Our Team
Richard Thompson 
Founder
Richard was admitted as an attorney in 2015 and holds a Business Science – Marketing (2009) and Post Graduate LLB (2013) degree as well as a Masters degree (LLM) in Intellectual Property Law (2019), all from the University of Cape Town.
He has over 9 years post qualification experience, both in practice as a commercial and civil litigation attorney as well as in-house as a legal counsel for both start-ups as well as established businesses across e-Learning, digital media, e-commerce and public/legislative industries. With his educational background and experience, Richard has acquired a nuanced skillset with his main areas of interest being nuanced business legal advice; drafting, vetting and negotiating all kinds of commercial agreements and company policies; establishing robust data-protection and “access to information” compliance frameworks; and assisting with in-house labour law matters.
Having become somewhat disillusioned with the unnecessarily complicated and expensive ways that traditional law firms provide services, Richard started Lay Law with the hope of simplifying legal services through the provision of efficient, cost-effective, unbundled legal consulting solutions to people or their businesses, without sacrificing on quality.
Taryn Blignaut
Legal Consultant
Admitted as an attorney in 2010, Taryn has over a decade of experience as in-house legal counsel to global, listed companies such as Ninety One and Coronation Fund Managers. Taryn’s specialisations include financial services law as well as corporate and commercial law, having drafted everything from IT contracts to multi-billion rand investment mandates for her previous employers.
At Ninety One, Taryn was senior legal counsel for the Southern Africa institutional business, responsible for concluding all institutional client mandates, providing legal input into new funds, commenting on draft legislation across South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, drafting and reviewing a range of service contracts for the South African and UK business and sitting on management committees, amongst other things.
In her early career, Taryn worked for non-profit organisations and a corporate finance start-up involved in mergers and acquisitions, credit funds and IPO’s. Recently, Taryn decided to leave ‘big corporate’ in order to pursue her passion for uplifting smaller businesses that typically don’t have the budgets to hire quality legal counsel.
Taryn joins Lay Law as an independent legal consultant to provide efficient and affordable legal services to SME’s across South Africa.
When she is not working, Taryn enjoys cooking, painting, travelling, chilling with her hubby and fur babies or walking the beaches of Big Bay, Cape Town.
Eugenia Barale
Legal Consultant
An Admitted attorney with over a decade of experience in the legal, compliance and risk landscape, Eugenia is also a Certified Information Privacy Professional, and a DORA Senior Lead Manager.
This blend of credentials underscores Eugenia’s comprehensive grasp of commercial law, regulatory compliance, privacy, information security, IT risk management, and IT governance.
Having worked with a wide range of companies spanning finance, fintech and technology, Eugenia is well versed in navigating the complexities of the current legal and regulatory landscape and highly equipped to help businesses manage their legal and regulatory risks in a digital world.
Our Story
Born out of a discontentment with how the provision of traditional legal services has not moved with the times, Lay Law was created with the mission and vision of shaking up the status quo for the benefit of people and businesses seeking legal assistance.
By providing a wide range of high quality digital legal services at prices that are affordable, transparent and carefully aligned to the value that we are adding to people’s precious businesses or lives, we are committed to our pursuit of making real life positive impacts for our clients.
At the heart of Lay Law is the concept of simplicity. Despite what many may think, we passionately believe that the practice of law does not have to be complicated, archaic and difficult to navigate. At Lay Law we seek to make our offering as simple and clear as possible, from our business model right down to our drafting style. We are massive believers in the “plain language movement” where legal content is presented in a way that can be understood by lay people, not just lawyers. Herefrom do we derive our appellation! Or rather – This is where our name comes from! Better, right?!
When we refer to our clients as “lay people”, this is not meant as an insult. The definition of a lay person is “someone without professional or specialized knowledge in a particular subject”, which is what our clients are, otherwise they wouldn’t need our help! We are called Lay Law because, at our core, we exist to help and provide value to people and businesses in ways that they can understand and practically apply.
