“It helps us with the questions we never see”: How adidas’ global legal team answers compliance questions with AI

Challenge

At adidas, legal’s fingerprint is on every corner of an enterprise of 65,000+ people: brand reputation to global trade, ESG to human rights in manufacturing, consumer complaints, government relations. No two days look the same.

For the Legal Solutions team, the ability to guide the business at scale was a critical one. Yes, they had the beautiful SharePoints and perfectly structured FAQs. But Legal still found themselves telling people: the answer’s on the intranet, here’s the link.

• Repeat compliance questions came in from all sides of the business
• Employees needed help, but didn’t know where to start
• Low-level queries took time away from higher-value legal work

“I call it infobesity,” says General Counsel Katherine Roseveare. “People have too much information, and nobody can be bothered to go find it.”

Where the tolerance for risk is zero, they needed a tool they could actually trust.

Solution

Katherine’s team reviewed their knowledge libraries and began transforming key areas into AI Q&A tools the whole business could easily engage with.

First up: a compliance tool, timed to launch alongside the release of the company’s new Code of Conduct.

adidas’ suite needed to take rigorous approach to accuracy, so before they got stuck in, a bake-off took place between Josef and Microsoft Copilot.

“I don’t want to see a hallucination. This is too delicate a topic. I want people to have certainty in the answers. We have to. It’s too risky.”

• Josef draws answers from approved documentation only
• A phased rollout, seeded with early adopters, would drive sustainable adoption

Josef came out on top.

Example: Code of Conduct Q&A

Previously, employees would go directly to the legal team with compliance questions, or in some cases, not ask at all. Now they can get answers any time they want: accurate, backed by verifiable sources, and drawn from approved documentation only.

“There’s actually a hidden benefit,” Katherine says. “People use the chatbot when they’re asking questions they’re too embarrassed to ask a human.”

It’s also made it easier for employees not working in their first language to get answers quickly, without having to labour over grammar and sentence structure. And the usage data is showing the team exactly where guidance needs strengthening and where to build next.

Results

With the tools live, the legal team can focus on the work only lawyers can do.

• Compliance questions get answered accurately and on demand, without involving a lawyer
• Hidden questions surface: employees ask things they’d never raise with a human, giving legal new insight into the business
• Language is no longer a barrier: employees across the world can engage in their own words
• Legal’s time is protected: less time on repeat queries, more on strategic work

As Katherine puts it: “It really helps us with the questions we never see. It helps us analyze whether our training materials are good enough, what focus areas we should pick up, and generally what’s in people’s minds.”