Q&A | Mark Leathers | International Property

[music] My name is Mark Leathers. I’m an attorney, conveyancer, and notary public practicing in South Africa. My practice specializes mainly in property law, although I hold a postgraduate degree in commercial credit security. So, a little bit of both between those those areas of expertise. Here

at Mac Norton Company, we try to do things differently in that as much as we’re a practice that caters to a large number of quite big clientele. We make it our business to see the people behind every transaction. People pick up the phone and we know their kids’ names.

Why? Because individuals matter. There are a lot of competent legal specialists out there. There are very few that care about who is in fact the person behind the file on their desk. And that is what makes us unique.

Our normal day-to-day matters that we handle obviously comprise a large amount of property law, property transfers, conveyancing. We are regarded as specialists especially in the country in the area of sectional title developments doing approximately 1,200 new sectional units every year. On a commercial side, we do have a competent team there headed up by myself as well as I have a number of competent staff for litigation. But commercially we do quite a lot of liquidations, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions for clients across four continents.

>> [music] >> Coincidentally, the cases that have left the largest impression on me are matters that we normally wouldn’t have taken and matters that I actually did for no fees. And these are all related to sports law. The first ended up being a series of matters for a Russian athlete, Alexandra Morizovva, whom Athletics South Africa attempted to stop from partaking in various events in South Africa on the basis of her Russian passport.

The the events were rather high-profile, including the Comradees Marathon. But [snorts] needless to say, for four years, we ended up having to go to court each year when they try to stop her running. and every year were able to win through and ensure that the Russian contingent was able to participate. A new more recent matter was coincidentally won in support of freedom of speech and that was for a running journalist by the name of the running mann [snorts] who was taken to court for defamation by the two oceans marathon in

South Africa and we successfully defended that lawsuit again. The fees that were collected on that matter, why I said they were done for no fees were actually donated back to the Comrades Marathon charities. So, interestingly enough, not our normal run-of-the-mill things, but both matters that went our way or went our client’s way. And yeah, they’ve left the long lasting impression. They were fun.

My main reason for joining Global Law Experts is firstly the credibility of qualified professionals. And what I mean by that is in a service industry, you don’t have a product to give somebody. They can’t walk into your store and leave with the item they have purchased.

You are rendering them a service, which means that you are asking them to engage with you. based on trust and trust is built from your reputation. And one of the best ways to strengthen your reputation is by associating and networking with other professionals who have a good reputation. So joining a directory of the likes of global law experts puts you exactly into that field. Excellence associating with excellence.