Leading African law firm Bowmans has expanded its South African business rescue, restructuring and insolvency (BR&I) capabilities to Johannesburg by appointing a team of six high-calibre lawyers specialising in the field. The new team supplements Bowmans’ Cape Town based team. 


Consisting of four partners and two associates, the team has formidable BR&I skills that are in strong demand in the legal services market, with experience in both litigious insolvency and non-contentious insolvency work.


‘We are very pleased to welcome this high-calibre team to Bowmans. They regularly act for major financial institutions, liquidators, business rescue practitioners and various corporate entities, and have experience with large and complex matters. They will be an asset to our firm and our clients,’ says Ezra Davids, chairman and senior partner at Bowmans.


The new BR&I team members, who joined Bowmans on 1 January 2024 from Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc. (CDH), are partners Tobie Jordaan, Kgosi Nkaiseng, Roxanne Webster and Kylene Weyers, and associates Jessica Osmond and Nseula Chilikhuma. 


Jordaan was previously head of the BR&I sector at CDH. He has been ranked in Band 4 for restructuring/ insolvency by Chambers for four years and is known for his pragmatic and commercially minded advice. Jordaan has 13 years’ post-admission experience in BR&I and, in addition to BCom and LLB degrees, has an advanced diploma in insolvency law and has completed an advanced short course in business rescue practice. 


Nkaiseng, who was a director at CDH and has 14 years of BR&I experience, specialises in business rescue, insolvency, corporate recoveries and general commercial litigation. He regularly acts for major financial institutions among other clients and has been listed as a next generation lawyer by the Legal500 for the past four years, from 2020 to 2023. In addition to an LLB, he has a postgraduate diploma in corporate law and has completed an advanced short course in business rescue practice. 


The two other new partners, Weyers and Webster, each have about eight years of BR&I experience.


Weyers is ranked by several major legal directories, including as ‘up and coming’ by Chambers and as a recommended lawyer for dispute resolution by the Legal 500. She also won the INSOL/SARIPA Young Bloods Award in 2020. She has an LLM in commercial law and has completed an advanced short course in business rescue.


Webster is a versatile BR&I lawyer whose career highlights include advising on the restructuring of Edcon; assisting a UK company to institute recovery proceedings against debtors who had relocated to South Africa; and acting in a matter that resulted in the eviction of a company in liquidation from premises it had been illegally occupying for a decade. She has an LLM in commercial law and an advanced diploma in insolvency law and practice.


All four new Bowmans partners are active members of major industry bodies such as INSOL International, the South African Restructuring and Insolvency Practitioners Association (SARIPA), the Turnaround Management Association of South Africa (TMA), and the International Women’s Insolvency and Restructuring Confederation (IWIRC).


Davids concludes, ‘Tobie, Kgosi, Roxanne, Kylene, Nseula and Jessica are well known and respected in the legal profession, and we are delighted that they have chosen to join Bowmans, further bolstering our capabilities in the highly specialised BR&I field.’