A leadership team with an unparalleled combination of business and legal experience. We value our relationships and create opportunities for all: individually we are strong; together we thrive.
Karen heads up Cognia's HR operations, which involves ensuring Cognia recruits and retains the best talent out there and leads an optimised human resource operations function.
She has a unique blend of commercial and HR experience, built over the last 20 years with business managerial roles such as heading up teams across various segments including insurance, imports/exports and procurement at Rentokil Initial, and more recently, developing talent in the legal sector.
As team leader and line manager, Oliver is responsible for the timely delivery and support to our financial services clients. He has held several roles at Cognia since he joined in 2014 and has a deep understanding of what Cognia is all about. He is currently managing a team of lawyers supporting a leading international investment bank, within their derivative documentation team.
Prior to joining Cognia, Oliver held a role as a Derivative Reconciliation Analyst at Morgan Stanley in London before returning home to Cape Town to qualify as a lawyer and practice commercial and civil litigation at Springer Nel attorneys.
Peter leads the smooth running of Cognia’s business services and flexible legal resourcing services. Having held CFO and COO roles over the last 25 years at global companies such as Old Mutual Direct, LTP Trade PLC and Standard Chartered, he understands the challenges clients face to deliver results on time and on budget.
Peter is responsible for driving systemic sector integration for new client acquisition.
He brings decades of experience developing and delivering business solutions, to meet client requirements working with global organisations with complex matrix structures such as IBM and SAP.
As a pioneering legal strategist, Janet is known for using her business acumen and adapting models to provide sustainable outcomes for global clients.
Janet brings over 20 years’ diverse, international experience in senior executive roles working in the corporate and legal sector at EY, Clifford Chance and Integreon.
Johan manages Cognia's finance team and ensures the business operates smoothly.
He has extensive accounting and finance experience from working with global professional services firms and across the legal industry. Prior to starting his career, he graduated with a BAccounting Honours from Stellenbosch University.
Justin is Cognia's General Counsel and leads our financial services sector and financial documentation service.
As a GC himself, he uses his learnings to develop practical solutions for in-house legal teams that are also commercially sustainable. He also brings over 20 years’ experience as a market-leading derivatives and structured finance lawyer at law firms and in-house, including the London Stock Exchange, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Ashurst, Dresdner Kleinwort and Barclays Africa.
Roberta is responsible for the timely delivery to clients, within budget and at agreed service levels of contract managed legal services to clients.
Roberta is a team leader and has held several roles over the last six years at Cognia, including quality manager, legal project manager and commercial contracts negotiator in both financial documentation and general commercial. Her experience means she understands not just the commercial landscape in which clients operate, but also the policies, regulations and methodologies that influence their ability to operate effectively. She also brings a wealth of process and continuous improvement skills having set up and managed Cognia’s ISO9001-certified Quality Management System.
Sonja works closely with GCs and legal teams, providing advisory support and developing practical solutions to address transformation, innovation, and improvement challenges. She partners with in-house teams to understand, define, and address business issues. Sonja brings structure, focus, and an analytical approach to strategic initiatives.
Over more than 20 years at magic circle law firms and in consulting roles across a broad range of industries, Sonja has specialised in supporting legal teams to implement improvements, increase efficiency, manage risk, and optimise legal processes and operations to deliver measurable benefits.
Calvin leads Cognia's Legal Tech Team and is responsible for the design and delivery of technology-enabled legal solutions across Cognia's service lines and client base. He heads up Cognia's Digital Studio, partnering with legal and delivery teams to build secure, scalable solutions that leverage AI, automation, reporting and analytics to improve client outcomes and operational efficiency.
A Solutions Architect with a Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) (Law) and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from Stellenbosch University, he has held various roles across the legal tech space, spanning technical project management through to solution development across multiple industries. Prior to joining Cognia, he worked at Exigent Group as a Legal Project Manager, managing large-scale managed review and contract migration projects involving volumes of more than 500k documents, and introducing automated reporting and process improvements to strengthen project delivery.
Helga is an Advisory Consultant at Cognia Law, where she brings extensive experience in legal operations to help organisations deliver transformational change. With a background spanning senior roles in both law firms and in-house legal teams, she specialises in legal operations leadership and consulting, legal portfolio and project management, and the design and delivery of large-scale change programmes. Helga is passionate about delivering practical, high-quality solutions that meet the needs of clients and stakeholders.
Prior to Cognia, Helga held senior leadership roles at Ashurst, including Associate Director within Ashurst Advance and Interim Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement for EMEA, where she led client solutions and transformation initiatives. She has also held senior legal operations roles at Barclays, LawAdvisor Ventures and Allen & Overy, building and leading legal project management functions and supporting the evolution of advanced legal service delivery.
