Team size: Ten

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?

Ninety One’s African legal team covers a lot of ground. As part of a global investment management firm, we have cultivated a team with a diverse set of financial services skills. Each qualified lawyer has a multi-disciplinary focus and skill set, while striving to be an expert in his or her core fields. This enables us to guide the business on almost any issue that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Periods of instability or crisis are an opportunity for in-house lawyers to shine. Being able to quickly cut through “noise” and provide commercially focused, business-integrated and pragmatic legal guidance is critical in crisis situations.

We are also fully integrated into the business and its strategic direction. Having an accurate and up-to-date understanding of the business ensures that we have the correct skills base and remain relevant to the business and its key initiatives. Our team operates in distinct pillars of deep specialist knowledge across the diverse areas of the business that we support. We have sought to create “centres of excellence”, in which each member in the team aims to be the expert in their specific areas. This helps business partners to understand who their “go-to lawyer” is for a particular subject matter and also for business partners to be able to build meaningful relationships with those individual lawyers.

What are the main cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

Some of the Legal team’s most significant transactions in recent years are:

The transfer of Sanlam’s investment management business to Ninety One: this transaction involves the transfer of around £17bn of assets under management to Ninety One.

The demerger of Ninety One (formerly Investec Asset Management) from the Investec Group and the simultaneous listing of Ninety One on the London Stock Exchange and Johannesburg Stock Exchange using a ‘dual-listed companies’ structure.

The launch of several complex funds in the private markets/alternatives space.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently?

Increased legislation and regulatory scrutiny: the presence of new and evolving legislation has been particularly prevalent in Southern Africa in recent years, including as a result of countries being grey-listed and various socio-political initiatives.

AI and technology: the advancements in this space are seismic and they present a multitude of opportunities to make legal services more effective and efficient. As a result of the large volumes of information and data digested by lawyers, LLMs and GPTs are proving particularly useful.