Team size:  30+  

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Janis Cheadle considers herself a career retailer first, an ESG professional second, and a lawyer last! Through a series of serendipitous career choices, Janis has gained an interesting basket of skills and experience from commercial litigation, corporate governance and company secretariat, to sustainability and retail M&A. She has spent the last 16 years in the listed retail environment, and currently leads the Mr Price group’s ESG centre of excellence, which includes the sustainability, legal, compliance, and ethics functions, as well as the non-profit Mr Price Foundation. She is also the Mr Price company secretary, a position she has held for 9 years.

In late 2025, Mr Price announced its first off-shore acquisition, across seven countries in central and eastern Europe for ~R9bn, marking the group’s fourth acquisition in five years. Janis was a member of the small core deal team and collaborated with international counsel to manage the legal due diligence process, assess potential liabilities, and structure and negotiate the deal in accordance with both South African and European legal standards.

Logic, pragmatism and being solution orientated are Janis’ key skills, and she describes herself as a “puzzle-maker”, with the ability to join the dots and make sense of complexity while focusing on the bigger picture.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

Managing legal risk and strategy should not fundamentally change, whether it’s business as usual or otherwise. A well-established legal framework allows permanent agility that can be flexed differently as circumstances in an organisation or its environment change. Legal teams must act as strategic advisors to senior management and provide actionable legal guidance to leadership and operational teams that supports swift, informed decision-making. This can only be achieved if legal resources take the time to fully understand operations so that they are trusted to balance business and legal risk. Clarity of business risk enables decisive and ‘real’ decision making.   

How can general counsel foster a corporate culture that supports ESG principles and compliance across all levels of the organisation?

Sustainability is the sixth strategic pillar for Mr Price. At Mr Price, ESG is a complete function, which brings together traditional governance roles such as legal, compliance and ethics, and the sustainability function, as well as the Mr Price Foundation. Having a single point of leadership in the ESG Director & Company Secretary creates natural alignment across the team itself, as well as to the board of directors. As head of the legal department and advisor to the Board, the director can leverage this integration to set the tone from the top, ensuring ESG priorities are embedded in reporting and risk management.

ESG is integrated into the business as a specific Centres of Excellence or shared service, with quarterly reporting, divisional board meetings attended by business leaders, annual KPIs and remuneration targets for management (including executive management), and has been this way for at least five years. It has become the Mr Price way, rather than something that needs to be driven through a compliance lens.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?   

The decision to engage external legal counsel versus relying on in-house expertise is guided by the complexity of the matter, the area of expertise needed and the pace at which support is needed. We run a small legal team, so we outsource matters that require specialised support, complex areas of law, or where we simply don’t have sufficient capacity to support a business need. We do not have a litigation function, so we seek support for all litigation matters.

Alignment with the Mr Price values and way of working is the key way that external legal services are evaluated. Most top and medium tier law firms have suitably technically qualified and experienced lawyers in various practice areas. However, whether they fit with who we are as a business is not something that can be assessed from a website or biography. This can only be determined when engaging with individuals and understanding their ‘how’ rather than their ‘what’. Law firms and individual lawyers who take the time to understand what it means to be a true value retailer and our pragmatic and risk based approach, as well as the pace at which we work – determining the cadence of the advice and support we need – are the legal services we choose and the ones we instruct on a repeated basis. Cost efficiency is closely monitored to ensure that legal fees align with agreed budgets and that the value delivered justifies the expenditure.