Team size: Ten

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

The Clicks Group is a JSE Top 30 company, encompassing various businesses, including Clicks stores (a corporate pharmacy-led health, beauty, and wellness retailer), The Body Shop’s Southern African franchise, UPD (SA’s largest pharmaceutical distributor and wholesaler), and Unicorn Pharmaceuticals (a generic medicine manufacturer). My team and I provide support to the entire group, relying minimally on external legal service providers, primarily for appearance work such as litigation, employment law, as well as for matters related to competition law and intellectual property law. Our stay-in-business work is diverse, legally and commercially complex, and interesting. We support an evolving business that operates at a rapid pace within heavily regulated spheres.

We have supported the acquisitions of Sorbet (beauty and personal care products and franchise salons), 180 Degrees Marketing (developer of pharmacy dispensing software), and H Mallach & Associates (owner of M-Kem 24-hour specialised pharmacy). All work on these transactions was performed by the in-house team, except for seeking approval for two of the transactions from the competition authorities.

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

Over the past decade, many businesses have shifted the roles of their general counsel (GC) to more business-focused strategic positions, moving away from their traditional roles as legal service providers and advisors. I expect this trend to continue. In recent times, GCs are expected to oversee legal risk management and the efficient, effective delivery of legal services to the business through various potential delivery channels. This contrasts with the previous focus on solely managing a panel of external lawyers and an in-house legal team. As a result, we are becoming more familiar with technology and legal service organisations beyond conventional law firms.

In the future, I see us leveraging our knowledge of the entire business, including its strategies, regulations, and legal risks, along with our expertise in utilising internal and external human and technological delivery channels. This will enable us to discover more effective ways of managing business processes synergistically across the organisation in legally compliant ways.

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?

I refuse to answer ‘AI’, although we can all see how this will have a massive impact on everything, from legal compliance management to contract negotiation. The technology that is most exciting to me right now is a software platform that we have started rolling out. It will serve as a contract repository, a contract management tool, and a contract drafting platform, allowing the business to draw up its own contracts.

We are also using this platform to automate and manage various business processes as well as draw reports from the data within our contracts to assist the business in decision-making and reporting. This advances our goal of further integrating the legal team into the business while, at the same time, using technology and automation to provide timely, high-quality legal support to a growing business without adding headcount. It also takes the ‘drudge’ work out of my team’s day-to-day activities, allowing them to focus on more engaging work that adds greater value – as the general counsel saying goes: ‘Happy lawyers, happy life’.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

I ask my lawyers to spend periods of a week or two at a time physically sitting with the teams in the business they are required to support while carrying out their regular work. This allows them to observe not only what the teams actually do but also how they do it, and, most importantly, it provides space to get to know each other. Our most valuable currency as in-house lawyers is the trust that the business has in us, upon which we build our deep understanding of the business and our institutional knowledge. All of this depends on relationships, and it costs almost nothing.