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

Huawei’s operations in South Africa cover a significant portion of the information and communications technology (ICT) landscape and the business groups, which the legal department services, include the carrier and network, enterprise, consumer, digital power and Huawei Cloud business groups. The South African legal department also provides support to the Contract and fulfilment, delivery and service, human resources, administration, procurement, EHS, broad-based black economic empowerment and finance departments. In short, there is almost no aspect of the company’s operations that the legal department does not advise on.

As such, the legal department plays a vital role in the daily operations of the company in South Africa and over and above the day-to-day risk mitigation and advisory service and support that we provide to the above-mentioned business groups and departments. A significant amount of time is also spent on ensuring good corporate governance, compliance as well as playing a critical role in the negotiation of, and advising on, various agreements, complex transactions and novel business solutions that our business departments provide to our various partners and customers in the Republic.

The Huawei legal team in South Africa contributes significantly to the company’s ability to successfully navigate the often challenging and dynamic business environment in South Africa.

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in South Africa over the next five-ten years?

With a continued focus in South Africa on compliance and good corporate governance, we foresee a substantial increase in overall workload. The challenge is therefore ensuring that the correct specialists are in place within the company’s legal department to enable it to provide fast, effective and professional advice on all aspects of the company’s operations. Keeping abreast of new developments in the legislative landscape, utilising external legal resources and implementing cost-effective solutions will be paramount. In this regard we are keeping a close eye on the developments in the artificial intelligence space to ensure that we are ready to leverage those solutions that are fit for purpose, and which will allow us to work smarter and faster, while not sacrificing accuracy.

The general counsel role will therefore most likely have to expand to include an in depth understanding of the technologies on offer and how and where to implement them to efficiently manage workload and to enable the legal function to provide ever faster and more accurate support.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

Any technology that can provide trustworthy and accurate outputs will be of value. Although we do not foresee a situation any time soon where technology will be able to replace warm bodies with practiced and experienced legal minds, AI solutions that are able to assist with contract reviews and source or collate legal opinions or case law are not only on the horizon, but in some instances already available. The challenge will be to understand when and where these technologies can and should be implemented with confidence and for the in-house counsels to use it to augment their outputs and reduce time spent on menial tasks.