South Africa lawyers set new standards for pro bono work
ALEXANDRA, South Africa (TrustLaw) – As he left Lindie Saunderson’s office, Isaac Ramaboea looked more cheerful than he did when he walked in 10 minutes before and sat down to explain what brought him to this singular outpost of Africa’s richest law firm.
“We want the bonus paid to you,” was Saunderson’s parting shot to him. “Our labour law in South Africa is very good."
The reassuring words, firmly spoken, suggested that Ramaboea had a winnable case. He had been unemployed for the last 19 months after he was sacked from his job as a security guard for fighting with a colleague who, he said, was drunk at the time.
The rights and wrongs of his dismissal were probably unprovable by now. But what Ramaboea still wanted was the 1,000 rand ($130) bonus that he insisted he was owed by his former company and the resolution of a related issue with his provident fund.
When he first crossed the stoutly barred threshold of the Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs (ENS) pro bono office in Alexandra township, the 45-year-old father of three took a major step towards settling both problems.
Saunderson referred his case to one of her colleagues, a labour specialist, and predicted that a formal letter would persuade the employer to pay up.
“Usually, when people get a letter from ENS they don’t want to litigate,” she said at the end of her appointment with Ramaboea, her third client of the morning.
None of them would pay a penny.
An experienced human rights lawyer, Saunderson opened the office in “Alex”, as Alexandra is known, in January 2009. Within a year it had 1,300 cases on its books, ranging from evictions to unfair dismissals or getting welfare payments for people with HIV/AIDS. The opening was delayed by a sudden and murderous outbreak of xenophobic violence, which swept South Africa’s townships in March 2008.
In its first year of activity, 81 percent of clients were female, 63 percent unemployed and 20 percent were foreigners, mostly from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the Congo.
The common feature of most clients of the country’s pro bono lawyers and legal centres is their extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, South Africa has one of the highest income disparities in the world; its rich are very rich and its poor are very poor.
The contrast can hardly be more striking than between Alex and Sandton, a neighbouring suburb in northern Johannesburg. As Africa’s financial and business centre, Sandton oozes wealth. It is home to the continent’s ritziest shopping malls, to its most valuable stock exchange and to the opulent premises of banks, brokerages and law firms – including those of Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs.
The gulf with Alex is extreme and for the company’s well-paid lawyers - all 294 of whom are required to do at least 32 hours of pro bono work every year - it is bridged in the safety of a four-wheel drive car driven by a top-flight bodyguard who used to protect South African presidents.
Serious violent crime is rampant in Alex, a bleak and densely populated place that was set up in 1912 as an area where black and mixed-race people could buy freehold property. The right was later withdrawn and in the apartheid era it became an impoverished and crime-ridden ghetto.
That remains its reputation and, to a large extent its reality, even though multi-racial democracy came to South Africa in 1994 and substantial sums have been spent on its renewal ever since.
“We can be busy in Alex for the next 20 years,” said Saunderson. “I’ve learnt so much but you need to decide what you are going to do and what you are not going to do.”
Increasingly, hers will be a dilemma facing every one of South Africa’s 17,500 lawyers because they are now expected by their governing body, the Law Society of South Africa (LSSA), to do a minimum of 24 hours of pro bono work annually.
That works out to at least 350,000 lawyer-hours available every year to be spent in the most socially useful ways possible.
No other African country’s lawyers have yet made that collective commitment.
“Pro bono needs to address reality here,” said Taswell Papier, chair of the LSSA’s pro bono committee. “More than 40 percent of people in South Africa are unemployed, millions are challenged by poverty and illiteracy and all of those challenges are caused by our historical past,” he said by telephone from Cape Town.
By coincidence, Papier is a partner in the corporate and commercial department of ENS, the same firm as Saunderson, but the pro bono culture has spread throughout South Africa’s legal community.
With so much expertise on tap, the issue now is to make sure it is harnessed purposefully and not frittered away.
“In fact, we are now moving towards the adoption of a national norm and standards for pro bono,” Papier said, adding that slapping bandages on the country’s increasingly down-at-heel and criticised public justice system is not going to be the way forward.
“When there’s a collapse of the courts, we don’t want to be exonerating and excusing the state, implying that the state doesn’t need to bother because the profession is always bailing it out.”
Yet back in Alex, a new and badly needed Small Claims Court started life in May with a heavy dependency on Lindie Saunderson and volunteer colleagues from Sandton. Eleven of them were appointed part-time Small Claims Commissioners, effectively acting as magistrates.
The philosophical debate about pro bono’s future in South Africa has a long life ahead of it.
For the time being, for the lawyers at the sharp end, there is work to be done.
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