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Minister of Justice, Jeff Radebe

The government plans to use its financial muscle as a major litigant — it is the biggest spender on court cases on the African continent — to force transformation of the legal profession.

In the same way that it uses its annual procurement budget of about R100bn to further black economic empowerment and local production, it plans to use the billions spent on legal services to force changes in the legal sector.

The government has also lost several high-profile court cases recently, and badly drafted legislation has been challenged or withdrawn in recent years.

Justice Minister Jeff Radebe said yesterday a transformation document aimed to "revolutionise the public legal sector" to provide legal services of the highest standard that protected and safeguarded the interests of the state and advanced access to justice.

"The envisaged reforms are aimed at addressing some of the shortcomings in the current system which result in government losing court cases it ought not to have lost, or embark(ing) on ill-fated litigation where it ought to have considered other alternative forms of redress thus resulting in huge costs to the fiscus," he said at a media briefing yesterday ahead of his budget vote speech.

"The intended reforms are also aimed at broadening the pool of legal practitioners who are briefed by the state to ensure it reflects a fair representation of black and women practitioners consistent with racial and gender demographics of our society.

"We want to ensure our system of farming out work (to private-sector legal professionals) is in conformity with our transformative imperatives, to ensure that more women get work and that we also target black professionals so that we are in line with the demographics of SA."

He is to release a framework policy on the transformation of state legal services on Monday.

Black Lawyers Association president Busani Mabunda yesterday welcomed the move as "very appropriate", noting that state procurement of legal services was "very much skewed towards traditionally big, white firms".

He cautioned, however, that the strategy would have to be properly implemented as many big law firms paid lip service to black empowerment while not really sharing ownership with black professionals. The procurement had to be geared to black-owned firms, Mr Mabunda said.

Law Society of SA co-chairman Jan Stemmett said while the society still awaited more details of the practical implementation of the plan, it welcomed the decision to outsource legal services.

"Such an initiative, if handled correctly, can play a major role in the provision of much-needed work for black and female legal practitioners and the transformation of the legal profession," Mr Stemmett said.

Mr Radebe said the strategy would also aim to bolster the government’s capacity to litigate in its own right, and to rationalise and co-ordinate its legal services. "The proliferation of state attorneys will be looked at," he said.

Another shake-up in the pipeline is the Legal Practice Bill, which will overhaul its organisation, ultimately replacing law societies and bar councils with a national legal practice council with regional bodies under it. The bill was certified this week by the chief state law adviser, whose weaknesses have ironically been one of the chief causes of frequent government failures in court.

Some legal practitioners fear the bill will threaten the independence of the profession and erode its self-regulation by giving more powers of control to the minister of justice.

Mr Radebe also reported that the Asset Forfeiture Unit had confiscated nearly R5bn worth of assets from criminals over the past 13 years. These funds are deposited in the National Revenue Fund, but R150m had been allocated for building the anticorruption task team’s investigative capacity.

The team had finalised 175 cases involving 182 officials in the justice, crime prevention and security cluster. More than 120 officials were convicted of corruption in the past year.

Mr Radebe said the Sexual Offences Courts would be re-established in the light of the rising incidence of rape and other sexual offences. A multidisciplinary task team from various departments would be convened to urgently investigate the re-establishment of the courts, which Mr Radebe said had been successful in the past. The team would be required to submit its report and recommendations by end-August.

Mr Radebe also indicated the government intended to appeal the judgment of the Western Cape High Court on the Sexual Offences Act in order to achieve certainty. The court found the act did not prescribe sanctions for certain offences, but Mr Radebe said the high courts of two other provinces had arrived at different interpretations.

This could lead people convicted and serving time to approach courts to quash convictions and sentences.