Senior Counsel
Senior Counsel of the Superior Courts of Zimbabwe.
Profile
A practitioner who has sat on both sides of the boardroom table.
Ten years in private practice leading a firm, three years inside a telecommunications group as its legal and compliance head, and a litigation record in every superior court in Zimbabwe.
The practitioner
Sabastain Masimba Guwuriro is a strategic, pragmatic and hands-on legal practitioner with twenty years of experience across the telecommunications and legal sectors, ten of them spent leading a law firm and advising at board level.
He is a trusted adviser to chief executives and boards of directors, brought in on the matters where the legal question and the commercial question are the same question. His work runs from negotiating and drafting complex agreements to resolving disputes that threaten a client's position, always with the same object: protect the client's interest without putting the client's standing at risk.
He has advised clients on broad and complex legal matters, on policy, on internal procedure and on strategic questions that had a legal edge to them. He is a relationship builder by method, not by disposition, having spent his career forging working alliances with industry counterparts and partnering with government, regulators and multilateral institutions where a matter required it.
What clients get is a practitioner who will tell them what the position is before he tells them what he can do about it.
Appointment as Senior Counsel
Sabastain Masimba Guwuriro is Senior Counsel of the Superior Courts of Zimbabwe. The rank is conferred on practitioners of standing at the bar and carries an obligation to the court that ranks above the interests of any one client.
For a client, the practical consequence is straightforward. Matters are prepared to the standard the superior courts expect, opinions are written knowing how they would be tested on appeal, and advice given in a boardroom is given by someone who argues in the courtroom the boardroom is trying to avoid.
Standing, admissions and education
Legal practitioner
Admitted as a legal practitioner of the High Court of Zimbabwe since 2004.
Notary public and conveyancer
Registered notary public and conveyancer of the High Court of Zimbabwe.
Law Society of Zimbabwe
Registered lawyer and member in good standing.
Bachelor of Laws Honours
LLBS, University of Zimbabwe, 2004.
Master of Business Administration
MBA candidate, Eastern and Southern African Management Institute.
How he works
Every instruction begins with the same question: what is the client actually exposed to, and by when. Only after that is settled does the discussion move to strategy, because a strategy built on an unexamined assumption is the most expensive thing a company can buy.
Where a matter can be resolved by negotiation, arbitration, mediation or conciliation, it is taken that way. Those routes save clients time and money against litigation, and they preserve commercial relationships that a trial would destroy. Where litigation is the right answer, it is prosecuted properly and to the end.
The object is a result the client can live with after the file closes.
Instruct counsel
Set out the matter in a few lines and it will be assessed for conflict and capacity before anything else is discussed.