Continuous growth, built on a century of heritage and service, and an extraordinary team behind the scenes

Looking back, it is hard to believe how much happened between a Friday evening and a Monday morning. When the lawyers and staff of one of Africa’s leading law firms, Deneys, went to work in late March under their own name and on their own systems, it was the culmination of months of planning, late nights, and thousands of hours of execution by Chief Information Officer Maurae Wooding, Chief Marketing Officer Cherisse Rao, and their transition teams.

Maurae says that when she first heard last year that the firm would return to independence, concluding its membership of its global network, she was excited.

She also understood the transition would involve far more than changing logos, names or firm colours. “We’re agile, and very nimble,” says Maurae, one of the most experienced technology leaders in the South African legal sector.

“But when Brent Botha, our CEO, first asked how long it would take to move from the global systems to our own, I said that if we want our lawyers to be able to work all the time with no disruptions, ideally I need a year.”

She had four months on the calendar. With December largely given over to the South African summer holiday, the real runway was three.

Talking with both Maurae and Cherisse a few months after the launch, the scale of the undertaking comes into focus. “There is a fearless nature about this firm, a history of doing things first, and it showed in everything we did,” says Cherisse.

A legal professional herself, Cherisse has led business development and marketing functions for mining companies and law firms, South African and international, over the past two decades, joining the firm as it prepared its return to independence.

With the firm tracing its roots back to Johannesburg in 1922, and the Deneys Reitz name still carrying deep respect in South Africa and across the continent, the task for Cherisse was to honour more than a century of heritage while building an identity for what the firm is becoming.

“Being Deneys shows a clear progression, and a very clear commitment to continuously growing and being the best version of ourselves for clients,” she says. “Our strapline is ‘As the world moves.’ and every part of the identity had to earn it. Nothing in this brand is decorative. Every choice, from the name to the colours to the tone of voice, is there because it says something true about this firm. That is what made the work so demanding, and it is why it holds together.”

Maurae and Cherisse worked closely together, alongside a steering committee, through the months, weeks, and days leading up to the public launch.

Confidentiality carried its own difficulty.

Until the transition was announced, the work could not be visible to the market, so there could be no open approaches to providers. Maurae drew on partners whose delivery she had seen first-hand, and tested her recommendations against their track records before any appointment was made.

The firm’s systems sat in a shared international environment and had to move to South Africa, tens of millions of emails among them.

“An independent firm needs an environment built for it,” says Maurae. “We could not simply lift and shift everything as it stood. We rebuilt where we needed to and configured the environment for the firm we were becoming. And as a team we agreed there was no option but a single cutover. On the Friday we would be part of the network. We would have Saturday and Sunday to move everything. And on Monday morning we would be Deneys.”

Maurae credits Cherisse with the Friday launch events that quietly solved the weekend's biggest logistical problem: laptops were handed in by staff on arrival, buying the IT team precious extra hours in a race against time.

More than 400 laptops across three offices. On the Saturday, the connection to the international environment was formally closed, and the final migration of data ran to around 5am on Sunday. Then the rebuild of every laptop began: removing, loading, and updating applications, finishing as late as 3am on Monday morning in Durban. The new email environment went live at midnight.

Later that morning, staff came back into the office and got to work.

“People were patient, and kind,” says Maurae, noting that lawyers she’d never worked with before offered to help, and praised her team for the job they did. “That is where the atmosphere at Deneys is always so good. We had people putting their hands up, associates offering their time to help sort laptops out. My team were tired, but we got there because everyone was enthusiastic and committed to the end, and when you find people like that to work with, it is special.”

That energy has continued since the launch, notes Cherisse, as the lawyers and support staff of Deneys carry the firm’s African story forward, and “a brand that is our own, a heritage that is our own”.