About

The legal department of the HF Group, a major East African mortgage provider, is divided into two separate units: a commercial unit that handles documentation and a litigation unit. Reacting to uncertainty in the market, the legal team has recently undergone a reorganisation to allocate more resources to the litigation team. Structures were also flattened at the lower levels to ensure that more junior counsel are exposed to diverse legal work in both commercial and litigation teams. This has allowed junior lawyers to function as generalists and heads of legal units function as specialists. Among an abundance of important victories, the team has also streamlined its work, resulting in reduced costs, particularly in the field of litigation. A source within the team says: ‘We have endeavoured to mitigate this by facilitating training on know your customer (KYC) and other legal and compliance requirements to ensure that the business has the necessary knowledge to avoid legal pitfalls’. A major challenge recently faced by the team was the implementation of Kenya’s Advocates Remuneration Order (ARO). ‘Legal fees are regulated in this jurisdiction and this is not very well understood by the business’, one source explains, ‘as a consequence, we experience a lot of resistance. We have overcome this by educating the business on the ARO and also working with [external counsel] with whom we can negotiate other value adding services such as training and others’.

The team has also impressed with its ability to cope with the slow judicial process in Kenya and East Africa, by embracing alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, which encourages negotiations with customers before court action is contemplated. On the documentation side, the team has been praised for its achievement to cope with delays arising from digitisation of land and company registers in Kenya. The previously introduced tool to track the progress of the conveyance, has contributed to the minimisation of customer complaints by ensuring that each customer is apprised of the progress of their matter at each touch point.