Africa’s in-house legal departments are quietly becoming one of the most innovative corners of the global legal profession, yet they remain almost entirely absent from the conversations that define legal excellence. That gap is the subject of a new analysis from the African Corporate and Government Counsel Forum (ACGC), which argues that General Counsel across the continent are solving problems with fewer resources than their peers in London, New York, or Singapore — and doing it without recognition.
The ACGC has spent years collecting those experiences. Since 2019, the forum has moderated conversations with hundreds of senior in-house lawyers across West, East, North, and Southern Africa. The pattern is consistent: legal teams are being asked to manage more complexity with smaller budgets and leaner headcounts than almost anywhere else. The global legal press, meanwhile, tends to gather in a handful of familiar cities. The lawyers working in Juba, Conakry, or Ouagadougou are rarely in those rooms.
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In-house teams are building capabilities once reserved for law firms
Chudi Ofili, who spent years as general counsel at Renew Capital, a pan-African venture capital firm, described building what he called an “internal firm of lawyers” to handle deal execution, compliance, and fund structuring. He outsourced only about 5% of the work to external counsel — the genuinely specialist pieces that need an outside perspective. “I don’t need you for the typical routine stuff,” he said, “because I’ve essentially built an internal firm of lawyers to handle that faster and with more business context.”
Ofili, dual-qualified in New York and Nigeria, sat on the investment committee and worked on more than three billion dollars in transactions. He has since launched BACH Global, his own practice focused on transactional architecture. His experience is not an outlier. Despite that, these same teams are expected to manage compliance, government relations, ethics, strategy, and legal risk at the same time.
The business case for building internal capability is cost. The consequence is that many African in-house teams now have transactional and advisory depth that was, a decade ago, the exclusive territory of external firms. The firms themselves have not fully absorbed what that shift means for their relationships with clients.
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Judgment under conditions most lawyers never face
The conditions are unforgiving. Africa spans 54 countries with vastly different legal frameworks and little harmonisation. They are moving forward without the platforms that are supposed to make this easier.
Richmond Idaeho, legal deputy manager at Mixta Africa, a real estate group operating across Nigeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, and Egypt, described a working week that involves simultaneous legal support across multiple jurisdictions, business units, and regulatory environments. Osose Aziba, head of legal and compliance at British American Tobacco for West and Central Africa, put it this way: “When you’re in-house, you wear a business hat with a legal background.” She added, “Whatever I advise, it impacts me too, because I’ve already seen myself as a business owner, a business manager, a business partner with a legal background.”
Gigi Maajar, founding partner of Maajar & Co. Advisory in Tanzania, described being woken at 4am because the owner of the business was walking into a meeting in five minutes and needed a yes or no answer — not a 10-page opinion. The perfect answer at the wrong moment, she said, was not a contribution. “The best answer,” she noted, “is not necessarily the right answer for that particular business.”
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There is one data point that law firms should sit with. When African GCs were asked their top consideration when selecting outside counsel, 73% said understanding of my business. Legal expertise came second. Brand and reputation ranked fifth. That suggests a broader question for African firms: if understanding the client matters most, why do so many of the continent’s largest mandates still go to international firms? Part of the answer may be that many firms continue to sell legal expertise when clients are looking for commercial understanding and strategic judgment across borders.
The lesson extends beyond law firms. Regulatory complexity is increasing everywhere. Budgets are under pressure. Businesses expect legal teams to move faster while staying strategically involved. African legal teams are already operating in those conditions — and developing new ways of working within them. The material is there, the voices are there, and the judgment is being exercised daily. What is often missing is attention.