Head legal and ethics | Discovery Health Medical Scheme
Howard Snoyman
Head legal and ethics | Discovery Health Medical Scheme
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
As a General Counsel, one must be comfortable with discomfort and crises. Your role is to provide a calming influence and navigate the waters of crisis with a steady hand, making it essential to focus on and prioritise key tasks, while neutralising the most pressing threats.
Over time, legal and commercial strategies have increasingly become intertwined, driven by necessity. Before pursuing any new and innovative business direction, it is crucial to assess how defensible such a strategy is if challenged by competitors, customers, or regulators. Innovation is important, but blind innovation without proper legal and regulatory risk mitigation is essentially a gamble. Therefore, legal strategy and commercial strategy must work together in a symbiotic partnership.
What are the main cases or transactions you have been involved in recently (you don’t have to be too specific; we just want to know the work you’ve been doing in general terms)?
One of the primary focuses in our business, aside from the ongoing innovation around medical scheme (health insurance) offerings and their governance, is guiding society towards a sustainable model of universal health coverage (UHC). It is widely acknowledged that the current wording of the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act presents legal, logistical, and fiscal challenges, and as such, falls short as a practical means of achieving UHC. However, there are ways in which amendments to the Act, and to some extent the broader regulatory environment, can address these shortcomings and expand access to adequate healthcare for all. We have been working tirelessly to pursue this aspiration in a sustainable manner.
How do you prioritize diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?
Diversity of competent thought is a valuable asset to any team, and such diversity can only be achieved by including team members from various backgrounds and skill sets. It is important to be slow in dismissing perspectives that differ from your own and to empower those employed to help solve legal and regulatory dilemmas to actually do so. Having a suitably skilled team and not listening to them creates an expensive echo chamber, which cannot deliver the optimal benefits to the enterprise.
In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently (these can be legal, political, economy or business-based)?
Governance is rapidly becoming one of the most critical considerations in corporate decision-making, and rightly so. How a decision is made is often as important as the decision itself. This is because, if it can be shown that the decision was reached rationally (while adhering to all statutory and fiduciary duties), even if the actual decision is controversial, the process of reaching it will be seen as responsible. This makes it less likely to be challenged or overturned through judicial or regulatory escalation. A rational decision-making process thus protects the decision-makers (often the Board) from attacks on their fitness, propriety, and personal integrity.
Head legal and ethics | Discovery Health Medical Scheme
