Blow for fund lawyers

COURT: NO APPEAL OF RULING TO NOT USE PRIVATE PRACTITIONERS Firms claim they will have to retrench 90% of their 3 000 employees.

Thousands of jobs could be at stake after a desperate bid on the part of a group of more than 40 law firms to hang on to their lucrative contracts with the Road Accident Fund (RAF) was this week dealt another blow in court.

This year, the RAF announced it would no longer be using the private practitioners on its panel to represent the fund in claims instituted by the public and directed that all files pertaining to unfinalised cases be returned.

This prompted 42 affected law firms to approach the court with an urgent application for an interdict against the RAF pending a review of its decision.

“The applicants will suffer irreparable harm in that the demand for them to return all files affect them financially but also affect their employees,” Pritzman Mabunda, of Mabunda Inc, said in an affidavit at the time. “The effect of this decision will entail that panel attorneys who in total employ over 3 000 employees in their law firms would have to retrench almost 90% of the workforce in this economic distress the country is facing.”

But Judge Norman Davis in March dismissed the application. And on Thursday, he also dismissed an application for leave to appeal his findings.

Davis honed in on allegations that he had attended meetings with the RAF last April and September and that, had he disclosed his attendance at the April meeting, in particular, a recusal application would have been launched.

“The applicants further contended that I had been ‘legally disqualified from presiding’ over the urgent applications,” the judge said.

Davis said he had only come to know about the issues at hand when he was allocated the case and found the applicants “would not have satisfied the onus on them had they brought a formal application for recusal”.

It is understood the review has been set down for this month. Mabunda yesterday declined to comment.

But in court, Mabunda and his colleagues argued that without the court’s intervention, the RAF would be left unrepresented with more than 6 000 files to attend to.

He said the RAF had not put in place “mitigating measures which would ensure that the administration of justice will not be hampered by its decision to demand the handover of unfinalised files”.

“In the absence of any mitigating measures, the effect of the decision is to throw the administration of justice into chaos,” he said.

“It is a matter of public record that the majority of RAF matters litigated in all courts involve poor people, who do not have means of their own. Most of them were involved in motor vehicle accidents which have impaired them from performing their daily work.”

The fund reportedly had an accumulated deficit of R262.2 billion in 2019 and in a letter addressed to judges, the RAF’s acting CEO, Collins Letsoalo, said in February the decision to drop private practitioners had followed extensive reviews – including “cost structures”.

The RAF said yesterday that it would only be able to respond to questions next week.

42 law firms wanted interdict against Road Accident Fund