OUR TECHNICAL CAPABILITY
We provide expert legal services in the following fields of law:
South African business law reaches into company law, contract, property, insolvency and employment law at once, and it changes constantly. We handle the documents that establish a business — company, trust and non-profit registrations, memoranda of incorporation, shareholders agreements — and the full range of commercial contracts that follow, from sale of shares and sale of business through to distribution, agency and service level agreements. We also carry the compliance side: board and shareholder meetings, resolutions and minutes, company secretarial work, and governance advice under the Companies Act 71 of 2008 and King IV.
B-BBEE compliance is measured element by element, and the elements interact — a shortfall against a priority sub-minimum discounts an otherwise sound scorecard by a full level. We advise on all five elements and design and draft the structures that deliver on the ownership element, including broad-based ownership schemes, employee share ownership programmes and trusts. Because the B-BBEE Commission now scrutinises trust-based ownership closely, that drafting has to withstand inspection rather than merely satisfy a spreadsheet. We work in collaboration with a leading B-BBEE consultancy, so the legal structuring and the scorecard modelling are done together.
South African labour legislation leaves an employer very little room for error, and the cost of a procedural misstep is rarely proportionate to the mistake. We represent employers at the CCMA, in bargaining councils and in the Labour Court and Labour Appeal Court, on dismissals, unfair labour practices, organisational rights, collective agreements and unfair discrimination. We draft the instruments that prevent those disputes — contracts of employment, fixed-term and independent contractor agreements, restraints of trade, disciplinary codes and workplace policies — and we run disciplinary enquiries, arbitrations and retrenchment processes with the employer rather than merely advising on them afterwards. We also train HR and management teams, which is usually the cheaper intervention.
Our retirement funds practice is led by Hunter Thyne, and acts for funds at every stage from registration onwards, as well as for trustees, administrators, financial institutions and the members, dependants and beneficiaries on the other side of a decision. The work runs from fund structures, rules and rule amendments through governance and trustee training to the statutory flashpoints — the allocation of death benefits under section 37C, employer deductions under section 37D, complaints to the Pension Funds Adjudicator and appeals to the Financial Services Tribunal. We appear for funds and for individuals, though never in the same matter.
We advise on asset, trade and acquisition finance, and on the regulatory obligations that attach to financial services businesses and the products they sell. That extends to drafting policy documents, advising on operational and systems risk, and conducting forensic and fraud investigations where something has already gone wrong.
We litigate in the magistrates’ courts, the High Court and on appeal, and act in private arbitrations. Commercial disputes are seldom won or lost on the law alone, so we take a view early on what an outcome is realistically worth and advise accordingly — including when settlement is the better commercial answer.