I have found that a lot of you have trouble understanding the exact requirements to become Legal Practitioners – being attorneys or advocates – as set out in the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 (LPA). Regulations for Candidate Legal Practitioners can be found in Chapter 3 of the Act.
However, it does not state them specifically but refers to the Rules of the Legal Practice Council (LPC). You are therefor required to read the LPA AND the Rules of the LPC together to make sense of it. I think it is here that a lot of you get lost, so I will try and negotiate you through the online world of information, so you know where to go in this regard.
Click on Home – Legal Practice Council (lpc.org.za) to go to the Home Page of the LPC. Click on the down arrow next to “Legal Practitioners” and a list will appear. Right at the bottom, click on “Rules, Regulations and Amendments”. Here you will find the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, LPC Rules and Code of Conduct as well as amended Rules. You can download these from the site if you need to.
Looking at the requirements in Chapter 3 of the Act, it is clear from Chapter 26, that you need to meet the following minimum qualifications and Practical Vocational Training (PVT):
- An LLB-degree from a university registered in the RSA or a law degree from a foreign country equivalent to the LLB. (Just a side note here: you can only register for the PLT courses at LEAD WITH an LLB, not before.)
- The PVT requirement, as per Section 29, deals with Community Service and is quite broad, looking at Section 29(2), and you may even be exempted from it if you apply for exemption and can show good cause why you should be exempted. I suggest you contact the LPC directly to find out what is acceptable.
- Serving articles. More on this a little later.
- Section 26(c)(ii) requires a Legal Practice Management Course for Candidate Attorneys who want to practice as attorneys or advocates. This course entails the basic set-up and management of a legal practice. You can find more on this on the LEAD website at LSSALEAD – Quality legal education for legal practitioners in South Africa under “Legal Practitioners” and then clicking on “Practice management Training”.
- You need to pass the Board Exams – I can hear you all cheer for this one! If you want to be admitted as a Conveyancer and/or Notary there are two more exams to pass.
Coming back to serving articles. The Act does not state the required time periods for serving articles. This has, as so many other matters, been referred to the LPC to make the rules in Section 95 of the Act.
You can find these rules in Parts V and VI of the South African Legal Practice Council Rules, referred to earlier. Hopefully you have downloaded them! Here you will find the exams you need to pass for admission, be it attorney or advocate.
On page 40, number 22, you will find all the requirements for articles. How to register, minimum payment, documents the LPC need from you, as well as all the different time periods and the requirements for each.
It may also be important to point out that a Candidate Attorney can only appear in the Regional Court in their second year of articles, after obtaining a Right of Appearance in the Regional Court from the LPC. If you do only one year of articles, you may be admitted if you completed PLT, but will have no Regional Court experience. This is important to consider, and I can already hear the crying and gnashing of teeth as I advise you to do two years of articles AND the PLT for six months if possible. The experience and training are never wasted. Yes, you will feel like a zombie at the end, but going out there, applying for legal positions or starting your own firm, will serve you and your clients so much better.
Also keep in mind that firms may be reluctant to sign you up for only one year. In the first year you have to learn everything, and you are pretty useless to your Principal. The aim is to, as a CA, write enough fees to cover your salary plus double that to help the firm cover overheads. Remember this is a business!
That said, I am deeply saddened by the current plight of Law Graduates to find articles only to be exploited, with their lives being made a living hell. I was blessed with an amazing Principal and can honestly say that articles were the best experience of my life, and my husband had the same experience. Hearing all your struggles on the Facebook Group makes me extremely angry.
I hope that those of you who succeed will learn from this and one day, when you train the next generation of Legal Practitioners you will be better Principals and give them all the support you never had. This is a nasty culture that has developed and only we can change it by doing better ourselves.
Till next time!
