Interview with: Laila Slassi, Partner

What do you see as the main points that differentiate Afrique Advisors from your competitors?

The main particularity of Afrique Advisors consists on the legal and lobbying approach offered to clients. This diptych vision that we nurture and constantly work on to build, is meant for our structure to be a crossroad for our clients between Morocco and the rest of the world, a springboard for their ideas and projects to raise, blossom and thrive. We moulded the scaffold of our firm to fit the image that we have of Morocco being a hub for international trade, a meeting point between Africa and the rest of the world. Furthermore, in 2021, Afrique Advisors opened its first overseas office in Washington D.C.

Our team, composed of advisors with years of experience in the various fields of business law, tax law, regulatory, finance, diplomacy and government relations, has a proven track record of success, and offers tailor-made advisory services on the various issues encountered by clients, whether at the national or international level. This hybrid and tailor-made approach is what makes us unique players on the market.

Furthermore, the firm’s practice is coordinated globally, with the unique ability to bring together experienced practitioners who look at situations holistically and offer practical solutions on all aspects of a project with an extraordinary level of interactivity.

Finally, our firm is recognized for being creative, detail-oriented, young, modern, energetic, constantly improving and, most importantly, for having a profound sense of commitment to the quality of the advice given and loyalty to the client retained, which allowed us to forge several long-standing relationships and earn new clients through recommendations.

Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

It is clear that many markets and sectors around the world have been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, various M&A transactions have been cancelled or postponed. Nevertheless, and although the Covid-19 crisis is still ongoing, our team has seen a tangible and continuous increase in requests for legal support in corporate and M&A transactions, over the last few weeks. Due in particular to the consequences of the pandemic as regards the labor and employment law matter, this practice will very likely be strongly solicited.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also notably obliged companies, organizations, or institutions to rethink their activities by adopting, among others, a remote-work policy for employees and a new online and digitalized work environment. In addition, the Covid-19 crisis has continued to accelerate the development of e-commerce and also led to the development of new technologies to prevent the spread of Covid-19 (i.e. contact tracing applications) involving the collection and processing of personal and sensitive data. These various developments have clearly highlighted the importance and need to take into account and comply with the privacy and data protection law. Thus, data protection and data privacy practices will certainly continue to increase exponentially in the coming years.

What’s the main change you’ve made in the firm that will benefit clients?

In 2021, Afrique Advisors opened its first overseas office in Washington D.C. The Washington D.C. office, specializing in strategic lobbying and institutional relations, will most certainly offer important opportunities for its clients’ future projects, both overseas and on the African continent.

We also constantly work on evolving our practice to meet the needs of the legal market. At an early stage of our development, we have realized that general legal advice was not practical enough for a direct implementation of our recommendations on the part of the client. In the light of this observation, we created two new departments in finance and regulatory by recruiting profiles fit for that purpose. These expertises allow us to complete our advice and, for the financial expertise, to allows us, especially in M&A practice, to support points of law with a deep financial knowledge.

Finally, thanks to its increasingly frequent assistance of start-ups and investment funds and its in-depth knowledge of the start-up’s ecosystem, Afrique Advisors has decided to develop a specific comprehensive range of legal, financial and strategic services specifically designed to meet the needs of start-ups and emerging companies at all stages of their lifecycle.

Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

Afrique Advisors always took advantage of the various opportunities and tools offered by technologies.

For instance, we communicate extensively with our clients to meet their needs. To do so, we provide a constant, 24/7, assistance to our clients by allowing them access to the practitioners leading their cases through groups created via platforms such as WhatsApp or Signal. Plus, early on in the process, teams are created for each prospective project in collaborative work platforms such as Teams and Slack. This structure allows for a smart and integrated approach to team collaboration and allows both the practitioners and clients to have, at any given stage, a broad overview of the advancement of the deals.

Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

In Morocco, the nature of most of companies’ implies that they rarely have a dedicated in-house legal department. As a result, our clients are mainly at the top management level and their needs often go beyond legal advice to include tax, financial and strategic advice. Our clients see our team as a pool of expertises and ask us to address issues that often go beyond legal advice.

Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms – where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

Clients’ need for stability and strategic direction from their advisory firm has continued to develop with the Covid-19 pandemic. To address this need, during the lockdown period, we have created a Special Advisory Unit, a multidisciplinary crisis unit, to assist our clients and our ecosystem to prepare, combat, understand, and mitigate the challenges arising from the ongoing and global Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the team noticed that Legal departments and companies, of all sizes and in all activity sectors, considerably increased their recourse to advisory firms to benefit from a global legal and strategic support for their daily business and decisions.

Afrique Advisors ambition is to be a global firm, with experience in a wide range of different and diverse areas, but not only. We pride ourselves on constantly and proactively working on our structure and our knowledge to build an integrated team where each individual is, in her or his own discipline, deeply imbued with the Moroccan market and its intricacies and is aware of its latest trends and evolutions. We seek to evolve in symbiosis with recent legal, social, economic and cultural developments of the country where we work and to be as close as possible to the reality of the environment of the clients we advise.

In three years’ time, the team strongly expects to be a Top-Tier ranked Law firm in Morocco.