‘Very few’ attorneys guilty of road accident claim graft

Most are conducting their work properly, MPs told

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, the Legal Practice Council says.

“Most attorneys are conducting their work properly,” council senior manager Anette Cook told MPs on Wednesday.

The council, which regulates the legal profession, made a presentation to parliament’s standing committee on public accounts on the profession’s handling of issues concerning the RAF and medical-legal claims.

The reasons for the misbehaviour, Cook said, included greed and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sustainability of some law firms.

She noted that from January 1 2019 to June 19 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 June 19 it had 23,782 open complaints, of which 4,754 were RAF-related.

It received 6,764 new complaints from January to June 16 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.

“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 Legal Practice Council’s concern included a failure to account to and correspond with clients, overcharging, poor administrative capabilities and incorrect interpretations of contingency fee agreements.

Legal Practice Council 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 KwaZulu-Natal (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 high court in Johannesburg had risen dramatically from 354 a month in 2019 to 804 a month 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. The courts were so clogged with RAF matters that Gauteng judge president Dunstan Mlambo issued a directive mandating pretrial mediation.

Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts has decided to launch an inquiry into allegations of maladministration, financial mismanagement, wasteful and reckless expenditure, and related financial misconduct at the RAF.

Committee chair Songezo Zibi said in a statement that the allegations pointed to a failure by the RAF board to properly oversee management. The inquiry will take place after parliament’s August recess.

“This decision follows months of repeated attempts by the committee to obtain truthful, complete information from the RAF board and executive management, to little avail,” Zibi said.

Among the committee’s concerns are the RAF’s failure to perform adequate background checks on senior management and executive appointments despite them having an employment and disciplinary history involving allegations of reckless financial management.

Another area of concern was the failure to appoint critical officials for an unacceptably long time.

Zibi said there were numerous whistle-blower accounts relating to supply chain irregularities involving more than R1bn while internal management controls appeared to not be applied.