General Counsel as Risk Architects: risk, opportunity, and accountability in a fast-moving era of uncertainty

Businesses cannot put decisions on hold while regulation catches up with a fast-moving world, says Bowmans partner Vanessa Jacklin-Levin. As risks evolve faster than the rules designed to govern them, General Counsel are increasingly being asked to help organisations make decisions without waiting for certainty.

“The risks are there, and the need for governance and accountability are there already,” she says. “A lot rests on the shoulders of in-house legal counsel to try and navigate governance and accountability within their companies.”

Such responsibility reflects the idea of General Counsel as Risk Architects that is at the heart of Africa Legal’s upcoming GC Forum Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), themed ‘Legal Leadership in an Unpredictable World’. In partnership with Afriwise, the exclusive event will bring senior legal, governance, risk, and compliance leaders together in Johannesburg on 7 October 2o26.

Vanessa, who will be moderating a panel with senior legal leaders from the digital commerce, FMCG, technology and AI, and financial services industries, brings a perspective spanning disputes and wider questions of risk for organisations. At Bowmans, her practice includes litigation, ADR, investigations, risk, governance, and compliance. She’s acted for and advised global multinationals, listed South African companies, and state-owned companies.

Nowadays, digital exposure offers a particularly vivid example of how quickly the landscape is shifting. “It’s changed radically, and at an accelerated pace over the last few years for most of our clients, because technology is advancing so fast. The law hasn’t kept up with it, although it is developing to try to keep up.”

At next month’s GC Forum GRC, Vanessa and panelists Lynelle Bagwandeen of Naspers and Prosus, Lufuno Shinwana of Danone Southern Africa, Andréa Campbell of Microsoft, and Mpho Chitapi of Nedbank Limited will explore how GCs are increasingly responsible for governing digital risk while enabling innovation, as their organisations embrace AI and digital transformation.

In her practice, Vanessa sees major exposure in areas such as confidentiality, intellectual property, cyber security, and data privacy. Importantly, she notes, these are not risks confined to management board, legal teams, or technology specialists; employees throughout organisations now access AI tools, potentially putting sensitive information, personal data, and intellectual property at risk.

Yet governance cannot simply mean prohibition.

“You can’t say, ‘please don’t use AI, you’re not allowed to use AI,’ because people will still use AI, so the risks will still be there,” Vanessa says. “You need to put in place governance, you need to educate people on risks, and you need to put in place processes to mitigate risks. You need to make full use of the opportunities while doing all of that, so you can get the most out of it, while minimising the risk.”

What organisations and leaders can’t do, says Vanessa bluntly, is put their heads in the sand and hope the challenges of the AI revolution are going to go away.

Effective governance, she says, is about creating conditions for informed use.

At Bowmans, the leading African firm shares its own experiences of technology with clients, provides training, and assists organisations with policies and decision-making protocols to maintain legal oversight and ensure there is always a “human in the loop”. And in fact, proper use of AI can help bring the human even more to the centre of matters, such as using complex AI to interrogate and compare massive bodies of evidence, then having lawyers cross-check and verify. Time reduced on otherwise ‘grunt work’ can leave more time for lawyers to use their skills, judgment, and expertise to help clients. At Bowmans, they have a favourite saying, says Vanessa: technology “takes the robot out of the lawyer”.

The questions facing today and tomorrow’s General Counsel extend well beyond technology, however. And across the one-day GC Forum GRC, the gathering will examine regulatory complexity across Africa, boardroom expectations, crisis leadership, organisational resilience, and the wider challenge of helping businesses and organisations make confident decisions amid uncertainty.

There’s a lot of value in tackling those questions collectively, at events such as the GC Forum GRC, says Vanessa. “I think it’s so important because it’s by bringing us all together and sharing this knowledge and learning from each other that it makes it so much easier for all of us to get ahead of the issues and the risks, and find the best ways to unlock the opportunities of technology.”

She’s looking forward to face-to-face conversations, and hearing how others are approaching similar challenges in areas where the answers are still developing.

“We’re all grappling with this in our silos, and that takes a lot more time and energy,” Vanessa says. “Coming together and sharing our experiences and our knowledge, I think, helps all of us on this path.”