How Bowmans created a group-wide HR system using Deel Local Payroll

Bowmans is one of Africa’s largest law firms, with 1,150 employees, 650-plus attorneys, nine offices, and six jurisdictions. Its teams advise multinationals and governments on everything from dispute resolution to B-BBEE and international arbitration.

Rapid growth—fueled by acquisitions—left Bowmans with a patchwork of local HRIS platforms and payroll providers. Each newly acquired office arrived with its own tools, and every African market comes with unique tax and labor rules. Managing payroll across six countries had become a time-consuming, error-prone exercise.

Bowmans’ strategy team set out to find a single, group-wide HR and payroll system that could:

• Standardize processes across all offices while respecting local regulations.
• Integrate scattered HR data into one source of truth.
• Scale effortlessly as the firm opened in new African markets.

“It was important for us to implement [payroll] systems that not only benefited the firm, but also benefited our lawyers. We want to empower them to bring expertise to our clients, not trip over bad technology and cumbersome systems.” — Chris Martinus, Head of Enterprise Systems, Bowmans

The Bowmans team adopted Deel Local Payroll and leveraged their API to create a single HRIS system across its locations in Africa. Because Deel Local Payroll’s API documentation is regularly updated and built on real-world use cases, developers can implement solutions quickly.

“When we deal with APIs, the documentation often doesn’t reflect what we’re trying to build. With Deel Local Payroll, all API documentation was comprehensive, coherent, and available.” —Chris Martinus, Head of Enterprise Systems, Bowmans

The features that came along with Deel Local Payroll helped the team accelerate their mission and build the group-wide HR system they needed.

To run payroll as seamlessly as it practices law, the firm deployed Deel Local Payroll as the connective tissue tying its HR landscape together.

1. A single engine for six countries. Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia each impose their own tax codes, pension rules, and reporting calendars. Deel abstracts that complexity behind one interface, so the Bowmans team can:

• Run monthly payroll from a unified dashboard,
• Trust automatic compliance updates in every jurisdiction, and
• Feed clean, standardised data back into its existing HRIS.

2. Built for builders. A modern, RESTful API and public, space-based documentation let Bowmans’ engineers self-serve. No more endless email chains with vendor support. Code samples, endpoints, and change logs are all a click away.

3. Safe-to-fail innovation. Before, even a minor integration tweak risked corrupting live employee data. Now thanks to Deel Local Payroll, Bowmans spins up a ring-fenced staging environment where developers can build, test, and break things without touching production. Mistakes become learning loops, not crises.

4. Real-time back-up from real humans. When questions did arise, Deel’s technical specialists were on call—delivering precise answers on tight timelines and ensuring Bowmans’ rollout never lost momentum.

Bowmans now runs a single, scalable payroll architecture that grows as the firm opens new offices. Lawyers focus on clients, not paperwork; finance trusts the numbers; HR has one source of truth. And the firm’s next expansion—wherever it lands on the map—plugs into the same backbone, ready-made.