Supporting the Hiring of Pinnacle's First Legal Counsel
- Jan 5
- 4 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
We supported Pinnacle Holding Company Ltd ("Pinnacle"), the parent company behind some of Ghana's most successful companies, with their first legal hire.
Images: Capemay Properties Limited and Kasapreko PLC When a business reaches a certain scale, the absence of internal legal support is a gap senior management eagerly wants to fill. For Pinnacle, that moment arrived in 2025. In October 2025, Counsel & Sol support Pinnacle with their first in-house legal hire, a Group Chief Legal Officer.
The Business: Scale, Diversity, and Growing Legal Complexity
Pinnacle's subsidiaries span a diversity of areas including beverages, manufacturing, energy, and property development. Kasapreko PLC, a multinational beverage manufacturer, achieved impressive revenue growth of 45% to $245 million in 2024. The group's property development company, Capemay Properties, is currently developing the tallest building in Ghana, Selton Skye. The group's diversity is a huge strength. However, it also means that legal risk comes from many directions. Regulatory exposure across multiple sectors. Complex commercial relationships. Brand reputation tied to consumer trust. Cross-border operational footprint.
Pinnacle's senior management team recognised the need for a new model of managing their legal risks. They needed a Group Chief Legal Officer: a single, senior in-house lawyer who could sit across the entire group, provide strategic legal leadership, and bring coherence to the internal legal function. The challenge was that hiring a legal professional of this calibre, with the right blend of technical expertise, commercial acumen, and cultural fit, is not a straightforward process. especially when those leading the search are not legal professionals themselves.
They brought in Counsel & Sol.
Hiring Your First Legal Counsel
Hiring the first in-house legal counsel is one of the most significant decisions a business will make. It sets the tone for how risk is managed, contracts are negotiated, and key decisions are made across the organisation. Hiring the wrong legal counsel can lead to several challenges, including:
Slow Decision-Making: Delays in commercial decision-making can hinder growth.
Leadership Friction: Poor alignment with leadership teams can create tension.
Increased Risk: Lack of sector experience can lead to poor judgment.
Costly Reliance on External Lawyers: Over-dependence on external counsel can strain budgets.
On the other hand, hiring the right legal counsel can provide numerous advantages:
Trusted Adviser: They can act as a reliable adviser to leadership.
Reduced Legal Spend: Internal counsel can help lower external legal costs.
Improved Governance: They can enhance governance and compliance.
Support for Growth: A good legal counsel can facilitate scaling.
You Cannot Properly Evaluate Legal Talent Without Legal Expertise
This is the most underappreciated risk in any first legal hire, and it is the issue that costs businesses the most when it goes wrong. Legal CVs are not like other CVs. The institutions, practice areas, deal experience, and regulatory exposure listed on a legal candidate's profile require legal literacy to interpret accurately. A candidate with strong transactional experience at a major firm might look exceptional on paper — and may be entirely wrong for a role that demands day-to-day commercial judgment in a fast-moving, multi-sector group environment.
Equally, the interview process for a senior legal hire requires a different set of probing questions. Generic competency frameworks do not surface the things that matter: how a candidate approaches a situation where the legal answer is genuinely unclear; how they communicate risk to a leadership team that wants to move fast; whether they have the confidence to push back on a CEO and the commercial sense to know when not to.
Pinnacle's senior management team had the vision and the business acumen to know the legal expertise they needed. Count & Sol provided the first legal lens to assess whether the candidates who applied for the role could actually deliver. We worked closely with senior management to:
Define the Group's Legal Needs to have a precise role
We assessed the legal needs of the various subsidiaries in the group and their current reliance on external counsel. This ensured the role and requirements were scoped correctly.
Designing a rigorous process to Vet Candidates Through a Qualified Legal Lens
One of the most overlooked risks when hiring a first legal counsel is who evaluates the legal expertise of the candidate. Legal capability cannot be properly assessed by non-legal interviewers alone. With extensive legal expertise, Count & Sol conducted the first stage interview stage and:
- Assessed technical legal competence.
- Evaluated judgment and risk appetite.
- Tested commercial awareness and stakeholder management skills.
- Ensured the candidate could operate autonomously as a sole legal professional.
Ensure Cultural and Structural Fit
For all businesses, cultural alignment matters. We ensured the selected candidate could:
- Work effectively within the business structure.
- Support leadership without creating bottlenecks.
- Balance governance with commercial pragmatism.
- Grow with the business as complexity increases.
By identifying the top candidates, we removed over 80% of the screening and evaluation workload. Senior management were able to enter the next stage of the process fully briefed, with their time protected and their decision significantly de-risked.
Faster Hiring Process
One of the most avoidable failures in senior hiring is losing strong candidates to delays. We maintained close coordination throughout the process, shortening the gap between hiring stages and ensuring that candidate engagement remained high. Pinnacle delivered an offer to their preferred candidate within a month and the new Group Chief Legal Officer started in January 2026.
Setting the new legal counsel up to succeed from day one
Our involvement did not end at the offer. We delivered a half-day onboarding session during the new hire's first week, alongside a programme of quarterly personal development sessions — ensuring the new CLO hit the ground running and had structured support as they built the legal function from the inside.
Do Not Hire Your First Legal Counsel Alone
Hiring your first in-house legal counsel is a pivotal step for your business. It can shape your organisation's future, influence decision-making, and ultimately drive growth. The wrong legal hire can cost more than external counsel, with poor legal judgment exposing the business to more risk. The consequences of getting it right are transformative — a trusted legal partner embedded in your leadership team, a function built to scale, and the confidence to make decisions faster. By having expert guidance, you can make this important decision with confidence.
Please see the Sole Counsel Hub or book a consultation for more information on our first legal hire service.
