How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

A central learning from managing a team during the pandemic was the correlation between resilience and redundancy. By having redundancy in the form of more than one team member who could perform each role in the team – e.g. an employment lawyer, and another team member who could also play in that space – we were able to respond to spikes in demand for a specific type of legal support (as one typically experiences in a crisis). Especially in the first year of the pandemic, as we responded to rapid changes in the external environment with lockdowns and law changes, this gave us resilience and enabled us to thrive as a team.
What are the main cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

A significant focus in my last year at Clicks was supporting the business’ strategic expansion into new territories in Africa, in new areas of business. This entailed close cross functional collaboration, as well as agility, creativity and a solution-focused mindset in providing legal support. It was also a lot of fun!
How do you manage and motivate your legal team to ensure high performance and professional growth?

I start off by understanding where each team member is and what their personal and professional aspirations are. In conjunction with each team member, I then plot the steps that need to be taken to bring them closer to reaching these aspirations – e.g. appropriate formal education to enable career progression or holding off training (or finding more flexible training opportunities) for a new parent who does not have the time to devote to it. By doing this, team members feel valued and supported as people and are more engaged as employees. I have found that if I show commitment to supporting them, they show the same commitment to delivering as a high-performing legal team.

While some team members’ aspirations will mean that they eventually leave the organisation to further their careers, the effort they put in while they are in the team makes up for that. And some team members don’t leave – my successor when I left Clicks was an internal successor who I had helped develop for the role, perhaps my greatest achievement in my time with the group.