Why global law firms keep quitting South Africa

At the end of the month, one of South Africa’s biggest international legal mergers unwinds when Norton Rose Fulbright returns to being Deneys Reitz. Why do the marriages keep ending in paperwork in Joburg when the global merger machine is humming again?

Globally, law firm combinations rose 18% in 2025, with 59 completed deals as firms chased scale, technology budgets and the increasingly brutal economics of talent. Yet in South Africa the mood has lately been less confetti than conveyancing.

Hogan Lovells said in September 2024 that it would close its Joburg office as part of a retreat to “strategic markets”. A&O Shearman said the same month that it would shut its operations in Joburg in a post-merger shake-up. Then Norton Rose Fulbright announced in November 2025 that its South African business would become independent again from March 31 2026, with the firm reviving the Deneys Reitz name as it steps out on its own.

That is enough, in journalistic terms, to qualify as a trend. But Brent Botha, CEO of Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa, is having none of it. In an interview, he argues that these break-ups should be understood case by case, not as evidence that South Africa has somehow become a failed proposition for international law firms. 

In Norton Rose’s case, he describes the split as “a very natural evolution for both firms”, shaped by changing global market dynamics rather than any local implosion.

Botha insists the decision was mutual, not imposed by London or New York, and says there was “no trigger, no fallout”, no client conflict and no dramatic rupture behind the separation. He also pushes back on the familiar idea that a Swiss verein is some wonderfully baggy, low-commitment structure in which everybody keeps a logo on the door and minds their own business. 

Yes, the regions are not financially integrated, he says, but they still go to market as a single global proposition, and that means local strategy remains shaped by a global one. Independence, in his telling, is attractive precisely because the South African firm no longer needs to subordinate its strategy to a worldwide vision.

What this suggests is that not only is South Africa’s attractiveness fraying, but so is the old promise that global legal brands can be both unified and locally nimble at the same time. The verein, in other words, may be less a loose federation than a system for distributing constraint politely across time zones.

Botha also makes another striking point: freedom. Outside Norton Rose Fulbright, the South African firm will be able to pursue African clients more aggressively and explore relationships with firms in other jurisdictions that it could not previously pursue at its own discretion. 

Still, once you widen the frame, the pattern looks awfully structural.

The original sales pitch for these tie-ups was simple enough. A South African firm would gain a global badge, international systems and access to blue-chip clients; the foreign firm would gain a credible local platform and, in theory, a springboard into the rest of Africa. On the launch-day brochure this always looked marvellous: one globe, many offices, everybody terribly synergised. In practice, it has often turned into a dispute about money, control and status, wearing the costume of partnership.

One senior, experienced South African lawyer who has lived through two such arrangements describes the model with devastating simplicity: “It’s a franchise model.” Firms, she says, are effectively paying for the global name, systems and databases – “like a KFC”. 

The glamour is obvious at first. The brand opens doors. It promises access. It allows local lawyers to feel they have joined the big leagues. But the seduction tends to fade when everybody starts asking the impolite questions: who controls the client, who books the revenue, and who is really benefiting from the arrangement?

Three central problems

The first problem is brutally prosaic: South Africa is not a rich enough legal market to satisfy global expectations. You can slap a transatlantic logo on the wall, but you still cannot charge Manhattan rates to a Sandton client who thinks R18,000 an hour is already bordering on obscenity. And when transactional volumes are weak, as many lawyers say they have been, the Joburg office starts to look to global management like a very small line item on an Excel spreadsheet. Small line items, as corporate history repeatedly teaches us, tend to acquire philosophical vulnerabilities during strategy reviews.

That spreadsheet logic is one reason these relationships often feel as though they run in cycles. There is initial enthusiasm; then a period of toleration; then a new global leadership team arrives and asks the dead-eyed question every outpost eventually fears: what exactly is this office adding to the bottom line? Once asked in that tone, it is usually only a matter of time before someone starts speaking in the language of “focus”, “simplification” and “strategic markets” – which, in corporate dialect, often means: lovely people, regrettable geography. Hogan Lovells’ Joburg closure was explicitly framed as a move to concentrate on markets where the firm saw more strategic demand, while A&O Shearman’s exit came as part of a broader post-merger restructuring.

The second problem is conflict – both legal and cultural. These arrangements are sold as engines of shared clients and cross-border work. But they can crack the moment a powerful global client collides with a valuable local mandate. 

In some cases, the international firm’s priorities simply outrank the local relationship. That may be rational inside a giant global client account; it lands rather badly in South Africa, where firms still live by relationships, memory and the basic expectation that one is not to be ordered about by a colleague three continents away who discovered the matter five minutes ago.

Then there is the issue nobody likes to state too plainly, but nearly everybody recognises when it appears: hierarchy. South African firms do not enjoy being treated as decorative provincial affiliates wheeled out for Africa slides in a global pitch deck. The resentment tends to grow when “the best team” on a cross-border matter somehow always seems to be in Frankfurt, London or New York, even when the issue is manifestly local. South Africans, to put it mildly, do not warm naturally to being cast as second-tier natives in their own jurisdiction.

That is why the arrangements that seem to last are usually the ones that do not pretend the local firm has become an offshore clone.

Linklaters and Webber Wentzel formalised their collaboration in 2012 as an alliance, not a full absorption, and they still describe it as a collaborative model built on a much older relationship.

Dentons, when it expanded in South Africa with KapdiTwala, stressed that the local firm would remain 100% locally owned and retain its level 1 broad-based BEE status. In other words, the more durable models tend to respect local identity instead of trying to iron it flat under global branding guidelines.

A broader issue

South Africa is not unique in this. Globally, the tensions inside sprawling legal federations have been showing through the polished brochures for years. Dentons’ combination with China’s Dacheng had to be unwound in 2023 into a preferred-firm relationship after Chinese counterespionage, cybersecurity and data restrictions made the structure increasingly untenable. 

And this month Bloomberg Law reported that DLA Piper plans to move away from its long-standing verein structure as it seeks tighter strategic and economic integration. The message is not subtle: the looser the federation, the easier it is to expand across jurisdictions – but also the easier it is to leave core contradictions unresolved until they turn expensive.

The South African version of the story has its own local twist. For years, foreign firms persuaded themselves that Joburg would serve as a launchpad into the rest of Africa. But Africa is not a single market, and it stubbornly refuses to behave like one just because a PowerPoint map has been shaded in one colour. Fees differ, regulatory systems differ, relationships differ, political risk differs, currencies differ, and local talent is expensive. The idea that one office in Sandton can effortlessly intermediate the whole continent has always been one of those propositions that sounds more convincing in London than in Lagos.

These relationships are not always failing because somebody behaved atrociously, or because South Africa has become uninvestable, or because the lawyers involved suddenly ceased to like one another. They are failing because the underlying bargain was often overpromised. The global firms wanted clients, prestige and Africa exposure without too much local complication. The South African firms wanted brand, referrals and international reach without surrendering too much of their economics or autonomy. Those are not impossible goals. But they are more difficult to reconcile than the launch cocktails ever suggested.

In the end, the surviving lesson may be an unromantic one. These tie-ups work only when the foreign firm trusts the local lawyers, uses them properly, shares economics sensibly, and resists the temptation to treat African offices as decorative proof of internationalism. Otherwise, all that remains is the logo, the conference lanyard and – five years later, give or take – the farewell memo.

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