The challenge: Keeping pace with a high velocity business

At Canva's scale, with over 250 million monthly active users, the legal team faced a significant operational bottleneck. The same questions about data residency, liability caps, and contract terms flooded their sales enablement Slack channel daily. Even with a comprehensive knowledge base, the sales team’s Slack-first workflow meant lawyers were spending hours manually providing the same answers repeatedly. This diverted their focus from complex negotiations and strategic initiatives, creating avoidable friction in the sales process while responses were being coordinated.

The bottleneck was about where lawyer time was spent, not the legal team's capability. Hours spent re-answering documented questions were hours not spent on complex contract negotiations, policy development, or strategic cross-functional work. The team needed a solution that met three requirements: preserve Slack as the primary interface (ensuring actual adoption), connect to their existing knowledge base (avoiding duplicate work), and allow lawyers to verify answers before they reached the business (maintaining accuracy and institutional knowledge capture).

Generic AI tools could generate answers, but without centralized governance and visibility, they risked creating a "shadow legal" problem - legal guidance flowing across the business with no playbooks, no audit trail, and no way for the legal team to see or control what advice was being given.

The solution: AI-powered, Lawyer-verified answers in Slack

Wordsmith AI addressed all three requirements directly. The platform's native Slack integration meant the sales team's workflow remained unchanged, they continued asking questions in the same channel. Wordsmith connected to Canva's existing knowledge base, eliminating duplicate documentation work. Most critically, the system gave lawyers centralized control: every AI-generated answer flowed through an admin channel where the legal team could review, approve, and refine responses before they reached the business.

"Wordsmith's thoughtful approach to in-house legal stood out immediately." - David Bushby, Head of Legal Operations, Canva

The admin channel became the legal team's command center. When a sales question came in, Wordsmith generated a draft answer from the knowledge base. Lawyers reviewed it in the admin channel—approving accurate responses instantly, editing imprecise ones before they went out, and flagging gaps that needed documentation. Each interaction improved the system. Approved answers became verified responses for future queries. Edited answers updated the underlying knowledge base. The legal team maintained complete visibility and control, while the sales team got instant access to lawyer-verified guidance without waiting for manual responses.

The Impact: Proving legal's strategic value

The implementation solved a core problem for legal operations: scaling support without scaling headcount while maintaining control over what legal guidance the business receives. By connecting directly to Canva's contract repositories, Google Drive, SharePoint, and existing knowledge base, Wordsmith ensured every answer drew from the company's actual policies and approved language. No stale documentation, no manual syncing between systems, no risk of guidance diverging from current legal positions.

"Easy to implement. The time savings hit immediately." - David Bushby, Head of Legal Operations, Canva

For Canva's legal team, the shift was immediate. Lawyers stopped spending hours re-answering the same questions and started focusing that time on complex negotiations and strategic work. The sales team continued working exactly as they had—asking questions in Slack— but now received lawyer-verified answers instantly rather than waiting for manual responses. As Canva's internal policies and contract playbooks evolved, Wordsmith's answers evolved with them automatically because the system drew from living documentation sources rather than static copies.

The admin channel provided complete visibility into every interaction. The legal team could see every question asked, every answer generated, and every edit made. This audit trail became valuable not just for governance, but for identifying patterns: which questions came up most frequently, where documentation needed clarification, and which policies required updating based on business needs.

Key takeaways for in-house legal teams

• Choose Purpose-Built Solutions: Rather than investing time and resources into building in-house tools, partner with specialists who understand the unique challenges of in-house legal work.

• Meet the business where they are: Leverage the tools and platforms your team already uses. Adoption accelerates when you work with existing behaviors, not against them.

• Build for continuous improvement: The best AI implementations get smarter over time. Choose tools that capture and compound institutional knowledge.