About Adv Douglas J Shaw

Douglas J Shaw is originally from Scotland and moved to South Africa in 2000. Douglas has a unique and valuable combination of skills that is very unusual. These involve deep knowledge and experience in law, economics, IT and management consultancy. Having all four of these in one person is not common. He has been an advocate for the last ten years and is involved in a range of court work especially in banking law.

He has also represented organizations and companies in the consultation processes with the government in the creation of new Acts and policies. In the course of his legal work, he has seen the problem with the existing systems, and has developed a number of better systems.

Having worked as a fund manager in his early 30s (running the best performing investment fund in the world in 2000/2001) he also understands the world of finance, derivatives, insurance, and banking. His first degree involved considerable actuarial science, econometrics, and statistics so unlike most lawyers, he is very good with numbers.

He worked in management consultancy on the mines for around a year before becoming and advocate gaining many of the people skills and business re-engineering expertise necessary to deliver strategy and also to execute that strategy. As someone who has consulted informally to fourteen African governments on economic issues in the early 2000s, he is also interested in areas of law which incorporate applied economics. He has attended  the Law and Economics conferences in Europe.

He has also written many books, some self-published, but four also published by established publishers. His pending PhD has taken his writing and research skills to a new level. Douglas likes to research for a practical purpose, however, and his recent research is aimed at finding global best practice in Sale in Execution that can then be developed into a product that can be delivered to clients across the globe.

He was for a time Chairman of Mensa Johannesburg during which the society grew more quickly than any time before or since. Douglas is adept at managing intelligent people, a task often compared to herding cats.