‘There’s more to law than the law’: how Michelle David built her own uncharted path to legal leadership

Long before she took the helm at Deneys, Michelle David understood something many overlook when it comes to the business of law: the people who will be placing work in ten years are rarely the people placing it today.

It was the early 2000s, and as a young financial services regulatory lawyer she took a clear-headed look at the client landscape of the time. The established corporate relationships were long settled, and an Indian South African woman entering the profession was unlikely to inherit them. Michelle could spend years working to break into those networks, or she could build her own.

She chose the latter.

“I had to look for my own potential clientele,” recalls Michelle of that period. “The people that were coming up in my ranks, the people who were also finding their feet at pension funds or elsewhere, and have those conversations with them.”

Consequently, Michelle’s early support system was less in the South African and international firms where she practised as a young lawyer, before joining what is now Deneys in 2012, than among “like-minded people in potential clients”.

Necessity may have prompted the approach, but Michelle’s commercial instincts made it work. She recognised that markets and decision-makers change, and tomorrow’s legal business does not necessarily come from yesterday’s sources.

She learned early that there is more to law than the law. Technical excellence mattered, but so did understanding clients, relationships, and where revenue would come from. That insight would help take her from star law student and young attorney to equity partner and eventually Chair of Deneys.

An unconventional pathway

Michelle confesses she hadn’t originally intended to become a lawyer. She began with chemical engineering, “probably the unhappiest time of my life”, before admitting to her mother that she needed another path.

Law proved transformative. “Law school just came naturally,” she says. “It wasn’t something I’d always wanted to do, but I’m very grateful I got into law, it became my passion, and I’m good at my passion.”

Michelle’s switch came against a complicated backdrop: she grew up during Apartheid and finished school soon after South Africa’s first democratic elections. She lost her father tragically while she was still at school, and her mother ran a fruit and vegetable business that put both her children through their education. “She was really good at business,” says Michelle. “Even though it was a small business, she did it so well.”

Years later, entering legal practice, Michelle would show similar nous.

“When I started my career as a Candidate Attorney at a large firm, on day one I realised there’s a big difference between studying law and the business of law,” she says. “But for me, I always find the business of law very, very interesting.”

Earlier, Michelle had experienced firsthand how much South Africa still had to change. Having attended an all-Indian school, she says university was the first time she really engaged with people from different racial backgrounds.

She excelled from the start. When she came first in a law exam, an anonymous complainant questioned how a student from an Indian school could have outperformed those from white schools. Michelle finished among the top students in her year regardless and was selected among the top three to represent her university in a national moot. Told privately that her background and accent were not those of the other candidates, she raised it, and her place was confirmed. She turned it down anyway. “When the issues were resolved, I nevertheless chose not to participate. That’s my personality.”

More to law than law

That attitude and agency continued into practice. Whether she looked or sounded different to the traditional idea of a successful corporate lawyer, Michelle was undeterred. No roadmap? She set the destination herself.

“Quite early on, I decided I was going to make a career at a law firm, I was going to become a partner, and I was going to be successful at it,” she says. “I think that was the difference: being focused on that career and being focused on clients.”

Beyond focus, Michelle developed deep expertise. Today, she specialises in pension funds, medical schemes, and financial advisory services, representing regulators and major corporates. But top legal skills are only part of what makes a successful partner and leader, she says. Her own success isn’t just because of her expertise, but the way she understands the business side of law, and her ability to navigate that legal and business environment with clients and colleagues.

“I think that’s the differentiator,” says Michelle. “Some people are technically skilled but lack the understanding of what the business requires, and that business of law is what makes the difference between someone who’s going to be equity and someone who’s going to be the person with great technical skills on a project.”

With growing African markets, legal expertise remains essential, but as Michelle’s journey suggests, future partners and legal leaders also need to deeply understand clients, relationships, and the economics underpinning their firms.

Moving, as the world moves

Her broader outlook was one reason Michelle joined the firm in 2012, drawn to a practice with Big Five roots that had chosen to evolve rather than stand still. She was interested in the agility, the movement. “There was almost a braveness about it, and I wanted to be a part of that,” she recalls. Now, Michelle is helping lead the century-old African firm forward as an independent firm.

“I like things to expand, chasing the next sort of new thing,” she says. “I’m not the kind of person who’ll say, ‘look, we’ve reached our goal’. One thing that’s happened at Deneys, outside of the great people and culture, is the different iterations.”

Evolution also means responding to the wider world.

“There’s got to be change as markets change, change as clients change, change as the world changes,” says Michelle, whose own journey and story illustrate ongoing evolutions in South Africa, its business landscape, and legal profession.

Gaining a broader outlook as part of global leadership groups provided Michelle with something new: senior women who looked like her, had gone before, and were “amazing mentors”. She calls it a turning point that opened up “a whole new dimension of what is out there and how to come out successful”. Now, as Chair of Deneys, Michelle looks to occupy such space for others, maintaining an open-door policy and offering younger lawyers straight talk and practical guidance.

Creating a fairer, better future

As the world and region transform, alongside the country and legal profession, Michelle’s approach is characteristically concrete. “I’m not one for speeches and that kind of thing, but I’m definitely one for checking numbers,” she says. “Maybe that’s the engineering background. I’m all about processes.”

In practice, that means watching the numbers across teams and asking questions when they diverge. If two associates on the same team are building very different practices, the responsible partner can expect a call, and if that gap tracks gender, Michelle wants to know what sits behind it. If the answer is performance, her next question is what is being done to manage it. It is, she says, “exceptionally important that we all have equal opportunities to be somebody in the building”, and the numbers are how she checks the firm is delivering on that.

Her advice to younger lawyers is similarly practical: understand the difference between having a job and deliberately building a career.

“Once you wrap your head around building a career, you’re able to focus a lot more,” she says. There are enough demands on any lawyer, she notes, and often more on women. Protecting your own focus is, in her view, a practical necessity. It is not an argument that the extra demands should be there, and her position is that both need attention: the individual career, and the structures around it.

There will always be difficulties. The important thing, Michelle says, is to understand what they look like for you, and to develop a plan to navigate them.

“We’d all like to see change happen faster,” she says. “But you can’t simply expect someone else to change the world for you. You’ve got to get your hands dirty and make sure that you’re contributing.”

The recently re-elected Chair of Deneys has spent her career doing precisely that: reading the landscape, looking beyond established boundaries, challenging outdated orthodoxies, and creating opportunities where the well-trodden path offered few.

She has no plans to stop.