#22 - Creating Technology for Legal Ops with Katherine Roseveare and Alex Herrity at Adidas

What does it take to run a high performing business? Strategy, finesse and a lot of advice from people who've been there, done that before. I'm Mario Carroll. Join me on my Pearls on Gloves off podcast to hear from the leaders building some of the most innovative companies today. We'll take a high value, no holds barred approach to find out what works. See you there.

Hello, everyone. Today we are recording from the Adidas offices in Amsterdam. Amsterdam, with my hosts here and my podcast. Catherine Rosevaire, general counsel, global functions, global operations and legal solutions here at Adidas. And Alex Herity, the director of legal solutions. Thanks so much for having me in your beautiful offices, which are also very cool. We're in this room right now that is a replica of the stadium locker room. Is that right, Catherine?

That's right, the IX stadium, which is across the road. Very proud sponsors.

Yeah. So this is very special to be here today and thank you guys for letting us record a podcast while I'm visiting.

No problem.

Great to have you here.

Welcome to your three striped life. It starts today, Mary.

This is a great trip because I had an excuse not to wear any heels.

Yeah, but still the pearls, Mary.

But of course, still the pearls. Let's get it out of the way. It is Adidas, right? Because in the US everyone says Adidas.

You can say both, as long as you buy the shoes. The Europeans tend to say Adidas. Yeah. And in the US it tends to say Adidas, but we really don't mind.

It's funny though, depending on who you're speaking to, sometimes I'll refer to Adidas to someone in the UK and they'll say, okay. And then they're like, oh, do you mean Adidas? It really is what you've grown up on. Maybe what TV shows you watched as a kid, all kind of stuff. But yeah, we're not too fussy, I don't think.

Yeah. And some people think it was all day I dream about sports or soccer.

Is what I heard growing up.

Well, that would be American. Yeah, but it's actually short for Adolf Daslow. So Adi Daslow is the founder of Adidas, who will take a picture of you next to him in reception, Mary, when you leave. So he was the founder, so that's how it became Adidas.

So I think my paradise's bio. I thought maybe we could start with a little bit of background. Tell me about your role here and then perhaps the very short version of path you took to get here. Why don't we start with you, Katherine?

Sure. I've Been at Adidas now for 18 years, I think. But before that I used to work at Umbro's General Counsel. Then I was in private practice, Adelshaw Goddard, but actually did some comments out to Adidas UK actually, which gave me my taste in this industry. And I've done various things during my tenure here, but I look after a whole bunch of things, functions, operations, so making and moving products, the internal sort of corporate functions. But then also a very special team which is the legal solutions team. And I have joined here today by a member of that team, which is Alex.

Yeah, so I guess quickly my background as well is I think I've been working at Addie now for, since 2012, so yeah, 10 plus years. Well, and I started off as a legal counsel here, working in the UK team, so the local business unit based in the market, so selling the product directly to consumers. And then I had various little secondments to different areas, a bit of time in private practice as well, but ultimately ended up working in the HQ over in Germany. And that's where I initially slotted under Catherine's wing in one of her many teams. And that was just around the time that sort of operations was taking off in the corporate. So five, six years ago, maybe even longer now. And Catherine was talking about, we should do this, we need to do more of this legal tech, legal operations. And I had a little bit of a background in making some of my own little solutions, a few legal tech things that I've done. I was interested in learning how to code and things like that. So I think Catherine and I were chatting about IT and you said, do you want to stop doing the day work of legal work and you want to try this new thing? And yeah, we decided to go for it. That's when the kind of team in earnest started. There's a few colleagues who come from like, I see teams that were doing similar things, but that's when we built our legal operations team. But we called IT Solutions because we want to be solutions orientated and operations means a different thing in our business as well. So it makes sense for us.

So if you keep going on about something long enough, somebody eventually turns around and says, just go and sort it out. Which is exactly what happened. There's lots of people in the team who are very enthusiastic about technology, but we needed to bring IT under one roof in Solutions because when you have a global team, you really can't have lots of different technology portfolios across the world. And actually that was part of our IT philosophy, our tech philosophy as well, as the company as a whole. So we knew we had to bring under one roof and actually you don't need a whole different technology portfolio. If you have one or two people in a market, you may as well have something for the whole function. Managing technology as well is not that easy. So when we started Solutions, we knew technology was going to be number one, but we knew it couldn't just be technology. So we really knew we had to change a culture, change a mindset. And that was what that's really how we try and run solutions in this team. We don't have to educate people most of the time. We try to manage expectations. We've had such a growth over the last four or five years of people wanting to change and do things more efficiently.

Fantastic. So in the beginning, was it that way or was it a little bit of an uphill battle trying to get traction?

And it was a mixture really, depending on what it was. In fact, we started at Clock.

I remember this.

Yeah, yes. After we said, catherine, just go and sort it out. How on earth. No, we actually came to Vegas in 2018, I think I remember seeing you.

In the hall and you said, just did it. We just sat down and banged out the plan for the next few years.

So we came to Clock and actually we took quite a few of us. We brought Bill, we'll go through the team in a second. But we took a few members of the legal team from the US different parts of it. So somebody from the patents team, somebody from commercial team. Alex came because he had an interest in legal technology. And we said, let's go completely open minded, go with a whole bunch of questions, figure out what everybody else is doing and then figure out what we need. So we just went crazy for four days. Not on the gambling tables, but in the rooms. And we just were like sponges, we just both soaking everything up. And then we went away to think about what do we actually need and how are we going to pull this together. And then we went ahead with a recommendation to the general counsel at the time, said, I think this is how we start. So we started off with very basic three year plan. It was really simple. First year was what do we have? It took us quite a long time to figure that out. Yeah, what do we need and what are the big ticket items we need to clean up? And then what's the rest of the roadmap? And then organically just grew over time. So we now have three pillars. Maybe. Alex, you want to talk about the three pillars of solutions?

Yeah, I'm trying to think, oh, my God, what's super. Yeah. And I guess just quickly before that, to your point around, did this happen? People making requests? I think that's one of the big things. One of the big themes is we don't have to go to people so often as people coming to us now. Or even those conversations that I think every business has where you just. We'll just park it with that team for now because they're not going to bite or we know that person isn't really. I just don't think we have as many of those or even any of those and more. It's. People are really raising the flag themselves and it's a different challenge because you need to manage expectations. But, yeah, initially it was finding those friendly faces and then, yeah, trying to do what we could, but now it's completely different.

Yeah, we take the philosophy from how we sell product, actually. You have influencers, you have first adopters, and then it goes to mass market and then it's about maintenance of the product. So we really try and latch onto the enthusiasm of those people in the team who are interested about making change and then other people, what are they doing? People are recognizing what's happening and seeing the efficiencies in the team. And then we just try and help spark that enthusiasm and do some of the background making stuff, making the magic happen behind the scenes. That's really how we see it.

You know, your team is successful when you get to that point where people start knocking on your door. I remember going through that as well, where we were knocking on doors and teams were saying, oh, no, thank you, we're good, go talk to somebody else. And we could. Until you found the teams and the people that were excited to work with you and then got traction and you showed success. And then over time, then you get so many requests that the question becomes, how do I prioritize out of all these things that people want me to do?

Yeah. We recently had an implementation for a new tool and I think after the first training session or first onboarding, two people independently from separate teams messaged me saying, hey, would I be able to get access to Sandbox? I've got a few ideas. I was like, what's going on? This is so from that field now. But it's super exciting. Right. I think that goes back to the mantra that the best ideas for a lot of the use cases are within the legal teams themselves and getting that culture shift to where they can then offer them up by themselves. That's really where the goal is going to be because legal operations, you can only do so much and the less you're practicing day to day, the slightly more removed you do get over time. So we try to kind of refresh that. But you do. I think we're pretty open to say we're relying on you to come up with cool ideas and max out the product and kind of really come with. We can lay the foundations, but we're already seeing that people are just, I want to try this. And if you can give them a friendly place to do it, that's really cool as well.

Yeah. Trying to find the common denominators.

Yeah. Without going too crazy. I guess that's the thing always iterations need to happen in a sensible, semi controlled way. But we also don't want to stifle creativity.

We're very much a creative business. It's just what we do day in, day out. And I would say lawyers are definitely creators too, particularly here. If you don't like creating, don't come to an inns because we want that mindset, we want that people who want to make change, we want to work with other people in the business who are very creative. You can't be in a fashion sports business without being creative. And we're really setting our own agenda. We're trying to respond to the needs of the team. We don't sit here and say the legal team needs this. We are responsive to what the legal team needs and we try and do it in collaboration with them. And we always say that we have across the whole of the global legal team, everybody's part of solutions. It's not us, we're a team of six. Now it's myself, it's Alex based in the uk, we've got Bill based over in the us, we've got Andreas and Ellie based in Germany and we have Maripath who's based here in Amsterdam as well. And we started off with being allocated to very specific areas, but now we just try and make sure the whole team is. Has much more transparency on different parts of legal. So they can, we can cross fertilize ideas, we can have development within the team, but then also we have all those people who are out in the legal team seeing this day in, day out who are really interested in the topic. So we always want to make them feel as though they're those honorary members of solutions. So we have these three principles, technology, efficiency and engagement. Technology comes first because we have the big portfolio that we have to maintain. Efficiency is really about how do we make Legal as efficient as possible. That's mainly about spend, spending the budgets in the right way and processes. And the last one is engagement, knowledge management, making the legal team feel as one community through SharePoint, through trainings, through whatever. But just having that feeling of connection, we think with those three things then you start to change culture and then you start to change the way that we do things.

And with the culture, the mindset, the creativity, the wanting to change, it sounds you really have that now. But is that something your team had to consciously try to put on the rest of the department? You mentioned what 300 people around the globe in legal.

Yeah. Global legal is not just legal like other functions might know. We actually have social, environmental affairs, we have government affairs, we have protection, physical security, people security. But we all have that red thread that goes across all the different teams which is about enabling and protecting what the business needs to do. So we know we have to cater for all of their needs and they don't have to interact with each other. So we have a very wide portfolio of technology, for example, that they need. But you have to make sure people feel connected. So it's either through technology or it's through initiatives that we do as part of the legal function that creates that sense of community. But yeah, I don't think we don't sit here and set the agenda to say this year the culture will be X. It's we're just trying to reflect the team.

Yeah, I think it was a mixture of trying to harness what was already there and then catalyze the rest. And yeah, but that's mostly again I think I've said a few times before, people talk about lawyers being risk averse and all those kind of things, which there's some things that true about that but they're certainly not out of ideas. That's always oh, legal just want to do it the old way and they've got no ideas. Plenty of time. I think they've got tons of ideas but they usually fall at probably the first hurdle, which is I'd love to do this thing and I would just do them tech here, oh, it's not there and you just stop straight away because you've got such a busy day. But I think we were there to be saying ask some of that to us. We'll work together, we can take some heavy lifting, we'll have conversations. Big corporate, you need to have conversations with it, Infosec, privacy, all these things. On tech especially, we can do some of that heavy lifting for you. We can be your guide through some of those processes which I think are just a little bit opaque to lawyers a lot of the time because you don't do a lot of this and you expect things to work in a certain way and they don't. So you just get discouraged. So I think we were there to just bang the drum, extract those ideas and set those people off who wanted to do stuff, get them going and then yeah, just slowly raise the bar for everybody else. And we've definitely seen the sort of the fruit of our labors on that.

We had a year of play when we started to use Office365 differently and we started to use Power Automate. We were just learning as we were going, we just went let's go try anything. We don't care what it is, just try whether it's something really, really small we don't have. Sometimes it's not just about doing the big implementations of systems. We introduced an Aqua big chunky IP management system and then we went, okay, let's go to the complete opposite of that. This is something you can do in your daily life. Learn how to use Microsoft forms because that going to change the way you do things. Use a functional inbox and this changes the way that people actually provide their legal services. You have to be more collegiate. You have to really think about how you have been doing things and what do you want to change. So I think that was also a turning point this year of play where people just really sat down and thought how are we doing this?

So I'm just going back a little bit because I think a lot of folks who want to put this in place struggle with trying to get the headcount, trying to get the budget. But I think what's interesting about the way you came up with the full on plan and you pitched the idea, but it doesn't sound like you asked for headcount initially because you took someone who was existing in the department.

That's right. We already had a contract management team to manage our global contract system. So we already had two people in the team and there's a few other people in the team who were very interested in it would try to drive these initiatives. So we adopted people along the way and then I managed to get Alex on board and then as we were rolling out tracker to different locations we knew that's when we could ask for a headcount to support some of that. And then it sort of grow from.

There proving it through people dabbling on the side. And question for you Alex, that I get all the Time is I'm a practicing lawyer, I really want to get into legal ops. Mary, how do I apply? What do I do? And I said, you're at a big company already, just go do it. There's so many projects and initiatives and things that could be better if you just start doing things and start showing impact and then eventually saying, you know, I'm really interested in this. Could this be something that could be a role here? Or if you're going to leave, then at least you could say I've done it right. I just have the title. So is that essentially what happens for you?

Yeah, essentially that was it. It was the day to day job and I always joke that it's born out of my own laziness that there was a certain task that I just hate doing this all the time. And that was what drove it. Was it necessities, the mother invention, all.

That sort of stuff.

It was really necessary for me not to do that piece of work anymore. And that was it. Yeah, started to play around with something because I wanted that end result probably for me more than anything being totally selfish. But it was, yeah, but it was going to drive a business result and yeah, it got some traction and a.

Very supportive boss like Linda is really supportive and really into driving efficiencies and technology. Yeah, that was. Definitely gave you the space to do that.

Yeah, absolute, absolutely. Yeah, it was definitely that. I think it would probably been wrong to just go completely off grid myself because it was on a sensitive topic and we're working on something that's business related. So definitely worked with him to just say is there something cool that we can do? And having that support is great. But if you don't have an ops function or any kind of background like that, you do have to put in the hard yards a little bit yourself. So it was incrementally an extra hour here or watching a YouTube video over lunch whilst how do I write this little bit of code and the materials that are out there are crazy. I'm sure it's. You've gone even bigger in the last five years because there's so much stuff there. But definitely found myself down this sort of dark avenues of forums and things like that trying to figure out asking some grand wizards somewhere how do we do this and summon some code for you. But yeah, that was it. It was, yeah. Play around, deliver something and then that solution in particular kind of got a lot of traction and still iterations of it in the business today. But it was definitely, yeah, that living breathing proof of concept but then flipping over to Catherine's point, it was very clear to say, and if you want this to become a thing here, then you need to resource it and start putting something on the table and really putting something around it because you can max out. I think because being a lawyer is such a busy job, obviously we talk about that being the kind of reason a lot of the time for legal ops. So saying to someone who needs a double hat for a long time can be obviously counterproductive. So, yeah, definitely encourage GCS or heads of legal. Once you see that success, try and harness that, really try and make someone give someone some time and availability. Or short term assignments. Yeah, short term assignments are really cool. Partnering with some consultancy or something like that just to buy some time and some sort of support. Yeah, that's definitely a cool way to do it.

Rewarding and noticing and celebrating successes is really important. So everybody in the teams knows that if you do this, we will really try our best to allocate budget and time and against this. So we also. I think you won an award back in the day.

Yeah. And now we have a regular innovation award in our kind of annual awards for Global Eagle, which is really cool. We've had some really good wins and they've been a real range of things from just sort of new processes or working with a third party or just something someone's made. Chatbots, bits and bobs. Yeah. So it really encourages those people to come to the fore.

And we've also had our enterprise wide digital upskilling as a bit, as an entire business. So we've tried. Sometimes we've been ahead of the curve, sometimes we've been behind it. So we have a whole digital workplaces team now and we are banging on their door every single day to say please release the hound. So we want to go and play with this even more. If you think about the business, we're probably in our business, everybody does something on PowerPoint or Excel. Not many other teams use word like we use word. So we're really pushing them hard to make sure we have sufficient support to maximize Office365 as much as we possibly can. And they use us sometimes for pilots because they know we're quite receptive. And also what we do actually has an enterprise wide effect. If you're looking at employment contracts or you're looking at something that goes through the procurement team, nearly everything we do is not just purely for legal, it's actually related to all the other departments. It has a massive cross functional business benefit.

Yeah, yeah.

I Definitely took that as a kind of badge of honor. When the IT guys were you guys are doing all this stuff and you're legal and what are you doing? I was like, yes, that means we're amazingly front of the queue. Such a small department, relatively speaking and yet them to say can you come along to our kind of quarterly and share this use case example? I was like, yeah, we can. Yeah, absolutely.

We had a similar experience when I was at Google where legal became the shining star of leading innovation as a DNA function and we were doing use case stories and at the all hands for our legal for our engineering team. Well here's the success of how we collaborated with the IT ran team and here's how we were successful. But you would never would guess that legal would be leading the pack when it came to innovation in the company. So that's really great that you're able to do that.

And the business has changed to the way we run our tech. So we've gone from having tech business partners and then whatever happens over the other side of the fence we had no clue to now we have a product LED business and the building you're sat in today, this is our main house of digital around the world. So we've really upskilled an entire business about agile philosophies, sprints. I mean we're just talking a different language these days. So we now have to run the product area for legal risk and audit, which means the tech colleagues are at our table. So we've had to learn a different way of working as well. In fact, kickoff meeting at the beginning of the year. This year we had it together with the tech team because we said we can't set the agenda for the year unless you're at the table with us. We would never have done that a year ago or two years ago. We just said here's our one pager and this is what we want this year. Now we do it with them. Which has been that's also been a great learning for us to understand how these things get paid for and working out the magic that happens in the techit funding process.

So sort of on that, that's the other question that a lot of people have is okay, I believe in it, but I can never get funding, I can never get budget because we're legal and we just don't get tech budget. You mentioned Office365 and so do the tools that you have at your disposal. And that's great. I think that can take you to a certain point. But at the size and scale of a company you are, you probably get to the point where you go, okay, this is not scalable. We do need budget, we do need purpose built solutions. Have you had to make sort of pitches for that? Have you been successful? What tips and tricks can you give?

Well, Tracker for example we have SAP Ariba but we said we need Tracker. So it was why do you need this? We need to have standardized. We need it. When we pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and we had a great head of procurement who'd had worked with it before. She's like, yep, she ticked the box and got it through. We said we will manage it, just let us run with it. And now we've got the phase where they're actually seeing benefits. And we got a comment not so long ago saying actually this is better than Ariba. Yes, we know this is what we wanted in and the reporting that you can get and the time, the less time it takes on our shared service teams. People are now starting to see the efficiencies but we've had to put in the hard legwork to get into that space. So we had to an aqua. We had to have an IP management system. We have say our product area is not just legal, it's also protection. So even the visitor badges that comes within our product area. So we have to have a big range of things that are not just legal in order to make this fit within the model that the company wants to work towards. So how many tools do we probably have? Like 20 which are not Office 365 based.

Yeah. And then you mentioned you had to make the pitch that we'll manage it ourselves. Is that pretty important? I know it is always limited. So sometimes we were always told that's a great tool, you'll have it one day. But we don't have the resources to help you right now. So it can't be an R roadmap from the IT team. But if there were things that we said our team can manage it because it's low code, no code, or we had someone who actually knew how to code, then as long as they were involved and blessed it, then we could kind of run with it finding the same thing. Is that a good argument to.

I think so, because I think getting into the detail of that is really important because there's an assumptions are made all the time where the tech team don't always appreciate what a specific legal tech tool is doing and they might overstate it in their mind. So you really. We've worked in the last year Particularly with the team, to get into the detail of what that means. When we say the predominant heavy lifting here is actually the operational lifting in the back end. So just having super users or buying in some consultancy to support that isn't going to be your time it so you don't need to just making them feel comfortable. It's not going to be loads of change requests that go to IT and they go through that process. Most of the modern tools actually have that concept now, right, where the infrastructure is an IT thing. But actually the back end operations can be done by some tools, can be done actually by the attorneys. But obviously the bigger the tool, the bigger the company. You're probably going to have either your ops team or specialists within your ops team on CLM obviously, which you know so well. You might have a doc engineer or a CLM admin or those kind of things or supporting it with external and getting some budget for that as well. I think you have to drill into it because when you're pitching something lots of assumptions are made, lots of misunderstandings. We've got to try and speak the same language and that's we really try to do so.

We took our tech colleagues because we are now we see ourselves as one team. We took them to clock. So understand what's happening. When the domain architect came along, fabulous lady called Jeanette, if you're listening Jeanette, she said, I remember her saying, oh wow, legal tech is a new fintech we know. And that massively helped because then they could visualize how that might put the building blocks together in the business. And then we spent a lot of time when we looked at, we're starting to look at clm, educating the tech teams and the other support teams around it. What is a contract, how does it work? What's the process? Do you understand contracts go through many functions of the business in different ways. It's not just one team who does it. It might be sports marketing, it might be real estate, it might be employment, it might be procurement. And all of these have different processes because they're so used to having, okay, invoices get approved, paid money goes out. It's a standardized process, doesn't work for clm. And I think everybody blew their minds as to how diverse these processes are. And then we have the internal issues as to how do we standardize our own content that goes through those. So there's lots of different moving parts when you're looking at some of these bigger projects.

And then who owns it too, right? Who gets to make the decisions on Something that is so cross functional. How does that work for your company? So many folks that I talk to don't even know where to start because they want to fix the problem. But there's so many stakeholders involved, I don't even know if I'm authorized to make suggestions or to fix this.

That's where the particular technology, that's where the funding process comes into place. We always have to, I call it street fighting. We go in with our list of things we want and then we have to make hard trade offs between. What's more important? Is a business partner due diligence tool more important at the moment than this or is it something on an E comm? So there's lots of different gates you have to get through and you just have to go into a bit like Dragon's Den. You have to go in and do your pitch and start street fighting for the money.

And working with enterprise architecture as well. So all these teams that I would never have appreciated a few years ago. Ivan, who's our architect, he's fantastic as well. Just working with him and keeping close contact so he really understands what's going on and why. And again, as part of that community, a totally separate community that we would not have had visibility of without him, he can go away. And there are always all these different meetings and explaining this is something that should sit with legal. This is why I understand the process. I know you're hearing this from hr, that maybe it should be them and bringing people to make sensible decisions that maybe are data driven or makes sense from the key processes that are going to go in there. I think you, unfortunately you always have to dig into the detail and lay it all out for people and then just keep reiterating, keep walking people through. I think one of the biggest tips we always have is always have a deck that always comes to every meeting to just be like, remember this is what we're talking about in one slide. Here it is. I don't want to go too heavy on PowerPoint or anything like that, but there's so many meetings where you put a 20 minutes in and you realize, oh, I don't think half the people here know what we're even talking about. And we're talking about something very specific for legal. I can totally understand why someone in HR or in IT wouldn't have any clue what this means. What does CLM mean for example? So just having that back to basics and then resetting, reframing, unfortunately it's the way it goes, but it's. You can See why in a big setting with corporate, you need to make sure everyone's pulling in the right direction.

Well, I have two very simple rules of survival. I share them. One is assume nothing. And that means ask questions, always go back to basics, make sure everybody in the room, especially if they're supposed to be having an influence on something, understands what on earth is going on. But it also means stay curious. It means have that open mindset. The second rule of the office is embrace the chaos. Because it'll never go in a straight line, particularly not here. The three stripes. It's always a little bit chaotic and creative, and if you try and control it too much, it will probably. You won't survive very long. So you have to learn how to network your way around the place and to get stuff done. So those two things, two guiding lights.

Yeah, I could not agree more. I always say the most important quality in legal ops is figuring out how to get stuff done. Because it is not a straight line and it is not. No one's going to sit you down and say, here's the process of how to get things done. Every organization's got their who you need to talk to, who are the influencers. And that doesn't always mean they're the leaders. You've got influencers at all levels and all eyesight. And you get.

Now, general counsel came in. I mentioned those two survival rules in his onboarding. A couple of months later, he sent me an email saying, catherine, I have a third one. I was like, oh, gosh, what's this all about? He said, rule number one, assume nothing. Rule number two, embrace the chaos. Rule number three, there are no exceptions to rule number one and two. So you are free to roam the streets of Adidas unaccompanied, because we keep coming back to it, whether it's in a contractual negotiation. Do all your business people know and understand what's going on? I think it's just those rules have really helped us. When we've been doing setting objectives, doing a review. Does everybody know what we're doing? Does everybody. Are we doing the right thing and taking stuff off the list? We've got also force of levers of efficiency. Do you want to go through them?

My favorite one is stop doing things.

Yeah.

So that's the. Yeah. Which is interesting. Which I think is a real sort of. It is difficult for lawyers to do that. Definitely the one. Just. I've mentioned that loads of different meetings past and people have really fought me on it sometimes been like, no, but what if I just. I'VE got it mentality. Obviously, automation radically simplify is another point of. That was a mantra for us a couple of years.

Because coming back again, I think it.

Needs to come back. And then, oh, I've got to stop it now. What's an outsource?

Yeah.

So smartly.

Because again, you don't have to do everything yourself. Plenty of really creative and clever folks out there that are doing really amazing stuff. And I think with the rise of the spot alternative legal service providers, there's just stuff out there that just wasn't there three or four years ago. And there's people with incredible skills in either knowledge of a certain product or just something they've done before.

Technology we haven't been allowed to buy.

Yeah.

So why we should be leveraging this where we can.

Yeah.

It's really changed the game, the ecosystem and like certain of those types of alternative service providers existed before, but now the amount of services that you can do, even illegal ops outsourcing, legal ops outsourcing that, like you said, the implementation or the support of the ongoing management of software is.

We have that with Tracker. We have somebody, another amazing sub colleague who helps us manage the legal Tracker tool. Specialist in IT does it all the time. It's basically integrated into lots of our processes and it allows internal team members to then still keep an eye on it, but actually then start to learn to do other things as well. So we're really trying to put the right sort of effort in the right places.

Yeah. That's fantastic. Switching gears for just one second. I'm so curious. We're at the end of April. I don't know when this will actually go live, but what's the sentiment? Or within Adidas or even across Europe? Or are you feeling a lot of pressure here? Is it curiosity? Is it fear? What are you guys seeing?

All of the above. Let's go back to those two rules. It's about assume nothing. I think we need to really work out what is right for us. There's an awful lot of chat about it, there's a lot of excitement about it and we're all going to lose our jobs. That's everything it says in the newspapers, but if you use it smartly and in the right way, I think it can actually be extremely helpful. We haven't really got to the bottom of our thinking about it. I think there's still a lot of work to be done to figure out what is right.

Are lawyers in your department asking about.

It or is it AI has always been on top of the List of questions.

Yeah, I think it's definitely crystallized a little bit to that. I think that was the cool thing that OpenAI did. By putting that chatbot on the front end of it, they made it so much more understandable. It wasn't conceptual anymore. How do you explain it? And it's, again, it's not in the detail, but yeah, that chatbot just really blew it open. And obviously that's a show pony a little bit. The real power is what's under the hood and I know ironclad in that space as well. But yeah, for us, I think the thing that's really interesting for me is what we're seeing like the peak of the hype cycle. I'm guessing the peak maybe are going to carry on. I've just been buried by the news and if you try and go on Twitter or LinkedIn or something, it's obviously really difficult to navigate. Top five tips for prompting OpenAI and all this kind of stuff. And it's. It's just that crazy moment. I'm really excited to see those people that are going to come through with a really strong thread and a bit of a roadmap and even some people are just going to say, we're going to build something that's like at this point now and deliver something and just push it against some real use cases and show you the power of that. We're going to keep doing all the development and fun stuff in the back end and this product's going to iterate. But I think that's always what we've had it a little bit with Blockchain. I don't think it's going to be the same with Blockchain. I think this is going to be the real deal. But I think that's where we need to see some products that are delivering.

And we need to get our basics and foundational systems in place, which we can then use AI in it.

That's very true. Yeah. People say, how do I prepare? What should I do now? I think you nailed it, Catherine. AI is not going to be very helpful if you don't have your processes in one place. Someone explained to me it's the same as asking a human to do something. If everything is everywhere, they're not going to do as good a job if you point them to something. Go here. Is everything nicely structured in this folder?

Yeah. If your metadata is rubbish, well, good luck.

A very fast rubbish thing. But I think that's going to be interesting thing and obviously the privacy stuff is obviously really interesting. Just really interesting to see how it goes. What are corporates and the general sort of big businesses approach going to be to are they cool with their data sort of being finding its way into the data set for future training? I know that's not always going to happen. There are some tools that don't do that and I think that again, that's the iterative side of things is going to be really interesting. But yeah, it's just almost a bit of a bolt out of the blue really overnight and it's been so cool and I guess from the easy wins off it, it obviously does get in everyone's head straight away and makes people start talking about this sort of thing. And that's always a win, right?

That I think is the huge win because like you said, there's plenty of other processes and things that we have to put in place. But if there's excitement, if there's interest in at least getting to or they know what's possible and where we're going with this, not just creating process for process, then that dialogue is much more fruitful.

Yeah.

Preparation is key, as always. Fail to plan, plan to fail.

Yeah.

Is there anything else that you're seeing different in Europe versus maybe the US in terms of whether it's AI technology or even just the roles of legal ops? I know that I'm here this week because we are assembling a group of legal op helps people to come together in person today and do a roundtable discussion. Probably what wouldn't be possible. What, five years ago?

Probably not.

Clearly there's growth here. Is that. Are you seeing more? Is it something that's been around for a while now or is it still fairly new?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's definitely growth. There's more roles, more people that want to talk about this stuff.

Like you say, focusing on it as well. I think five years ago maybe people were doing it on the side a little bit. Like I was saying, we need to do something on this. But now I think there's more dedicated teams doing it and really putting time aside and headcount aside to drive this. Because legal has to be at the speed of business and you can't do it manually anymore because the business has speeded up, speed up, sped up.

Sorry.

So if we can't keep it the same pace or integrated into their processes, legal will always be the NO department and we don't want that.

Yes, yes, we seeing roles scoped correctly, do people understand what the impact of the role can be?

I don't Think there is one defined role. Even if I just look at our own team, the beauty of our team is we're completely diverse. Alex comes from a legal background, but somebody who's come from the tech team, somebody who's come from finance, somebody who's come from business administration, somebody else who's come from a legal background and business administration. And then I still have my other world, which is still the legal day job as well. So that diversity of thought has really, I think, has taken us to a whole new level and a new level of understanding of different perspectives of the business as well that we may not have thought about had it just been pure lawyers who'd become legal operations people.

Right, Yeah.

I would say that makes sense for kind of at the interview stage. I think the interview for Legal Ops rules need to be definitely more conversational because you need to extract what it is saying, oh, we said we need to come in to do Legal Ops and someone will turn in a CV for that and you'll be like, well, kind of. But I definitely think it's something you want to talk to them to say like all the obvious stuff, but like, is this kind of what they are expecting as well? Because it's going to be a flash in the pan otherwise people like, oh, this is really, you know, you're really hiring a legal engineer or a doc engineer for this. And actually my background is more in this. And I said I could do Legal Ops, but I did. I think that's the cool thing about Legal Ops is that it's such a broad church. It's a so many different avenues in. And as you said, in Europe, you know, there are some centers initially, you might say everything was coming out the States and then a lot of stuff out the uk Maybe Australia was leading for a little while with all that stuff, but now, yeah, India's got some. Yeah, all the kind of outsourcing stuff is really cool from there. But things legal design that's going to root into Legal Ops a lot of the time and got people in Helsinki and all the sort of Nordics, countries that are super hot on that. A lot of people in Spain doing stuff, robotics and things. I think that's the really amazing part of it is that, yeah, everyone's got a route to this central thing called Legal Ops, but it's still really movable and intangible and actually it's more what you're trying to achieve at the end of the day. So I think that it's not easy if you're trying to hire and you don't know too much about it.

But an elephant is quite difficult to describe until you see it and you know exactly what it is.

That's it.

Because I think it's actually just the personality of somebody who's coming in depending on where you are in your journey. We just want people who are open minded, who can help our patients and help bring people on the journey. I'm probably the most impatient person in the team.

But not everybody goes at the same pace as everybody else. So we need people who can help support and encourage to bring people on that journey. And depending on what you need, then you try and find the person to go around that particular need you have in the team. Which is why in this team, it's so important that we all have a little taste of what everybody else is doing. Because we might need to adapt and change if somebody goes off on maternity leave or leaves or goes to another department. It's also a really great career progression. A lot of our junior lawyers who are coming into Adidas now want to do something with technology they're all grappling to do. I don't want just to churn contracts or just do X, y or Z edit every day. I want to be involved in that, in the technology. It's actually part of their sort of education now. Very different.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And the scope of the role, as well as the background that people are hiring for. I have found the catalyst for a lot of companies saying, I think it's time for us to hire someone in whatever you want to call it. Legal ops is the digital transformation is the need for technology and to modernize the department. Whereas in the past, you guys have been around five, six years, and I think five, six years and earlier a lot of it was budget and financial management and trying to tighten the belt and how can we do things more efficiently. Now it's all tech tooling, AI. How do we modernize our department? And so you're getting less lawyers. You're starting to get diversity of project managers, data analysts, tech specialists, you name it.

Which is why that engagement, part of three pillars of solutions is so important. We need to change the culture. We need to help form the culture of the wider legal community to make sure that we're upskilling people. We are providing the right practical materials, the right knowledge bases to make sure they take them on their journey. It's all intertwined. You have to have those three things together. Yeah.

I think it's interesting now for companies that are large, like yours, because we are hearing all these lawyers saying with all the AI, I want my job to be tech, I want to do legal tech, I want some of it. Because they see where the future is going and I think that's very smart. And as don't want to be ageist, but the young people actually do know how to code and actually do know how to do stuff with tech a lot more than like I do. As a large company, we were always worried about saying, now everyone's going to go rogue. Now everyone's going to start building stuff and using tech and tooling and embrace.

The chaos you've got. So you can't, you can't control it. You have to just listen and understand where people, where it needs to go and what people want to do. And our job as leaders is actually just to open the door. You have to see where just sort of sense the room, what do we need?

Yeah, I do like that about the no code, low code stuff because that's for me, like the sandbox. I think you have to create spaces for people to do this stuff. And like you say, when you're working in a large organization, you can't obviously let everybody completely off the grid because you have a core business purpose that you're trying to deliver and a code of conduct and all the other good stuff. And there's like, you say that kind of the flip side of that is what happens if you don't let people do stuff? They leave. So that kind of classic, I don't know what example is, you're going to spend money training people, but what if they leave tomorrow and what if they stay? I think that's the classic here, isn't it? You need a healthy balance. And I think we're definitely at that stage where we want people to lean more towards the kind of just going a little bit crazy and doing something in that right environment and just saying, if you come to us and say, I want to completely rip this up, I've got a vision for it and this is what I think we could do. We can support you to say, okay, let's do that in an environment where that's okay. And then it could be implemented or it could be, we learn a few things from it or anything's possible. It's just that impossible is nothing but that's it. And I think that's the reality that you have to do that kind of cutting edge, letting people loose, but also then just constantly coming back, iterating, bringing it in, continuous improvement for dev test production. I think it's such a cool thing in it. You need that in your OPS and legal function. Because it doesn't have to be tech.

We'd like to apply the same principles to our work products. If you're doing contract templates, you're developing it, you're testing it, you're learning from it, you go back and change the templates the next year. The same principles you can apply for how you do tech development to how you do our own work products. And also, you can only do this by learning and failing. Yeah, and failing is a good thing. Failing is good because you learn from it, you learn from that, but you fail fast and you learn faster. And if people have the experience of that, it's not always about perfection. We want people to dot the I's and cross the T's. That's a very important skill within legal. But we want people to have that creative mindset, to collaborate with others, to understand where they're going and to then adapt and change. Because you can't stand still.

Exactly.

And if they do leave, they might come back.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Alex, you've now done solutions and all this for a long time and specifically in legal tech, which is the hot thing right now, hence you've become what, a legal influencer?

Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe.

Well, I was speaking to you, so I can't really claim that, but was.

That just by accident? Was that. Did you try to build up.

Yes, I think initially it was just by accident because I was using LinkedIn probably more as my platform to just ask questions initially. I think I remember some of my first questions were back in when people were talking about blockchain. I was doing smart contracts, what's going on? And you get some really smart people out there who are really happy to share, which is amazing. That's probably the cool things about social media or the right channels of social media, some not so great. And then, yeah, it became more of a conscious thing, which was less about my day to day Adidas work. But the cool thing about it was meeting new people, someone with a new idea. And then we can mention that in the team meeting, we're always talking. But yeah, from my point of view, I definitely lean into that sort of rising tides lifts all the boat and I definitely see the upside of it. So, yeah, I guess being in a sort of semi privileged position because I'm not a vendor or I'm not trying to sell my wares, I've got a little bit of a space to Just say, I can put that out there. Someone can happily DM me and ask me a question. And it's crazy. People from FTSE companies where you're a really massive company, you're asking me a really basic question. But okay, that's what you needed. You needed someone to put something out there. And I just say, you want to speak to these three people or this is what we're doing, start looking at it. I've just been that sort of conduit, I think is where I see my role. But I'm definitely more of a sort of introverted person. So I have had a few instances of people saying you're the guy from such a thing and I'm already like, oh no, I'm going to have to cancel, I'm going to have to stop because I can't take the embarrassment of going into a law firm and someone says, oh, you're that guy. But no, it has been really super fun. And yeah, getting a small little bit of dopamine off a few thousand or something like that, it's. Yeah, it's been cool. Please follow me for listening to this. I'm thirsty for the likes now.

I'm addicted to incredibly useful. When we are brainstorming ideas, we're like, oh gosh, somebody else must have done this. Alex, find out. We will network. Somebody else has done it. This cannot be rocket science.

Yeah.

Thank you both so much for your time and for doing this. This was a lot of fun out of bows of wisdom and glad to see it.

Yeah, Amazing. Thanks for coming.

Thank you.

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