Law Market Talent in Africa: The GRM Group

Firstly, if there is anyone out there that can give Rob isiXhosa lessons, please message him at [email protected] - he has to improve his language skills!!!

Secondly, thank you so much to the incredible Xhanti Mtulu. Listen to his life, his story, his management style, his tips for young lawyers and much more.

His YouTube channels are @SuperXhanti and @themtulus

Please subscribe, watch and like his content.

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In this episode of the Unicorns pod, we interview HR guru, Lynn Roux, we cover her upbringing, her life and her thoughts on the challenges facing HR in the coming years.

Follow her via https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnroux/ 
Email at [email protected]  

Lynn's passion for people and process improvement is unrivalled.

Lynn was born and raised in Johannesburg. Her father was an artisan, and her mother was a schoolteacher. She has a sister who is 18 months older. She has two boys and they all live with her dad. She used to ride a motorbike and has now replaced this with a 4X4 so that she can do the trails with her boys.

She started working part-time after completing secondary school and whilst she was studying, she worked as a teller at one of the big banks. She was permanently employed when she started her honours part-time and was fortunate enough to be transferred to the employee relations team to gain work experience in her field of study. 

She moved from the bank to one of the Big 4 accounting and audit firms and stayed there for 15 years. During her tenure, they kept her interested by creating opportunities and giving me exposure to different aspects of HR. She started out with responsibility for policies and procedures and employee relations. This morphed into being a functional owner of HR systems, setting up an HR centre of expertise and shared service centre. 

By popular vote of the team, she was appointed to lead the HR generalist team, the HR shared service centre and centres of expertise for reward, employee relations, HR systems and HR projects.

In September 2015 she joined the first law firm as the Head of HR. She spent seven years in the legal industry with two of the big law firms in South Africa. Coming from a professional services environment she expected this to be an easy transition – how different can it be? Both charge for their time. She was in for a BIG surprise. 

Partners leaving with teams, egos and arrogance, entrenched hierarchy, fear at junior levels, credibility and relevance determined by how successful you are as a lawyer and the divide between lawyers and business services staff were an eye opener. Could law firms really be 8–10 years behind professional services in terms of culture and soft skills development?

Towards the end of 2022, she decided to leave corporate and started her own HR consulting business. This was the birth of LAnderson Management Consulting (Pty) Ltd. 

Her focus areas include creating a culture of belonging and inclusion; employee wellness, considering the ISO standard that has been published for wellness and optimising HR systems and business processes.

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Karien is the Co-CEO of agritech start-up, AgriRevolution. She is also an experienced legal and commercial advisor.

I wanted her on the Legal Unicorns pod because she epitomises what we are looking for across Africa, lawyers who are brave, lawyers who are doing things differently - to inspire the next generation.

After completing B.Comm and LLB degrees at the University of Stellenbosch, Karien moved to London and started her career working for tech start-ups TotallyLegal.com and later EnergyQuote.

She returned to South Africa in 2006 to start her articles at Intellectual Property firm, Kisch in Sandton. After qualifying as a trade mark practitioner, Karien moved to Deneys Reitz (now Norton Rose) before joining FNB as IP Legal Advisor.

She was then drawn to the world of start-ups again and joined Clickatell as a group legal advisor in 2010 where she obtained invaluable global experience in technology, communications and commercial law. 

This experience stood her in good stead when she joined UK start-up, Radiant Law, and later martech consultancy (and another South African start-up success story) Acceleration. 

Acceleration was subsequently acquired by advertising behemoth WPP. Karien spent
more than 7 years at WPP where she was promoted to Assistant General Counsel for the international marketing communications agency, Wunderman Thompson before moving into the WPP Group’s central legal team. 

Karien is passionate about helping start-ups scale and feels privileged to
have played a role in the journey of multiple start-ups, including a few that have successfully navigated their way from “3 guys in a garage” to global enterprise.

For the past 3 years, she has moonlighted as a strategic advisor for AgriRevolution and was appointed Co-CEO in April. She is thrilled that she has the opportunity to use her experience to contribute to the growth and success of AgriRevolution.

https://www.agrirevolution.africa/

Meet the Earthworm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep43xm-Ox8I 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karienholtzkampf/

Remember to: -

Like, subscribe and share all the episodes of Legal Unicorns
Visit us on Twitter @globallawcareer and @legalunicorns
Subscribe to GRM's newsletter at globallegalmarket.substack.com 

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe

Part 2 of our chat with the incredible Leah Molatseli, African Advisor to the Global Legal Tech Hub, Head of BD for Legal Interact, and LegalTech futurist across the African continent.

00:00 Welcome back after Load Shedding!
02:05 Leah joins Legal Interact
06:00 Congratulations to Legal Interact on their hiring policy!
06:40 Get the audience excited about the Tech, Umbiie.com
08:10 BIG Legal Tech Launches ahead
09:30 SA's first AI Robot Lawyer
12:00 Legal Tech brings law for all
13:13 Its about IMPACT, not control
14:57 Leah becomes African Advisor to the Global Legal Tech Hub
23:25 When you go into new markets, ask questions
25:00 That's why we launched Umbiie.com
26:25 Level the playing field through tech
28:00 Generative AI will change the legal market forever
29:00 Alternative careers

Reach her on 
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahmolatseli/
Twitter - @leahmolatseli 

Thank you, Leah.

Our podcast is sponsored by technology platforms

www.umbiie.com - legal recruitment technology for global lawyers

Built on the www.stiint-it.com platform

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Leah Molatseli is a lawyer, published legal tech author, speaker, and Legal Tech and Innovation Specialist who currently holds the role of Head of Business Development at Legal Interact. She focuses on the intersection between law, innovation, and technology, using her expertise to educate and empower the legal market. She is a Guest Lecturer at the University of Cape Town where she develops and teaches legal tech and innovation-related courses to the broader legal industry. She is a Mandela Washington Fellow, a University of Notre Dame alum who enjoys everything that speaks to using technology and innovative processes to empower lawyers in whatever roles they find themselves in, from practicing lawyers to in-house legal teams.

 

She sits as a Council Member of the University of the Free State, where she is a member of the ICT Committee, is Chairperson of the Naming Committee and Vice-Chairperson of the Disciplinary Committee, is part of the Advisory Board for the Global Legal Tech Hub and Women in Tech South African Chapter, a country member for the Global Legal Tech Consortium and is one of 2022’s International Legal Technology Association’s Most Influential Women in Legal Tech and American Bar Association’s 2022 Women of Legal Tech Honouree. She recently was awarded the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum (ISF) 2023 Fellowship, from Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative, which was founded by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, which brings talented people together in networks to test their ideas and solve complex problems in science and society. She is a 2023 Justitia Awards Nominee and Institute for African Women inLaw- 2023 Women to Watch.

 

Leah is a University of the Free State LLB alum she thenarticled at the UFS Law Clinic she became admitted as an Attorney of the High Court, in the Free State in 2012. She worked in private practice before founding a legal tech startup and publishing a legal technology book with Juta.

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Sponsored by Umbiie.com - the future of your legal career

This interview is for all the lawyers, across the world, who are contemplating moving out of employment and to work for themselves.

Research shows that by 2035, 70% of legal professionals will work in the gig economy (work for themselves)....Freida will show you how.

Frieda is an ICF-accredited coach specialising in Whole Person Coaching and Enneagram Coaching.

She’s a practising British lawyer and has been for nearly 20 years.

She was an Associate at a law firm, moved to Partner, in-house counsel, back to practice and now runs her own consultancy - she shows us how she did it.

Her coaching focuses on helping people to create real balance in their lives so they can shift from feeling lost, stuck and overwhelmed to leading a happier, healthier and more fulfilling life, both professionally and personally.

Rob and Frieda chat about the future landscape of the legal profession.

Legal Unicorns is a podcast available on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/7k40Zkd...

Powered by The GRM Group, creatively servicing the global legal market.

grmsearch.com for all Legal Career Opportunities

Legal career advice from Rob Green via https://www.patreon.com/globallegalca...


Umbiie.com has been built on the Stiint-It.com platform 

Follow Frieda on:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/frieda-levycky/
https://bravingboundaries.com/
https://lawyerlifeexperiment.buzzsprout.com/

Support the show

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Rob chats to Rori - a thought leader within the legal profession.

Rob and Rori delve into the difficulties of being a young lawyer in South Africa, unapologetically up-skilling oneself and the importance of mentorship for young lawyers.

Rori completed her undergraduate at Rhodes University receiving a Bachelor of Arts and LLB. She then went on to complete her LLM from Wits University. As she completed her legal training, she jump started her career at top law firms such as Bowmans and Norton Rose Fulbright. She currently works as a Senior Property Finance Attorney at Nedbank.  Along with these fantastic strides in her career, she started a passion project called MoLAWoo which is a mentorship project
for young lawyers.

Get in touch with Rori here:
LinkedIn – Rorisang Mzozoyana
Facebook – Rorisang Mzozoyana
Instagram – @rori_legalcounsel
Tik Tok – @rori_legalcounsel

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe

These are the 6 key take aways from my 14 years of owning and running GRM.



GRM Newsletter - globallegalmarket.substack.com

Global Legal Career Patreon Channel - patreon.com/globallegalcareers

Podcast, available on all podcast providers = Legal Unicorns

Support the show

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe

This is our best podcast yet. In South Africa, race is a delicate topic, the country has had a checkered past that it's citizens navigate every day. 

In the workplace it is no different.

When I interviewed Nikita, I didn't have a plan, I wanted to find out about her, her journey, to hopefully inspire young lawyers that are listening. What we got was one the most open, enlightening, honest conversations I've ever had.

This may end being one of the most important interviews of my life.

To connect with and follow her, please click here

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikita-lalla-b291a261/

For the world's first and only, legal market-focused skills-matching platform, that brings together lawyers and those that need lawyers in an unbiased way, you must look at www.umbiie.com

For free Legal Jobs news, salary and remuneration news, and market analysis, please sign up for our free newsletter,  click on our Substack - rgreen.substack.com

For exclusive, legal industry research and data, not available anywhere else in the world - subscribe to Nabii, available here,
https://grmintelligence.com/product/m...

For exclusive legal jobs, and talent management - contact GRM Search at www.grmsearch.com

If you are on Spotify, check out our podcast - Legal Unicorns - where we interview legal industry leaders, throughout Africa, about their careers.

Support the show

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe

Legal Unicorns goes in a slightly different direction this week. On our quest to meet the African lawyers that are driving the industry forward on the continent, we meet Pauline and Robyn, colleagues, friends and great young attorneys that are shaping the SA property legal market, with a specific focus on Cape Town. 

For those that are not aware, Cape Town is the most expensive place in Africa to buy property, its market fuels the local economy and is home to some of the continent’s largest developers, most skilled architects and sharpest legal minds.

Pauline Manaka is a fantastic, disputes specialist who will shape this area of law for many years to come. 

Robyn Geswindt is a conveyancing legal expert, who has a very bright future - both are future Partners.

To connect with and follow them, please click here

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyn-geswindt-613084b6/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauline-manaka-a8653b25/

For free Legal Jobs news, salary and remuneration news, and market analysis, please sign up for our free newsletter,  click on our Substack

rgreen.substack.com

For exclusive, legal industry research and data, not available anywhere else in the world - subscribe to Nabii, available here,
https://grmintelligence.com/product/m...

For exclusive legal jobs, and talent management - contact GRM Search at www.grmsearch.com

For the world's first and only, legal market-focused skills matching platform, that brings together lawyers and those that need lawyers in an unbiased way, you must look at www.umbiie.com

If you are on Spotify, check out our podcast - Legal Unicorns - where we interview legal industry leaders, throughout Africa, about their careers.

Support the show

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globallegalmarket.substack.com/subscribe