How a people mindset creates a better legal ops professional
We’ve all heard the tropes about legal professionals before; they’re ambitious, analytical and Type A personalities (let’s just call them the AAAs of the professional world). Although stereotypes are often rooted in some truth, there are always exceptions to any rule, and Naledi Mokgwathi is one of them.
Mokgwathi, a legal operations trailblazer, has a people-centric approach to legal that creates meaningful connections with the wider business and delivers maximum impact. Mokgwathi studied psychology and economics at the University of Botswana before beginning her career in HR, working for both Woolworths and Debswana Diamond Company, where she developed a particular interest in employee relations, the area of HR that intersects directly with legal frameworks, labor disputes, and regulatory processes.
The value an HR perspective brings to legal ops
“I always knew I wanted to learn more about the law,” says Mokgwathi. “Employee relations took me to court, to the labor office – that’s where it started to click.” Yet her path to the law was far from conventional. While working on the implementation of a company-wide data protection programme at Debswana, the Head of Legal expanded Mokgwathi’s remit to include legal operations.
Legal operations sits at the intersection of people, process, and technology, areas that a traditional legal education doesn’t focus on. It is a function that aims to enhance the process for people, making in-house counsel’s lives easier and equipping them with data and analytics that allow them to make strategic decisions that maximize value. HR, an inherently people-oriented function, operates in a service-oriented manner, seeking to improve outcomes for people and aligning with the ethos of legal operations.
“I don’t go to business partners to say no,” Mokgwathi says. “I go to ask, how can we help you?” That shift in approach has helped reposition legal from a reactive, siloed function into a proactive business partner focused on outcomes, efficiency, and transparency.
Leading Debswana’s software integration
A defining moment in Mokgwathi’s legal operations career has been through her leadership of Debswana’s LawVu implementation. With a small legal team supporting thousands of employees across multiple sites, the department had reached the limits of manual processes. Simply put, the volume of Debswana’s legal team’s work had outgrown their human resources.
“Our legal team was responsible for reviewing high-value and long-term contracts,” she explains. “But some of the disputes we faced were from smaller contracts that slipped through those thresholds.”
Building capability through technology
Integrating legal technology significantly expanded the legal team’s scope for contract review and minimized risk exposure to potential litigation on smaller contracts. “We can now widen our review portfolio,” Mokgwathi says. “Technology allows us to manage more contracts, monitor progress end-to-end, and reduce turnaround times – all while staying within budget.”
While implementing new technology might sound like a purely technical exercise, Mokgwathi emphasizes that people are at the heart of successful adoption. “My biggest challenge was helping the team understand what legal operations are. That it’s not administrative, it’s strategic.”
Her approach focused on change management, running training, collecting feedback, and demonstrating early wins to both the teams and leadership. “We had to show the before and after,” she says. “Now, people see that things run smoother, faster, and with more insight.”
Still, Mokgwathi points out that many business partners don’t yet realize how much AI can help. “They think legal will always be slow because it’s legal. Once they see the technology in action, that perception changes.”
Redefining legal ops in an emerging market
Despite the obvious benefits of legal operations, Mokgwathi has had to contend with widespread misconceptions about its value, particularly in Africa, where the function is still emerging.
“Some people think legal ops is just an overpaid personal assistant to the general counsel,” she laughs. “Others simply don’t know what it is.”
Her response is simple but effective, show its impact. This can be achieved through training when implementing new software, feedback loops, and reporting on measurable improvements to the leadership team. Mokgwathi’s north star is to educate colleagues and leadership on the distinction between administrative support and strategic legal operations.
Mokgwathi’s story reflects a broader shift in the legal profession, and one that can be observed across the globe. As technology reshapes how legal work is delivered, the industry stands to benefit immensely from professionals with multi-functional knowledge, allowing them to bridge disciplines and combine legal understanding with operational thinking, digital fluency, and change leadership.
As Mokgwathi puts it, “Legal operations isn’t administrative, it’s strategic, and sometimes it takes someone from outside traditional law to see that clearly.”
