In May 2006, Kemp J Kemp SC of Durban won a famous victory for Jacob Zuma, the disgraced former deputy president, at his rape trial - Zuma was acquitted.
The day before Saturday, 27 months later, Zuma, now the ANC president, and Kemp walked away from the Pietermaritzburg high court, smiling again.
Actually, though Kemp won't comment, his smile was even wider this week than two years ago because everyone, including "learned friends", said that he would never in a million years succeed with his application to get a court to declare the national prosecuting authority's decisions to charge Zuma invalid.
Yet on Friday that is exactly what Judge Chris Nicholson did.
But Kemp and his team will now start filing papers for an application for a permanent stay of prosecution (which will come before Nicholson at the end of November) - and, given what Nicholson had to say about Zuma having been a victim of a politically motivated conspiracy, this application is going to be difficult for the NPA to defeat.
Again, Kemp won't comment about any of this on the record - or even talk about himself. He takes very seriously the rules of the Bar that forbid him to have anything to do with self-advertising.
Anyway, when it comes to questions of a personal nature, Kemp is more likely to giggle than answer. He is not much interested in talking about himself but about issues of law and argument.
All he will admit is that his nickname "Unkempt Kemp" - his hair is mostly tangled and his legal gear ill-fitting - was given to him by "a malicious colleague at the Durban bar".
He also will reveal that the J in his name stands for Jurgen. Kemp's father called him Kemp J Kemp because he fancied the name of Jerome K Jerome who wrote the book Three Men in a Boat.
Kemp, 56, hails from Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape but has lived and worked in Durban since 1980.
He completed a B Iuris, LLB (cum laude) at the University of Port Elizabeth and then his doctorate in law.
What's notable about Kemp is his air of being an absent-minded professor and his gentleness. There is very little in his manner that is belligerent or malevolent so he tends to win over even those he is cross-examining (Khwesi, the complainant in the rape trial, was a prime example) and the judges before whom he appears.
Kemp occasionally chats to journalists during breaks or after the day's proceedings. But he will never slip them some tidbit of information, talk about what a clever fellow he has been, or be nasty about the state.
He always asks something along the lines of: "Well, what did you think of that argument? Going to be a difficult one to refute, isn't it?"
Kemp's humour is usually of a cerebral kind. At one point, during the rape trial, prosecutor Charin de Beer asked the judge to ask people to keep their discussions for outside the court "so that we and the media can hear what counsel and the accused are saying".
Judge Van der Merwe did so and then, as was his habit, checked with the defence that they were in accord with what he had just said.
"I am happy, my lord," responded Kemp. "But I do have a concern. If members of the media are able to hear, what excuse will they now have for getting things wrong?"