Post by Sam Flynn

Working with adidas GC Katherine Roseveare over the past year has been a masterclass in one of the hardest problems in legal leadership: how do you actually counsel a business at scale? “The biggest users of Word in the whole business are the legal team. Lawyers love producing documents, policies, frameworks. But nobody wants to read those anymore.” Katherine calls it "infobesity". In this context, how do you make sure the right person has the right answer at the right time across a workforce of 65,000+ when no one has time to engage? You do what Katherine did. You turn that knowledge into tools that meet people where they work, and communicate in the way they expect, all while staying in control of what the AI actually says. (That last part matters more than anything in this context.) What struck me most was a benefit Katherine didn't set out to create. Once people could self-serve, they started asking the questions they'd never raise with a human. Can I accept this gift? Am I allowed to do that? As she puts it, it surfaces "the questions we never see", something Legal could never get to one conversation at a time. And that's the shift: from Legal as the team you go to once you're already in trouble, to advice that reaches the whole business everywhere at once. Check out the video to learn how Katherine did this, how she is helping to lead and build a modern Legal function at adidas, and where she thinks we're headed. I've learned a huge amount from Katherine, Alex Herrity, Bill Frank and the whole adidas team this past year, and I’m beyond proud that Josef gets to power this. The full conversation — including her two rules for surviving Legal, and the glorious "super duper wow wow" — is well worth a listen. Link in the comments 👇

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