Our History

About Imbewu

At IMBEWU, we approach sustainability legal issues from an integrated and multi-disciplinary perspective, providing highly skilled and innovative legal services. This translates into more effective and practically focused services for our clients since our establishment in the year 2000.

IMBEWU specialises in environmental, mining, energy and health and safety law.

IMBEWU collaborates with Warburton Attorneys Inc in order to provide specialist environmental litigation and other legal services, including commercial services and providing attorney client privilege, where appropriate.

Our Vision

Seeding sustainable growth through law.

Our philosophy

We facilitate and ensure our clients’ legal compliance, thereby enabling the limitation and management of negative impacts on the environment and employees and the significant risks that are associated with non-compliance. We also strive to develop and facilitate a strategic approach to compliance in the business sector.
We do this by developing strong partnerships with our clients in order to address issues of compliance, and the current and potential impacts of their business operations, most appropriately.

Our name and logo

The name “imbewu” means “seed” in the Southern African Nguni languages of Zulu and Xhosa. This notion of growth resonates with IMBEWU’s focus on sustainable development in the South African region.
IMBEWU’s logo is an image of the African Baobab tree. This reflects determination to be a source of clear, reliable and practical advice which is cognisant of the ever-changing legal context.
“Sustainability law” encompasses a variety of inter-related disciplines, the common theme of which is the constitutions imperative of securing “ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development”.
Taking its direction from the Constitution Act (106 of 1996), South African law is evolving to meet the country’s contemporary needs. Paramount among these is to provide for legitimate social and economic development, while considering the sensitivity of the natural environment to the effects of such development and including the consideration and protection of employee health and safety.