Jurisdictions Your Role Covers: Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Egypt, United States, United Kingdom, and additional markets across Africa, Europe, and North America

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

Over the past year, my legal team’s work has been characterised by cross-border complexity, strategic importance, and a focus on enabling innovation while maintaining strong governance. Operating within a global technology company with deep African roots requires legal support that is commercially pragmatic, regulatorily informed, and forward-looking, particularly as emerging technologies reshape business models and risk profiles.

A significant portion of our work has involved high-value commercial and strategic transactions with multinational enterprise clients across North America, Europe, and Africa. These transactions required bespoke structuring to address intellectual property ownership, data protection obligations, employment classification risks, and regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions. Legal played a central role in aligning contractual risk allocation with the company’s technology-enabled offerings, ensuring agreements were commercially viable and legally defensible across borders.

Closely linked to this has been our work on coding ethics and responsible engineering practices. Legal supported the establishment of clear guardrails around acceptable use of technology, testing and deployment standards, and escalation protocols for ethical or compliance concerns. This involved translating legal and ethical principles into practical guidance that technical teams could embed into daily workflows, recognising that governance in technology environments must be operational rather than theoretical.

In addition, we have handled employment, immigration, and global mobility matters for a highly distributed workforce, advising on senior exits, retention arrangements, and complex employee relations issues across multiple jurisdictions. We have also overseen equity administration and governance-related matters, including the interpretation of equity plans, vesting and exercise mechanics, working closely with finance, tax, and people teams to ensure transparency and compliance.

Across all of these engagements from complex transactions and organisational change to AI governance and ethical technology frameworks — the legal team has operated as a strategic business partner, embedded early in decision-making and focused on enabling responsible growth. The work reflects a legal function that combines technical rigor, commercial awareness, and ethical leadership in a modern global enterprise.

How is your legal department leveraging technology to improve compliance monitoring, contract management, or governance reporting?

Technology has become a critical enabler of an effective, scalable, and forward-looking legal function. In a fast-growing, globally distributed organisation, traditional manual approaches to compliance and governance are no longer sufficient. My legal department has therefore prioritised the thoughtful adoption of technology to improve visibility, efficiency, and risk management.

One key area is contract lifecycle management. We have leveraged contract management tools to centralise agreements, standardise templates, track obligations, and monitor renewal and termination timelines. This has significantly reduced execution risk, improved turnaround times, and enhanced collaboration between legal, sales, finance, and operations. Centralisation also enables better data-driven insights into contract exposure and commercial patterns.

In the area of compliance monitoring, technology has been used to support policy dissemination, training completion tracking, and issue escalation. Automated workflows help ensure that compliance requirements, such as data protection obligations or internal approval processes are consistently followed across jurisdictions. Dashboards provide leadership with real-time visibility into compliance status, enabling early intervention rather than reactive remediation.

We have also improved governance reporting through structured data capture and reporting tools. Rather than relying solely on narrative updates, the legal team now provides boards and executives with clearer metrics around risk areas, litigation exposure, regulatory developments, and policy adherence. This supports more informed decision-making and reinforces legal’s role as a strategic advisor.

Importantly, our approach to legal technology is pragmatic rather than experimental. We focus on tools that integrate with existing systems, are intuitive for non-legal users, and directly address operational pain points. Adoption is driven by value, not novelty. As part of our AI governance initiative, we also explored responsible-AI tools designed to support compliance monitoring and ethical review processes. This future-focused approach ensured the legal team could keep pace with the company’s technology-driven growth while maintaining robust oversight.