How one of Australia’s largest legal service providers saves $120k on HR & payroll with Employment Hero

About the business

Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) is the largest law and justice service in the Northern Territory and one of the biggest in Australia. 

With 200+ staff spread across Australia, the organisation delivers civil law, criminal law, family law, youth justice servies, community legal education, a custody notification service, policy and law reform services and throughcare services for Aboriginal people right accross the Northern Territory.

The challenge

Before Employment Hero, NAAJA was juggling five disconnected systems. Payroll didn’t talk to HR, and recruitment didn’t talk to onboarding. Manual data entry, duplicate records and spreadsheet-based compliance tracking drained precious time from their small HR team. 

NAAJA’s teams travel vast distances, sometimes over 1000km in a single day, to reach clients across remote communities. As People Operations Manager Ryan Cooney explains:

“Our staff are stretched thin, managing caseloads of sometimes more than 120 clients each. They don’t have time for extra admin or complexity.”

The solution

Enter Employment Hero, which replaced NAAJA’s disconnected tools with one unified, intuitive platform. 

Fast workflows eliminated the need for complex configuration, while HR and payroll now share a single source of truth, removing double entry entirely. Compliance items such as qualifications and Working With Children Checks are tracked automatically, and API integrations pull accurate people data straight into NAAJA’s reporting systems, eliminating manual spreadsheets and year-round data wrangling.

In Ryan’s words, “Employment Hero is a game changer. It could easily become the Facebook of people management systems.”

The ROI

Within 12 months, NAAJA was able to:

• Remove 1.5 FTE of manual HR/payroll administration
• Reinvest $120k per year into a new People & Culture Officer role
• Save an hour per applicant during recruitment and onboarding

Why it matters

According to Ryan, what sets Employment Hero apart is how fast it evolves as a platform.

“Every update saves us more time. In 12 months, they’ve already adopted 15–20 of our suggestions. Our previous system adopted only one in the six years we used it.”

By simplifying HR, payroll and compliance, Employment Hero has helped NAAJA redirect funding from administration into frontline culture, safety and support so the team can focus on delivering justice, not paperwork