Tackling BEE Challenges Head On
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 coun-