Insights
The discipline, before you instruct it.
Short, practical pieces written for boards, regulators, businesses and non-profits. No generic commentary: each one comes from a question the practice was actually asked, and each one ends at the service page that answers it.
The reference libraries
The two deepest parts of this site.
Not opinion pieces — working references. or a post can point at a single one.
The contract instrument library
Twenty-seven instruments, what each must contain under South African law, the statute behind it, and the defect that most often makes it unenforceable.
Open the libraryThe policy instrument library
Thirty-eight policy instruments across governance, ethics, finance, information, people and operations — what each does, how it is drafted, and what makes it worthless.
Open the libraryPublished pieces
7 pieces, newest first.
Every one closes at a named service page, so that if the piece has answered your question you can see immediately what the work would cost.
Ninety days and counting: what a POPIA enforcement notice means for your board
The Information Regulator has given a national public entity 90 days to prove it complies with POPIA. What the Regulator actually measures, the eight conditions in plain language, and five questions for your next board meeting.
Read the piece · 6-minute readThe section 51 manual: the compliance document most private bodies still have not published
It is compulsory, it is public, and it is free to produce. Its absence is the first thing a complainant points at — and the first thing a sceptical buyer notices.
Read the piece · 6-minute readPolicies that fit: drafting internal policy that serves the organisation — and survives scrutiny
Every policy has two audiences: the people who must follow it, and the person who will one day read it against you — a commissioner, an assessor, an auditor, a funder.
Read the piece · 5-minute readLegal opinions: six questions to ask before you rely on one
An opinion guides a decision on the day it is signed and defends it on the day it is attacked. Six questions any board, registrar or executive should ask before relying on one.
Read the piece · 5-minute readService level agreements: the clauses that actually get tested
An SLA is read properly twice — once at signature, and once when something has gone wrong. Five drafting disciplines for the second reading.
Read the piece · 6-minute readAmending rules and regulations without breaking them
Staying inside the empowering provision, drafting in the amending form, and writing the transitional provisions that decide who is governed by what.
Read the piece · 7-minute readDelegations of authority: who may actually sign, and how to prove it
Where signing authority comes from, what a delegation framework must contain, and why the Turquand rule protects the outsider rather than the board.
Read the piece · 6-minute readComing next
What is being written now.
Published here first, and nowhere else until they are. Nothing on this list exists yet — when a piece is published it moves up into the list above.
- October 2026 · Information governanceThe operator register: the POPIA gap that is never the clause
Almost every organisation has operators it has never identified — the payroll bureau, the cloud host, the shredding company. The section 21 agreement is the easy half.
- November 2026 · Commercial contractingSection 197: what a sale of business actually moves
The employees transfer by operation of law, with their terms and their service intact, whatever the sale agreement says. The parties can allocate the cost; they cannot displace the transfer.
- December 2026 · Public procurementThe contract cannot improve on the bid
Anything promised in a technical proposal is a contractual obligation whether or not it is repeated in the signed agreement — which is why the proposal has to be written as though it were the contract.
Start here
Have one of these in front of you right now?
A fixed-fee review of a contract or a policy you did not draft, with written advice, is R3 500. A thirty-minute scoping call is free.