The 20-strong legal team at Massmart Holdings – a holding company which controls a large number of diverse brands and retail outlets across a number of sectors, including high-profile brands such as Makro and Game – has recently made comprehensive organisational changes by establishing centres of excellence to deal with litigation, employment, IP and commercial legal matters. These have been effective at increasing the knowledge base of the team as a whole, according to group general counsel and legal executive Michael Spivey, while helping to create ‘a balance of technical specialists and corporate generalists to support [the] business’, something which has had an appreciable effect on the strategic direction of the company.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the company’s varied portfolio, Spivey points to a ‘rapidly growing regulatory environment’ as the greatest challenge the legal team has had to overcome in the past year. However, the team has risen to the new challenges and ‘increased workload’ of an expanding regulatory environment effectively, through the creation of ‘a separate compliance department of subject matter experts’ that has ‘assisted the business greatly’ in response to this. The team has also created a ‘formal rationalisation process for external counsel selection focused on creating greater value’ in their relationships with them, a measure that has led to even greater efficiencies when coordinating external counsel.