Hansie Schutte

Hansie Schutte has spent much of his career managing legal services from within large corporate groups. He has led in-house teams, instructed external advisers and served on executive committees and subsidiary boards, with responsibility for how legal advice supports the decisions and operations of a business.

As Business Development Executive at Thomson Wilks, Hansie works with corporate clients and the firm’s lawyers to understand clients’ requirements and develop the relationships through which the firm supports them. His experience includes the practical considerations behind appointing legal advisers, defining their instructions and managing legal expenditure. He is also developing the firm’s General Counsel services for corporates and their in-house legal teams.

His 35 years of corporate and commercial legal experience span technology, telecommunications, fintech, health tech and mining. As Group Executive for Legal, Risk and Compliance at Altron, he oversaw the group’s legal function across South Africa, the wider African continent, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. He led a team of ten in-house legal advisers, with responsibilities extending to data and privacy, ethics, business continuity and crisis management, as well as oversight of the office of the Chief Information Security Officer.

Previously, as Group Legal Manager at Altech, Hansie led seventeen legal advisers and served on the group’s executive committee and a subsidiary board.

His work has covered acquisitions and disposals, joint ventures, commercial contracting and technology agreements, including software development, licensing and data-sharing arrangements. He has overseen regulatory approvals, managed disputes and external legal teams, and advised on the structure of legal departments and the management of external legal costs. This experience encompasses both the day-to-day requirements of an established legal function and the demands of a significant transaction or organisational change.

Hansie holds a BCom from Rand Afrikaans University and an LLB from the University of Pretoria. He is an admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa and a founding member of the MAD Leadership Foundation.