Few attorneys guilty of RAF claims graft – LPC

South Africa's  Legal Practice Council (LPC) has said despite the negative reports about the legal profession’s handling of road accident claims against the Road Accident Fund (RAF), less than 1% of practising legal practitioners are misbehaving. ‘Most attorneys are conducting their work properly,’ the council’s Anette Cook told MPs last week. A Business Day report says the LPC made a presentation to Parliament’s Scopa on the profession’s handling of issues concerning the RAF and medical-legal claims. Cook noted that from January 2019 to 19 June 2025, the council received 53 068 complaints, of which 9 671 related to RAF matters that were lodged against 2 622 legal practitioners; of these, 280 were found guilty. By 19 June it had 23 782 open complaints, of which 4 754 were RAF-related. It received 6 764 new complaints from January to 16 June 2025 and closed 5 828 during this period. It has 43 legal officers and support staff involved in the investigation of complaints. From January 2019 to end-May 2025 it suspended or struck off the roll 741 legal practitioners. The roll currently comprises 43 553 practising legal practitioners and 43 062 non-practising ones. ‘Very few practitioners are accused of misappropriation of RAF funds and even fewer are found guilty of this offence,’ Cook noted in her presentation. There were 64 complaints open in this regard, with 78 legal practitioners found guilty of this offence between 2019 and 2025.

Most of the RAF-related complaints were as a result of clients failing to understand legal processes and the time it took to finalise payment from the RAF, notes the Business Day report. ‘The moratorium on the execution of writs of execution and warrants of attachments against the RAF resulted in a huge increase in the complaints against practitioners. Furthermore, payment delays by the RAF have also escalated complaints by some service providers to legal practitioners – for example, advocates and medical experts,’ Cook said. Red flags that raised the LPC’s concern included a failure to account to and correspond with clients, overcharging, poor administrative capabilities and incorrect interpretations of contingency fee agreements. LPC director Ignatius Briel briefed the committee on complaints about the legal profession’s handling of medical negligence complaints against the Health Department – mainly due to birth-related cerebral palsy in children. These complaints mainly concerned the failure to establish trust accounts timeously, failure to account, overcharging, failure to attend to matters diligently, accounting irregularities and misappropriation of funds (two cases). The Eastern Cape generated the most medical negligence complaints to the council (38), followed by KZN (36). Briel noted a number of court judgments indicated the RAF was not respecting the rights of claimants and disregarded the rules of court. It failed to defend cases, accumulating default judgments, which the RAF subsequently applied to have rescinded. The number of summonses against the RAF in the Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) had risen dramatically from 354 a month in 2019 to 804 a month in 2023 and 619 a month on average in the first five months of 2024. This indicated how the level of litigation was increasing. This was due to the RAF not deciding on the validity of a claim timeously.

Full Business Day report