It's a real question, and I ask it of general counsel often. You have a matter in a market where you have no office, no colleague and no history. Something needs a legal answer before Monday. Whose name do you scroll to?
For a lot of in-house teams, the honest answer is that they don't scroll to anyone. They email a relationship partner at an international firm, who emails a firm on the continent that the GC never gets to meet. The advice arrives eventually, filtered through two firms and a mark-up, and the person who actually knows the jurisdiction is someone you've never spoken to.
I want that person's number in your phone instead.
The market has a story about that phone call
The story goes like this. Deal directly with local counsel and you'll get your fingers burnt. To reach Kenya you go via London. To reach the DRC you go via Paris.
I've heard versions of it for years and I'd like to undermine it deliberately, because it doesn't match what I see. There are excellent legal experts sitting inside local firms in every market we cover. We've instructed them. Our clients have instructed them. We track what they publish, where they speak and what they win. The expertise has never been the problem. Access to it has.
The other half of the story is about African firms being slow to respond and hard to pin down. That criticism gets levelled unfairly and constantly. It's very difficult to argue with in the abstract, and very easy to disprove in a room.
Four jurisdictions, one set of questions
So at last year's GC Forum we stopped describing these firms and put four of them on a panel, then asked each of them the same questions in turn.
The selection was deliberate. Someone from the DRC, so Central Africa and francophone. Someone from Ghana, for anglophone West Africa. Someone from Zimbabwe, a close neighbour to South Africa operating in a very different reality, not least a currency that moves under your feet. And a lusophone market to complete the picture.
Asking one question four ways is how the differences between these jurisdictions come out. An alert or a client update gives you the answer without the reasoning, the caveats or any sense of how the person on the other end actually works. Four people answering live gives you all of it.
There wasn't much preparation and that was half of why it worked. It was light, spontaneous and genuinely enjoyable, and it was serious and professional at the same time. We laughed. Nobody read from a script. The audience left feeling they knew these lawyers, which was the whole point.
The instructions were still arriving a year later
The audience learned something about four jurisdictions. That was the stated aim, and it's the part I expected.
What I didn't expect was what happened to the lawyers. One panellist told me those few minutes were the most useful of his business development career. He picked up instructions from people in that audience the week after, the month after, three months later, six months later, and again almost a year on. Others were invited to speak at further conferences off the back of it. All four wanted to come back.
Nothing complicated caused that. By the end of the session the audience had their LinkedIn profiles, in several cases their WhatsApp numbers, and no hesitation about calling them. Our subscribers have historically treated firms outside South Africa as arm's-length transactions. An hour turned them into contacts.
That is the Friday phonecall, solved.
You legally cannot do the work without them
There's a hard constraint underneath all of this that gets forgotten in the debate about whether local counsel is worth the risk. A lawyer cannot advise on a jurisdiction where they don't hold a practising certificate. You need local counsel to sign off on pleadings. You need them for local disputes and local opinions. Matching in-house teams with local firms is how the work gets done.
Given that, the scope question matters. Local work has too often been ring-fenced into the smallest possible slice of local law, with the substantive thinking kept elsewhere. Our position at Afriwise is that the whole instruction can go to the local firm. That takes trust, and trust starts with knowing who you're dealing with, which brings us back to the room.
The biggest instructors of legal work on this continent are sitting in-house
The relationship runs both ways, and I think that's underappreciated by both sides.
In-house teams are the largest source of instructions into these firms. The firms hold expertise thein-house teams can't hold themselves. Neither needs a broker to make the introduction, and we're cutting that step out.
There's also something that doesn't get said enough. These firms are advising on deals in their own backyard. When a firm works on a power project, that's the power reaching their own homes. They're invested in the outcome in a way an adviser three time zones away isn't.
Regulators, law firms, in-house teams and platforms like ours each hold a piece of how legal work happens across Africa. Afriwise isn't the centre of that conversation. We're the centre of the effort to get the parties into one room. Everyone puts something in, everyone takes something out, and the more of it we do the better it works for all of us.
The risk story is 30 years out of date
The reason the phone call feels risky has little to do with the lawyers and a lot to do with a picture of Africa that people are still carrying from a magazine cover in the 1990s.
The reality is growth. New cities being planned and built at scale. Growth rates in markets like East Africa that outpace most of the developed world. If those numbers hold over the next 5 to 10 years, the relationships worth having are the ones you start now, not the ones you scramble for later.
There's a business culture point in this too, and it's one of the reasons these sessions work. Service, courtesy and real interest in the person across from you are the norm here. A European colleague of ours keeps remarking on how consistently people ask how she is and then stay for the answer. It shows up everywhere, down to attendees typing a thank you into a webinar chat before they drop off a call. It changes how you engage with someone when you believe they care.
This year we ask the harder questions
Three of last year's four firms are returning: Zimbabwe, Ghana and the DRC, with a new speaker from Mozambique. We ran the format on the fly the first time. Now that we know it works, we can go deeper.
The focus moves to risk and regulation, and the questions get more pointed. I want to put the things a GC would like to ask but might hesitate over for fear of a controversial answer: the difficult questions about how these markets really work. It's a gentle forum, there's no right or wrong answer, and I'd like our panellists to look those questions in the eye and own them.
Come with the jurisdictionthat worries you most. Leave with the name you'll scroll to on Friday.
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This article was written by Glenda Benson, Engagement and Business Development Lead at Afriwise
