Tackling BEE Challenges Head On

APARTHEID and a legacy of gender discrimination have adversely impacted on the legal profession and inhibited access to both the profession and legal services. Corporate law firms, in particular, remain under pressure to transform more.

This, says Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr’s CEO Brent Williams, is why his firm is tackling the challenges of transformation and empowerment head on.

Any business that wishes to ensure long-term sustainability as a participant in the South African economy and contribute to the country's economic growth, must address aspects of the Codes of Good Practice under the BroadBased Black Economic Empowerment Act, No 23 of 2003.

“Transformation is about living our values and principles every day. Within the context of South Africa’s history transformation is as much a constitutional imperative as it is a social justice one,” he adds.

The firm therefore strives to have partners, professional and support employees, who are representative of the racial, gender, cultural and religious diversity of the people of South Africa.

He says, “We aspire to be a firm where men and women at all levels within the organisation enjoy equal opportunities and treatment in relation to access to work, recruitment, promotion and remuneration.

“That creates a working environment that is sensitive to the particular challenges faced by previously marginalised groups such as women and black people.”

While this culture of change takes root, performance needs to remain strong too – the firm has been growing its revenue base at an annual average rate of approximately 10 percent for the past 6.5 years.

Its Mergers and Acquisition (M&A) team achieved first place by deal value for South African firms in the latest Mergermarket M&A Africa & Middle East 2015 Global League Tables, among numerous other recent awards.

“However”, Williams says, “far more still needs to be done in developing and graduating a material cohort of black ‘African’ lawyers through our junior ranks to partners.

“Over many years CDH has therefore developed organisational structures to address these issues and has embarked upon various initiatives and interventions to address this state of affairs.

“For example, 56 percent of our candidate attorney intake is black, 55 percent of associates are black as is 40 percent of our senior associates.

“Twenty-eight percent of our partners are black and 25 percent of partner profits accrue to them.

“This is the actual percentage of everything they earn, salary and profit share, in the firm as a percentage of the total earnings of all salary and profit share of all CDH partners.”

Acknowledging a need for even higher levels of representation, Williams points to various fresh and multi-faceted initiatives developed to improve the firm’s performance: “We want to get closer to our goal of becoming a truly South African firm that is also fully representative of our country’s people and where the salience of ‘race’ is less pronounced.”

There is both a formal and informal mentorship programme in which partners and associates participate as mentors and mentees and to which partners and associates make themselves available.

Verushca Pillay, director in the firm’s corporate & commercial department, says the changes to the BEE Codes and the BEE Act have caused CDH to reconsider the way in which it meets empowerment imperatives.

“The BEE Codes have of course made compliance more difficult. Nonetheless we want to ensure that we continue to achieve a high level of compliance and that we adhere to the spirit of the BEE Act.

“The result is a renewed strategy which has a strong focus on empowerment initiatives that promote the development of the legal profession both from an internal and an external perspective.

“We also manage the implementation of our strategy on a regular basis,” she says.

Williams concludes, “Diversity and respect for the individual has to be valued within any firm that intends to take transformation seriously.

“We believe in teamwork for the good of the firm and our clients and, as an employer of choice, we subscribe to the development of our people.”