easier for employees not working in their first language to get answers more quickly. They don’t have to labour over grammar and sentence structure to get the information they need.
“It really helps us with the questions we never see. It helps us analyse whether our training materials are good enough, what focus areas we should pick up, and generally what’s in people’s minds.”
“People use the chatbot when they're asking questions they're too embarrassed to ask a human. [...] It really helps us with the questions we never see.”– Katherine Roseveare, General Counsel (Functions, Operations & Solutions), adidas
Katherine has two rules for surviving Legal:
Both apply directly to how her team rolls out technology. You have to watch how people actually use what you build.
She thinks back to one of Legal’s first tech rollouts with DocuSign. There was one resister who fought implementation throughout training, but then sent an email a week later written in every colour of the rainbow: “DocuSign is super duper wow wow.” Her whole working life had changed.
“Now every time we do something,” Katherine says. “We say we are aiming for super duper wow wow. Who is our super duper wow wow person that we need to find in the group and bring along on that journey?”
“If you want it to stick, you really have to invest in change management. It doesn’t matter which tool it is.”
–
Listen to the conversation in full on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
Explore how you can empower teams company-wide with self-service AI Q&A, contract and workflow tools on Josef.
We'll be in touch soon to arrange a time to speak.