One of South Africa’s most visible corporate counsel, Kevin Lester received among the largest numbers of endorsements during the course of our research. He is praised widely for his innovative leadership of the global mining company’s homegrown legal function and his considerable contribution to industrywide discourse.

‘When I sit with other GCs and heads of legal in South Africa I’m the odd man out as I came in to create something new, so it’s hard for me to see the role across the industry’, Lester says. ‘I get the sense in South Africa that the role of GC has evolved enormously though. The primary focus on law has shifted towards a bigger management component. The range of issues on which I’m consulted sometimes surprised me, when I became counsel and a member of management’.

Leading what is now a 39-strong group, one of Lester’s first task on arriving five years ago, was merging eight separate legal functions, resulting from a series of company mergers. By the end of 2014, headcount was reduced to 39%, legal spend was down by 32% and overall operational costs were down by a quarter. ‘It was a very big task restructuring and integrating all legal functions’, Lester says, adding: ‘

The legal team at Anglo American has emerged from this period of sustained change and restructuring as a genuinely value-adding strategic business partner’. During this period he has made significant progress towards Black Economic Empowerment targets. (Lester actually founded and ran Transcend Corporate Advisors, a leader in black economic empowerment and transformation, until 2010). He also counts his role in winning the high-profile, multi-party Kumba Iron Ore litigation as a particular achievement. Decided in South Africa’s highest court, the billion-dollar litigation was, in Lester’s view ‘probably the most important South African mining law case determined in the last decade’. Lester also managed 2012’s “wildcat” strikes at the Platinum and Kumba units and the 2014 Platinum strikes.

‘The strikes of 2012 and 2014 represented an unprecedented shift in South African industrial relations’, opines Lester. ‘My team managed their delivery with great success and, in some instances, had to approach the courts to make new law to deal with the unfamiliar environment’.