The person behind Lex Praxis — and why employment law and AI are a more natural pairing than most people expect.
A manager drafts a warning with a chatbot, or sifts a shortlist with a tool, but the decision still has to be the employer's. It has to rest on the facts, follow a fair process, and stand up when the Authority asks how it was made. Lex Praxis exists to keep it that way.
Melt Strydom has worked in employment law for more than 20 years, in South Africa and New Zealand. He was admitted as an advocate of the High Court of South Africa in 2003, the equivalent there of a barrister, and the work was adversarial from the start. He appeared in the Labour Court and the Labour Appeal Court, and he chaired disciplinary and grievance investigations.
In New Zealand his practice is advisory. He advises employers, represents them at the Employment Relations Authority, and works through the agreements and disputes that sit behind most workplace problems. He holds an LLB, a postgraduate diploma in advanced labour law, and a higher diploma in arbitration law. Arbitration taught him to read a dispute from the decision-maker's side of the table, which is where an employer's process is really tested. He is a member of the Employment Law Institute of New Zealand.
Alongside that work, he spent years learning AI properly, through formal study of its law and ethics and a great deal of hard use, until he knew where it can be relied on and where it cannot.
The work sits at two moments. Before a decision leaves the building, we test it the way the other side would attack it: the missing fact, the allegation that was never put, the consultation that never happened. After a grievance lands, we reconstruct how the decision was actually made, from the human input, through the AI, to the person who signed it off. Either way, the record has to show that a person made the call.
Lex Praxis is not a technology vendor, and it is not a law firm adding AI on the side. It is one practitioner working where the problem sits, in employment law, workplace investigations, and an honest read of what AI can and cannot do. Every piece of work is reviewed and owned by that practitioner. The work is AI-augmented, never AI-powered.