“We're helping people find their way through things. We’re taking away all of the fog.”– Shanti Berggren, General Counsel, Adelaide University
Watch Tom's chat with Adelaide University's Shanti Berggren.
Speaking with Josef Co-founder and CEO Tom Dreyfus, Shanti shares how she walked into the role not knowing a single person on her team. She was the new kid on the block, and jumped at the opportunity to build her own legal function from scratch.
Two years in, everything’s taking shape. The team is anchored to three central pillars (modernity, visibility and optimism), tech like Josef is doing the heavy lifting, and Shanti’s lawyers are getting more time back to do the work only they can do.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or read our recap below.
Shanti didn’t inherit a legal team. She built one in rather unfamiliar territory.
“I had a moment where it was both lonely and liberating. And the liberating part was: how many general counsels get to start to think about a new function that’s befitting of a new, wonderful institution?”
Her role, as she saw it, was to think deeply about how the function could and should run, and implement her vision within the whirlwind of the merger.
With 20 years under her belt at the telco Optus, Shanti’s no stranger to the roles in-house lawyers have to play:
And there’s a seventh role she’s adamant her team can avoid: “The role we shouldn’t be doing is being traffic director.”
“We make a rod for our own back… we’re always responsive”.
“When things are time poor or you’ve got an important decision or it’s politically sensitive, [you] go to legal.”
Her favorite example? “We had a person run into the legal team on a very, very hot summer’s day to let us know that the cows at our Roseworthy animal facility didn’t have any shade.”
“How is that possibly a legal problem?”
(For the record, the cows got their shade.)
“We're helping people find their way through things. We’re taking away all of the fog.”– Shanti Berggren, General Counsel, Adelaide University
To align her team, Shanti whisked everyone away early on in her role to a group offsite. While together they landed on three pillars that now underpin everything they do.
Shanti and her team assessed 16 global tech vendors and Josef came out on top!
Fast forward through some comprehensive discovery and planning, they’re busy building and launching three kinds of tools:
“We had three to five thousand knowledge articles that were sitting dormant, and with the help of Josef we’re bringing them to life.”– Shanti Berggren, General Counsel, Adelaide University
“Describe Josef in three words,” Tom says. “A partner… two words!” Shanti says.
“Josef was a delight in that it was the same culture,” she explains. “The differentiator for us was your appreciation of our absolute merger fatigue. You weren’t going to make us have a workshop with a hundred people in. You were willing to work at our pace.”
Asked whether she, like many a lawyer, is a control freak, Shanti replies in the negative.
“I don’t think control matters. I think trust matters.”
It’s the thread running through everything she’s building at Adelaide University. Trust her team to think, trust the business to self-serve, and trust the technology to do what it’s designed to do, so the humans can step in at exactly when they need to.
As Shanti puts it: “Automation heaven is making sure that there’s work that gets done that we don’t have any oversight of. And it goes to trust.”
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Listen to the conversation in full on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
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