How Adelaide University built a self-service legal function from scratch with Josef

Challenge

For General Counsel Shanti Berggren, merging two of South Australia’s most established universities meant a rare opportunity.

Build a legal function from scratch, one that helps everyone across the university, while freeing her team to focus on the strategic work only they can do.

She walked into the role not knowing a single person on her team. A moment she describes as “both lonely and liberating.”

There were a few challenges to tackle head-on:

• “Traffic director” requests defaulting to legal because no one knew where else to go
• Repeat queries on policies and processes that were already documented
• High-volume, low-risk work crowding out higher-value matters

“We were just spending so much time on transactional work,” Shanti says. “We weren’t making time for the meaty, heavy, strategic, high-risk work.”

Solution

Shanti and her team assessed 16 global tech vendors before Josef came out on top.

Fast forward through some comprehensive discovery and planning, and they’re busy building and launching three kinds of tools.

• Nancy, a legal concierge embedded directly into ServiceNow and SharePoint, so anyone across the university can request legal help wherever they already work.
• AI Q&A tools that answer repeatable questions on demand, helping bring up to five thousand dormant knowledge articles back to life.
• Self-service contract automation that lets teams generate routine documents without having to throw them over the fence to legal first.

“Josef was a delight in that it was the same culture,” Shanti says.

“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.”

Example: Nancy the legal concierge

Before, getting help from legal would often mean knowing someone in legal. Senior people had a path in while ohers didn’t always know where to start.

Now there’s Nancy. The legal concierge lives where the rest of the university already works, takes intake requests, triages them, and gets the right matter to the right lawyer the right way.

“You don’t have to know anyone in legal,” Shanti says. “There are repeatable questions, and you can find your way through it.”

Results

Nancy, along with a growing suite of contract tools are now live and the function is taking shape:

• The business has a clear legal front door right where they work
• Teams university-wide can draft their own routine contracts and documents
• AI Q&A tools will take repeatable questions off the team’s plate as more tools go live
• The legal team has time focus on the strategic, high-risk work that matters most

As Shanti puts it: “That’s not dumping work on other people. That is empowering people to work through things.”