Legal team size: Eight

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

In the last year, we transformed the company from a tech training provider into a full tech consulting company. This transition happened through the strategic acquisitions of a small custom software business in Romania and an advanced AI company in the UK, Mauritius and SA. Through this acquisition (and the previous acquisition of a Silicon Valley company, which I believe was the first time an African company did such a thing), we’ve become the largest trainer of software engineers in the world, with over 250,000 users at any time.

As we managed these acquisitions, my team also expanded the usage of our in-house built legal tech program called JANIS, a slack base interface that connects other specialised tools but mostly streamlines how our team receives and delivers work requests. This product was originally custom-made for the legal team, but has now evolved into a “Staff Support” tool that houses all the shared services products. We call this app JANIS (Just A Nonconformist Innovative System). Due to its success, my CEO has asked me to look at potentially productising this internal solution and take it to market!

We are also about to launch a seed capital fund to support the entrepreneurs who complete our founder academy. Lastly, we just launched a new learning solution that will enable millions of young Africans to access high quality and scalable higher education all over the world. Launching this initiative involved a rigorous regulatory assessment of higher education, TVET, and business operations across nine African countries, as well as heavy partnership contracts with universities all over the world.

A government in East Africa wanted to expand their network connectivity to nearly 100% of the country’s territory. A large Telco provided a quotation to achieve this, but we used AI to run multiple scenarios and identify the optimal location for network towers, considering altitude changes, network signal, weather conditions and more variables. This reduced the investment required to achieve the connectivity goal by 50%.

An NGO in Rwanda (Society for Family Health) aims to build or modernise health posts nationwide, so every citizen is 15-minute walk from a health provider. The company worked with SFH in modernising their infrastructure (hardware, to health posts and software, to their systems) to create a new “nurse entrepreneur” model where the nurse runs the health post as a start-up and generates jobs in the community, but gets advanced tech support from the capital, including on demand deliveries of meds using drones via Zipline, and 24/7 monitoring of critical data. The data is displayed at a central “Blue Room” where the main stakeholders –he Ministry of Health – can look at it in real time and make critical decisions to improve the life quality of the people of Rwanda.

Which recent political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in recent years?

The arrival of AI into the world has shifted or crippled the belief systems of the legal world. Generative AI has transformed and revolutionized the constructs of IP and ownership, and industrial AI has reinvented how we look at legal liability.

Are there any causes, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

Yes! I’m super passionate about (rock) music and entrepreneurship. I carry a tiny carbon fiber guitar everywhere I go, and I devoted a portion of my salary to invest in startups from the learners of our ecosystem.