In many African markets, it is quite common practice for multinationals to retain a single local firm for both legal advice and investigative intelligence. The convenience is understandable. Building trusted local relationships takes time, and in markets where institutional knowledge is hard to develop from the outside, extending an existing mandate feels like a practical solution.
Legal advisory and investigative work are, however, different disciplines. They are built on different methodologies and require different degrees of independence from the transaction they are assessing. A legal team focused on structuring a deal is asking how to make it work. An investigator assessing the same deal is asking whether it should proceed at all. These are not competing questions. They are complementary ones, and keeping them separate is what allows both to be answered well.
What legal channels are not designed to do is surface what has not been disclosed. Informal ownership arrangements that exist outside any formal filing. Relationships between a potential partner and a government official that are widely known within a sector but appear nowhere on record. Operational realities that contradict what the documentation suggests. Independent investigative intelligence is built specifically to look for these things, and in pre-transaction scenarios, what is not found early enough tends to surface later at considerably greater cost.
The strongest due diligence processes combine both functions, each covering ground the other cannot. Legal advice structures the transaction. Independent intelligence assesses the counterparty. Together, they produce a picture that neither generates alone.
The strongest outcomes tend to follow.
Posted by PML Africa on 03 July 2026
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