Lawyer Monthly - September 2024

Warren Beech An Interview with... Discussing the issues and challenges of the African mining industry. 8 LAWYER MONTHLY SEPTEMBER 2024 Please introduce yourself to the readers of Lawyer Monthly magazine. My career as a specialist mining and natural resources lawyer was completely unplanned. When I started practice in the early 1990s, being a specialist mining lawyer was not a natural choice. There were extremely limited mining-focused courses being offered at South Africa’s universities at the time, and unless one happened to do articles at a firm with a mining law department, practising as a mining lawyer was not really possible. To pay my university fees, I started working underground at a gold mining company in a town called Springs, approximately 50km from Johannesburg, South Africa. Each holiday I went to work on the gold mine, which I did for five years. At the end of my last shift (night shift of 23 December 1990) I happily told all of my co-workers that I was now off to be a lawyer, and I would never step foot on a mine again! Famous last words. Shortly after starting my articles at Deneys Reitz (now Norton Rose Fulbright), a significant event occurred in South Africa’s mining industry with the convening of the Leon Commission of Inquiry into Mine Health and Safety. Deneys Reitz was instructed on behalf of several mining companies to make representations and appear at the Leon Commission. During one of the preparation sessions a partner shouted down the passage to me “Hey Beech, you’ve worked on a mine, come here!” and that’s how my career in the mining industry started. I met some exceptional general counsel early on, who supported me over the years and exposed me to the broadest possible range of work within the Mining

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