What are the most significant cases, projects or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Most of our client transactions are confidential and I can only mention matters in the public domain such as the much-publicised litigation between various banks and the Sekunjalo Group relating to the rights of termination of bank accounts. There is the ongoing litigation instituted in 2017, between the Competition Commission and 28 banks including we pertaining to an alleged single overarching conspiracy between the banks in relation to foreign exchange. That matter has been heard by the Competition tribunal, Competition Appeal Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal on various occasions. The last hearing was in the Constitutional Court during August, and we await the outcome. 

We are business led and have 4 business pillars, Corporate and Investment banking, (CIB) Personal and Private Banking, (PPB) Business and Corporate Banking (BCB)and Insurance and Asset Management (IAM).

Our legal teams in CIB deal with corporate and investment banking transactions including structured finance transactions, energy and infrastructure finance, global markets transactions, debt capital transactions, transactional banking transactions, trade finance and the like. Those in Centre of Expertise and South Africa deal with litigation, arbitration and all legal aspects of asset finance, commercial property finance, Intellectual Property, BCB transactions, PPB transactions, procurement,  strategic investments, corporate development, marketing, tax, finance, IAM transactions, and dispute resolution of matters referred to the different offices of the Ombud. We are present in the UK, IOM, Jersey, Mauritius and 20 countries on the African continent. We also have legal advisors in each of the countries outside of SA. They are all hands-on attorneys who do most of the drafting in house, and we only outsource to external attorneys in e.g. litigation matters where non practicing attorneys cannot appear, but we take part in drafting of pleadings and then drafting and negotiation of agreements, product terms and conditions, holding statements and other communications.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

During periods of instability or crisis, we have well understood and tested processes which set us up in teams to deal with the situation from a multi-disciplinary point of view. Legal is an indispensable part of those teams, and we can leverage a large pool of legal advisors to cover all aspects. 

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting? 

The build up to and being part of the Zondo Commission and its work on state capture as well as the experience of dealing with all of the unique legal and other issues brought about by Covid.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Our Group’s strategy has been one of fast follower as opposed to first mover. I think it has stood us in good stead to ensure that we watch and learn so that we could develop policies to build guardrails to protect against the associated risk. In legal specifically, we have implemented matter management systems which generate dashboards giving us data to inform our strategic decisions. We have implemented a cloud-based, collaborative contract generation platform designed to streamline drafting, reviewing, negotiating, and signing contracts across CIB jurisdictions. We have leveraged our in-house It teams to help us build bespoke platforms to help us manage things like litigation across our global footprint. We have used AI to automate vanilla agreements to streamline process for our stakeholders and we have just piloted a tool with end-to-end contract workflow automation, AI-assisted negotiation and clause bank integration together with document storage and monitoring.