About

‘In Africa we’re still in a position to grow – five to ten years ago, we didn’t even have mobile phones – we’ve leapfrogged from nothing’, Helen Anatogu says.

‘Unfortunately regulation has never developed as quickly, so we’ve playing catch-up, but I see that as an opportunity, because you can guide the regulators and policymakers – you can’t do that in Europe and the US, because it’s already highly regulated. Here the policymakers don’t know and they’re begging to work with people who do. You’re in a position to make a real difference’.

Anatogu has been at the forefront of policy development in the region’s burgeoning technology sector, having sat on the Nigerian Ministry of Communication Technology’s committee developing a Software Business Incubation Program blueprint, two years ago.

‘From a development perspective, working with the federal government on building the ICT ecosystem is something I’m very proud of, as I see the changes start to happen in the country’, she says. ‘Even among lawyers the work isn’t done yet, but I can say at least they’ve moved on over the last few years’.

A strong advocate for training, Anatogu has helped to organise a number of events, both inside and outside her organisations. These have ranged from industry focus sessions, on areas such as data protection, cloud and e-governance, to broader discussions on the role of corporate counsel.

‘Coming back to Nigeria, I find it is very much the culture that the GC sits outside the leadership team until there’s a big issue and the business realises they should have been involved in the decision-making process. How do you add value in terms of day-to-day management of business, not just crisis management, and how do you gain that seat at the table? I think it’s an integral part of who you are as an in-house lawyer’.

When she first joined Microsoft, Anatogu built legal support for the whole of Sub-Saharan region, excluding South Africa, from scratch. ‘There was no corporate attorney or legal precedent in the country. When I started, we didn’t have a corporate affairs person, so I did both. I had to make sure every country where we had people we had legal entity. I had to make sure we had appropriate documentation. Make sure every individual government understood what we did as a company. I’ve been doing a lot of tuning’.

During her time at Shell, Anatogu gained recognition for her management of the high profile Buncefield litigation, which set a new precedent in the Court of Appeal over beneficiaries’ trust rights. ‘I’m quite proud of that as I don’t think there had been a change in tort law for quite a long time before that’, she says.

On the subject of outside counsel, Anatogu says firms should spend more time working with the business and focus on identifying future trends. ‘That curiosity to understand what I do and how I do it. More thinking out of the box in terms of what could happen’.