Team size: Three

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

Our legal team is primarily engaged in handling technical agreements, ranging from licensing agreements and sell-through agreements for tech products. During 2023, we have been closely involved with back-to-back agreements for significant projects addressing solutions for load shedding in South Africa. These contracts required a thorough examination of service levels and accurate analysis of the project scope. Our legal team is proud to be contributing to agreements that will assist South Africa with one of its challenges – power outages.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

To ease the onboarding of new suppliers and streamline the flow of information between the governance and legal teams, we have created an automated system to help the flow of instructions from the initial team through to the legal team, ensuring a smooth transition and rapid response to business needs.

This process saves time and serves as a productive tool to assist the business. This exercise cost the company no money, furthermore we won the Risk and Compliance Team Africa award because of this project.

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?

Automation will play a significant role in the legal sphere. In order to enhance our productivity, Nexio Legal is embarking on an exercise to automate the legal review of tenders. We spend a considerable amount of time on tender reviews, and therefore, we have chosen to automate these processes through AI.

What are some of the main trends impacting your industry in South Africa?

Cybersecurity has a significant impact on our industry. The increasing number of data privacy breaches requires general counsel to become more involved in cybersecurity governance. I am currently personally engaged in a cybersecurity internal governance project at Nexio to ensure that our governance stands out and provides our customers with the best technology offerings.