Asking different questions and understanding in-house thought processes (GC Forum GRC Briefs)

As African and international organisations navigate geopolitical uncertainty, evolving regulation, digital transformation, and increasing stakeholder expectations, General Counsel and their in-house teams are no longer simply legal advisers. They are becoming Risk Architects - shaping resilient organisations, enabling confident decision-making, and guiding leadership through periods of disruption and crisis.

That was one of the key takeaways that rang out strongly at the GC Forum Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) held in Johannesburg on 7 October, a remarkable day of expert panels, interactive sessions, knowledge sharing, and practical solutions to modern challenges addressing “Legal Leadership in an Unpredictable World”.

Described by attendees as a day of “insightful and topical discussions” and “sharing experiences, learning and building stronger connections across Africa”, this year’s GC Forum GRC moved the conversation from understanding risk to leading through it.

During a break in the onstage action, we grabbed a few moments with highly experienced strategic advisor Kevin Lester, who brings three decades of experience and expertise garnered inside institutions where consequential decisions are made, including fifteen years at Anglo American in successive enterprise legal leadership roles, culminating as General Counsel: Upstream, with responsibility across five countries on three continents.

Earlier, Kevin moderated an insightful, interactive session ‘Inside the Boardroom | What GCs Are Really Being Asked’, which was built around real scenarios submitted anonymously by senior legal leaders. He was joined onstage by in-house leaders Castalia Moloi, Chief Assurance Officer at Sasol Assurance Services, and Luche Joubert, Head of Legal and Group Company Secretary at Remgro Limited.

The trio shared how they’d respond to the difficult, unusual, and ethically challenging situations their peers have faced, with the audience encouraged to join the debate, challenge the panel’s thinking, and share their own perspectives.

What did you most enjoy about speaking onstage in your “Inside the Boardroom” session today at the GC Forum GRC here in Johannesburg today?

It was an extraordinarily talented panel. That's the big joy, to actually sit with colleagues of that nature and speak to an audience like this. I had the sense that we were creating value - and you know what, that's what any in-house lawyer enjoys more than anything else in the world is knowing that you're creating some value. 

You took an interesting approach to an onstage discussion, creating an interactive session built around real scenarios submitted anonymously by GCs and senior legal leaders ahead of time. Do you want to share why you did that, and how you think that could provide different insights, perspectives, or value?

So the initial proposal had been to source anonymised specific questions that are generally posed to general counsel, then work through them. When we got those anonymised questions, we suddenly realised that they were awfully specific, and it would have been pretty easy to figure out which company was asking which question, so we had to very quickly think about a different way of dealing with it. 

There were, in fact, two questions which were sufficiently generic that could fill the whole session. So we sat down as a team, all three of us - Luche, Castalia, and myself - and said, ‘How can we do this thing differently?’ And what we fell upon was the idea of developing a framework as to how to address those questions, then applying it, the three of us onstage, and then taking the second scenario and putting it out to the audience and saying, ‘Can you now apply it?’ It worked really well.

How important do you think it is to bring private practice and in-house lawyers, and other related professionals and senior leaders, into the room together at an event like the GC Forum GRC, so we can all get an insight into how the mind of a leading General Counsel works? Because even as lawyers, they’re different roles…

I said during our session, the observation I made is that once we'd looked at the five questions that a general counsel ought to be asking when addressed with a difficult question or situation, not one of them is what's the legal answer. 

So if you're in practice as a lawyer, generally you start with ‘what does the law say?’, and then you work backwards from there. As an in-house counsel, you've got a fundamentally different frame. The frame has to do with who are your stakeholders, what's the actual question, what if we get it wrong on both sides, who's impacted, who needs to be there, what are you actually asking for?

So there are a whole range of questions that you ask as an in-house counsel, which may come up when you're in private practice, but only much further down the track. 

And I think what that does is it allows external counsel to understand how our thought processes work, why they work that way, and what defines the difference between us. It's not a positive or negative thing. Both in house and external lawyers belong in the space, but we serve different purposes in that space.

I think the most significant value is actually watching one another work through the work that we work through, and beginning to develop that understanding. It’s only through developing that understanding that the handoff begins to help. 

You’ve been helping organisations in a variety of roles for thirty years - I would imagine the role of the General Counsel itself has evolved a lot in that time?

So I think from my perspective, I’d just say to you that General Counsel is now an executive role inside an enterprise, and the legal department in a mature organisation is no longer a service provider, it’s an enterprise resource. 

That’s the evolution. It’s not complete, it has some distance to go, but over my time as an in-house counsel, I’ve watched that evolution coming from a place where you were just a cheaper version of an external counsel because you were retained and you were in-house to a point when, in actual fact, the whole value proposition is shifted.

That's the key, and ultimately, it's going to be value that is going to define in-house counsel going forward. It's the value we add that nobody else can.