The proposed Legal Sector Code (“LSC”) was open for comment until 20 September 2022. Not unexpectedly, quite a number of comments were filed.

The LSC has as its noble, principle purpose the development of a tailor-made sector code for the legal profession to deal with the transformation of our profession. The draft has already been amended twice and it is still fraught with problematic inconsistencies which will undoubtedly draw the attention of the courts if it is accepted without further amendments.

Some of the more serious issues of the LSC in its current format are that it does not support an inclusive approach to B-BBEE and transformation and will not achieve real transformation in the legal sector.

Furthermore, the practicalities of the proposed Pro Bono system are not capable of being realised without serious impact on practices.

There was an eighty page document submitted to DTI detailing the issues and why not to implement it in its current format.

“The all over burdensome effect of the LSC, especially on small rural practices that serve those still disadvantaged communities, might just have the opposite result of which it intends to achieve.”

The issue of transformation reminded me of a pre-trial meeting that a colleague of mine and I had some years ago. After the formalities were done with, we continued chatting about this and that.

We came to realise that we strangely had quite similar thoughts on day-to-day issues, and had quite comparable backgrounds. We both have four kids and the same wife we married years ago. We have the same religious views and feel the same about the state of affairs in our country.

Both of us were raised in a rural area (if the then Montana small holdings may be deemed as such). As school children we had to do some walking, myself to a bus stop a half a kilometer away, him all the way to a school a significant distance away.

Both of us were raised by conservative parents with fathers who did not obtain university degrees. Both our hard-working fathers wished for their children to achieve more than what they had in their lives. And there, we realised, the similarities ended.

He grew up near Tzaneen in a tribal area far from the school he had to walk to from day one onwards, come rain or sunshine. He started off at 6 o’clock to be on time… Without a lunch box. He was starving when he arrived back home late in the afternoon.

His father was employed by Dulux in Kempton Park until his recent retirement. His last paycheck amounted to R4 500. Over weekends he did some gardening work to make ends meet and provide for his family, miles and miles away.

My colleague and his family luckily relocated closer to the school in his later years. He matriculated with top honours despite all the challenges and sat to read law at the University of the North. His father had to pay for his first-year studies, thereafter he completed his degree with the assistance of bursaries.

The first ever motor vehicle that entered his parents’ home was when he drove there himself years later. He mentioned that while he was still in the house and studying, his mother used to remove the candles from his room at night, fearing he would fall asleep while studying, causing their house to burn down. They never had electricity (funnily enough, sometimes now-a-days as well, but for a different reason). Nobody in their village even knew that a job called an attorney exists.

“The legal profession is one of the better examples of transformation towards equality.”

He is now a respected attorney with some big shot law firm that identified his potential early on. A truly uplifted previously disadvantaged individual, now a lawyer.

Before we parted ways, I asked him how he felt about those days gone by. He replied that it felt normal then. We were both hiding a tear when he said, after some thought, that come to think of it, he supposes that nothing was ‘normal’ then.

If the intended LSC in its current format will rectify previous injustices is, however, another question. The legal profession is one of the better examples of transformation towards equality. For example, just have a look at the Constitutional Court’s composition.

The all over burdensome effect of the LSC, especially on small rural practices that serve those still disadvantaged communities, might just have the opposite result of which it intends to achieve. I fear that it might cause numerous practices to close their doors.