Good corporate governance entails, among other things, promoting an organisational culture that encourages ethical conduct and a commitment to compliance with the law. Non-compliant companies face legal consequences, with significant fines and potential criminal liability for executives and board members. Any violation of laws, rules or regulations further jeopardizes a company’s integrity.
But a company can’t be fully compliant if it doesn’t fully understand what is required from it and what the regulators’ expectations are. And mapping the legal requirements can be a massive task.
In today’s constantly evolving regulatory environments, companies need to find new ways to keep their finger on the pulse of ever-changing laws and regulations. Everywhere in the world, companies take out subscriptions to legal research services such as LexisNexis, PLC, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law etc.
These services make conducting legal research and compliance mapping so more effective, accurate, and cost-effective. Subscriptions to these services have become an integral part of a company’s compliance program. Beyond insulating a company from liability, subscribing to legal research and adopting compliance enabling technology also underlines a company’s willingness to comply, thereby reinforcing its cultural values.
But what about Africa?
Conducting legal research to address compliance matters in Africa and understand how local laws and regulations impact a company’s operations, is a daunting task, requiring a huge amount of time of both in-house counsel and external lawyers and thus triggering significant costs.
While some African blue chips subscribe to some of the international legal research services mentioned above, mainly for international best practice information, there was no research solution specifically focused on Africa… until recently.
Afriwise is the first company to provide in-house counsel (of both large and small companies) and corporate advisors with a simple to use, comprehensive and highly effective method to research local legal and regulatory environments and map compliance requirements.
Afriwise now offers an intuitive way to get virtually all relevant information by country and topic companies want, and have it available anywhere there is Internet access. Afriwise is the first company to compile legal research, in a structured and standardised way, on a pan-African basis and converge the information with modern technology.
Afriwise works with over 100 leading local law firms in Africa to compile and maintain legal knowledge at any given time. All content goes through a thorough editing process, managed by the company’s editors. The process consists of several phases, which ensures that the answers are accurate, up to date, relevant and practical. Afriwise displays all content in an intuitive wiki-like structure and further cross-references, indexes and hand-labels its information, thereby enabling users to easily find what they are looking for.
What to expect?
Afriwise’s online solution provides access to accurate and actionable legal intelligence in a business context.
The solution offers a unique combination of practical guidance, primary source material, legal alerts, time-saving tools, market info and news and business intelligence:
- Expert insights: access to insights from local leading practitioners on all key areas of law per country.
- Current awareness: users can finally stay on top of the latest developments through overviews of upcoming changes and automatic alerts in case of change of law.
- Tools: time-saving tools which allow users to research and compare law topics across jurisdictions.
- Expert access: direct access to vetted local counsel, which can be filtered on area of expertise and industry knowledge.
Want a quick 10 minutes demo? Or you rather just jump in? We can shoot you a login to a no-strings attached trial account and you can be up and running immediately.