How Bupa’s legal team sparked company-wide innovation with self-service tools

The challenge

Bupa’s Legal Operations team wanted to improve how Legal works day to day and  supports the wider business.

• Teams would wait on Legal to turn around routine contracts like NDAs, MSAs and Fit Out Agreements
• Legal was flooded with recurring questions like “How do I do this?” and “Where do I go for that?”
• Critical guidance was buried in policies and playbooks that were “too dense” to be useful

Head of Legal Operations, Claire Nuske, and her team, decided to tackle each issue head on, creating dozens of tools to streamline intake, generate contracts and handle Q&A with AI.

The solution

1. Easier intake

The team created a centralized intake tool, coined Sam the Running Elephant, so that every legal request comes through one easy-to-use channel.

2. Self-service contract generation

40+ contracts from NDAs, MSAs, to Fit Out Agreements, were all automated so that teams can draft what they need when they need it. 

3. AI-powered Q&A

Legal took in-demand resources like its Marketing Playbook, HR & People policies and turned them into easy-to-use Q&A tools. 

Teams now have on-demand access to guidance they can trust, and Legal can spend more time on higher-level strategic work instead fielding the same questions over and over.

Lessons learned

Claire shared some of her biggest takeaways:

1. Generate quick wins first: Deliver measurable value early by automating your most high-volume, standardized contracts.
2. Kickstart adoption with open-minded teams: By choosing the right testers early on, you’ll get helpful feedback from the start.
3. Remember to show your impact: The more you report on time saved or the number of processes improved, the more buy-in you’ll get to unlock further opportunities!

“Start small and just start,” Claire says. “Don’t worry about the potential difficulties implementing change… you just need to start!”

Results

Bupa’s legal team built a repeatable model for innovation across the business.

• Hundreds of legal requests are handled each month through the Sam intake tool
• 40+ contract tools now generate documents without needing Legal’s help
• In one sprint, Procurement “churned out 24 NDAs in just two days. They could just get them out by themselves, we weren’t a roadblock!” 
• Dozens of Q&A tools are now live across teams like Marketing, Procurement, HR and Workplace Relations
• It took HR less than a month to launch 10 Q&A tools of its own. They saw Legal’s success and wanted to follow suit!