- Courtroom pressure is relentless, with lawyers forced to answer unexpected questions, research urgently, and defend procedure under immense stress.
- Preparation requires sleepless nights, authoritative drafting, and personal sacrifice, making it impossible to sustain without fair compensation.
- Respect lawyers as professionals, stop misusing “pro bono,” and acknowledge that justice depends on valuing their time, skill, and family commitments.
In court, you face enormous pressure. You are told this and that. You are asked questions you do not know the answers to. You are required to research urgently on the authority of the points you submit. You are referred to the procedure and directive.
In court, every lawyer’s heartbeat is pumping fast. Your brain races three times. Your hair leaves your head. You are digging a rock with your nails.
You cannot do it for free. You cannot give hours and hours of preparation for free. A lawyer does not serve money, but a lawyer must have money to serve him. After all the struggle, you cannot fail to eat an appetising lunch.
You cannot use the legal profession as a benchmark for sympathy. The struggle is too huge for us to ignore the benefit. A lawyer must get paid, and a good one must be paid more.
Respect lawyers and pay for their sacrifice
The work of a lawyer, a legal practitioner, is a lot. It means representing the story of another person, arranging and organising it, supporting it with authoritative sources, and drafting court papers.
An average lawyer sleeps few hours. Extremely busy lawyers never sleep. After you spend sleepless nights for nothing, people who want free lawyers must not joke. Even legal aid lawyers are not free. Someone will pay them.
All of you who only know one Latin phrase, pro bono, kindly respect lawyers and stop using that against lawyers who are really working hard. No one should deprive their family of time, presence and memories for pro bono.
Some people are even spoiled. You want to sue for defamation of character, but pro bono. Do you think lawsuits are for broke people? At that, you want to sue a person who cannot even afford to pay the Vodacom advance of R12.
The value of lawyers
Any lawyer who gives his or her price, if I say my day fee is R17 000 or R15 000, my hourly rate is R3 000 or R1 700, kindly pay me. I really think any legal practitioner charges as per the level of experience, knowledge and skill accumulated through blood, sweat and tears.
The legal profession is not 68 Minutes of Mandela. Kindly pay for lawyers’ time and energy. Please, community, mphakathi, respect lawyers. Pay lawyers.
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