Anglo American’s Kevin Lester is among the most knowledgeable and experienced corporate counsel in South Africa, boasting substantial experience of managing legal services in the mining and metals industry. Joining the mining giant’s Johannesburg office in 2010, Lester successfully merged five separate legal teams into a single integrated legal department, achieving an optimised and cost-effective service delivery in the process.

Operating under an environment of increased cost-constraints caused by weaker commodity prices, Lester has impressed with his innovative spirit and willingness to develop and implement new approaches to existing processes, enabling his team to provide standout legal advice in the face of shrinking budgets. The implementation of a sustainable model of internal process management and external legal service utilisation has enabled Lester and his team to achieve a remarkable 50% reduction of legal spent over the last five years, whilst reducing the department’s size by 61%. The team’s use of legal project management and legal process outsourcers (LPOs) is understood to have been a major contributing factor to this achievement.

Among a plethora of transactional achievements and court victories, Lester stands out for his role in winning a high-profile, multi-party Kumba Iron Ore litigation, which is widely seen as one of the most important mining cases in South Africa in recent years. Besides his work achievements, Lester has made considerable progress towards black economic empowerment targets and formerly founded and ran Transcend Corporate advisors, leader in black economic empowerment and transformation.