CUSTOMER STORY – SUITE
A recipe for operational legal excellence: Inside an East African family business legal digitalization
How a third-generation East African conglomerate turned digital transformation into a strategic advantage
AT A GLANCE
INTRODUCTION
What began in the 1960s as a small family baking business in Kenya, in the first generation’s grandmother’s kitchen, has grown into what is now a leading regional player: a diversified conglomerate operating across East Africa, from Kenya and Uganda to Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique. Over the years, the group has steadily expanded its footprint, with operations in real estate, agriculture, services, and investments, all while staying true to its roots in the bakery industry.
Today, the family business stands strong and continues to grow. The third generation has taken over the leadership of the group, alongside other family members. Yet one key element was still missing: the professionalization of internal legal operations. Not because the legal team lacked talent, but because it lacked the tools needed to take its impact to the next level. Leading this transformation is the youngest member of the third generation, who brings a global outlook shaped by international education and experience. Tasked with modernizing operations across over 100 legal entities, he quickly recognized that the status quo would not scale, especially with a lean six-person legal department supporting six very different industries.
THE CHALLENGE
Too big for spreadsheets and paper trails
With family tradition and legacy also come challenges in adopting digital transformation, and it is worth noting that the East African region has generally embraced digitalization later than other parts of the world. The talented legal team could only do so much with the hours available and the limited tools they had.
For the group’s compliance and leadership teams, it became clear that the time for change had come. Legacy processes had outlived the group’s growth and were leading to delays, slow workflows, and far too many hours spent on tasks that could be streamlined. On a practical level, these challenges showed up across every aspect of the legal team’s work:
The Transformation and Digitalization lead explained: “We realized that for the legal department to serve as a strategic function across the group, we needed to give them tools.”
The goal in mind was to centralize, consolidate, and boost legal and compliance operations. The conglomerate needed a solution that could do it all and do it well.
THE SOLUTION
Goodbye manual work and fragmented information sources
Before jumping to the solution, it is important to understand how the conglomerate works. The group is built around six industry clusters, each with its own board led by a family member and reporting to a group-level board. The group-level board includes both family members and external advisors, a key component to ensure professional management and independent oversight.
Within this setup, the legal department operates as a centralized support function for all the entities, regardless of the industry. A strong team of six handles everything: contracts, matters and litigation, and entity management across the entire organization. It is powerful, but scalability had become harder as the group continued to grow.
Faced with rising complexity and limited internal resources, the group knew that improving efficiency wouldn’t come from expanding headcount. It had to come from choosing the right technology.
A tailored-fit solution
Given their current governance setup and legal team, the Transformation and Digitalization Lead evaluated around eight service providers before choosing DiliTrust. Once the entity management, matter management, and contract management rollout was complete, the legal team of six gained:
An all-in-one solution interconnecting contract management, entity management, and matter management.
Data customization for entity fields, aligning with reporting and local needs.
Standardized contract templates with enough flexibility to adapt to each industry and operating region.
Consolidated data, simplifying reporting across the board, whether for entities or litigation (such as hearing recaps and tracking)
The implementation followed a phased approach, starting with entity management, then moving into matter management, and finishing with CLM. The CLM rollout took longer than the other tools due to the group’s diversity and regional complexities, as they needed to account for inter-industry differences. DiliTrust was instrumental in supporting the organization during the templatization process.
One of the key factors behind the decision to choose DiliTrust was its all-in-one model. Indeed, the organization wanted to centralize as much as possible and avoid a scenario where each entity selected its own tools, which would have resulted in a fragmented system.
THE RESULTS
A legacy set to continue
The rollout was recent, but the results are already showing for the team:
To date, six users have been onboarded, covering the entire legal function. Next in line are the compliance and insurance departments, with broader adoption projected across other administrative functions in the coming year. This strategic scaling ensures that the platform grows with the group, rather than being limited to one department or use case.
More importantly, the transformation reflects the family business’s deep-rooted values: efficiency, humility, and service. By investing in tools that empower people rather than replace them, and by focusing on scalable, ethical growth, the group is proving that modernization can go hand in hand with tradition, and that family-led businesses can lead in innovation too.
We’ve made tech do the work. The legal team is finally able to act at the speed of business, not at the pace of paper
– Transformation and Digitalization Lead
You have seen how DiliTrust helped a multinational conglomerate digitize all its legal operations, freeing up time for legal teams to focus on strategy. Discover how we can help your organization do the same.