We speak with Aalia Manie, partner and the director of Fusion, about the spin out of innovation arm Fusion as an independent subsidiary
Leading African law firm Webber Wentzel has spun out its technology arm Fusion into a wholly-owned but independent subsidiary, as it evolves into an end-to-end product house.
The spin-off is the latest evolution in Webber Wentzel’s alternative legal services offering, which started as an internally incubated centre, before being rebranded and expanded as Webber Wentzel Fusion in January 2024. In 2025 Fusion, launched a Legal Innovation Lab that co-develops client-focused technology solutions, working with partners such as Legora.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the creation of the independent subsidiary, partner and Fusion director Aalia Manie said that the new structure will give Fusion complete agility. “Fusion is becoming its own corporate entity and its scope is much wider,” Manie told us. “Our clients now include legal technology vendors and we’re working not just in a legal advisory capacity but testing products and working as an implementation partner. We’re also acting as a technology consultant to in-house legal departments. When Claude released its new plugin, we gave advice on what that actually means and how you can benchmark that against legal AI tools. We’re helping clients with procurement and benchmarking; how they test ROI; how they take projects to the board; and what feedback to the board should look like a year in. We also help them to ensure AI is being used responsibly to transform the legal department and stay in touch with headlines but not panic.”
While for now Fusion is a wholly-owned subsidiary, everything is on the table. What is for sure is that Fusion and Webber Wentzel will be providing an end-to-end offering to clients. “We’re going to have joint mandates and we’re already planning that,” Manie says. The difference now is that Fusion can do the tech build, with Manie observing: “As an in-house department you might want to build a product or application on top of, for example, Microsoft, or a digital playbook in Luminance, or a workflow in Harvey or Legora. We in the normal course of a law firm would find that difficult, but now we can provide digital legal applications through this entity, so we’re closer to becoming a product house.”
Fusion is 14-people strong but can draw on lawyers across the firm, with Manie observing: “We made the decision years ago to go enterprise-wide with AI solutions and took investment because we believed that skills were more important at that stage than technology. Years late and we have people who can vibe code and in Fusion, we can flex and second people in.”
Webber Wentzel deservedly won the Innovation Award at the African Legal Awards in both 2024 and 2025. Manie says: “Our AI solutions are built around how legal work actually gets done. By embedding legal expertise directly into AI delivery, we help organisations move beyond experimentation to AI solutions that are both governable and effective at scale.”
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