When legal turns on legal, justice for all is denied

By Mustafa Mohamed, Attorney and Director: Vezi & de Beer Inc.

When advocates sue attorneys, something deeper than a fee dispute is at play. It signals that the professional bond designed to serve justice has started to fray. And when that bond fails, the ripple effects reach far beyond the chambers—they reach the client. For people already under strain, that discord becomes another wound. The law meant to protect them instead exhausts them.

This isn’t theoretical. Recent matters on the rolls show colleague-against-colleague disputes:

• Diederichs v Ravele (Gauteng, 2023) — Advocate sued for outstanding fees; attorney alleged delayed or incomplete work.
• Solomon v Junkeeparsad (Durban, 2022) — Advocate sought payment on multiple matters; court reaffirmed that attorneys are legally responsible for paying counsel once briefs are issued.
• Maite v Borman Duma Zitha Attorneys (Johannesburg, 2023) — Advocate claimed unpaid invoices; the firm argued duplication and disagreement on rates.
• Dayanand-Jugroop v Ngento (Gauteng, 2024) — Advocate sued for fees; attorney alleged overreaching.

These are only some of the visible ones. Beyond the law reports, similar disputes are filed and then resolved before judgment—settled at the door, withdrawn, or diffused after pre- action letters. They leave no precedent—only delay, cost, and distrust that practitioners across chambers know too well. Judicial sentiment has been blunt for years: it is, as one judgment put it, “a sad day for the legal profession” when professional conduct fails its own standards.

How we got here

A discipline of precision now runs on brittle admin. The trouble starts at inception: briefs are opened on the strength of a call or a WhatsApp, and the mandate never fully hardens— scope, fee basis, and timelines remain implied rather than expressed. When a matter later turns, each side reaches for a different memory of what was agreed.

From there, the record splinters. Emails sit in one folder, draft notes in another, voice notes on a phone, and a spreadsheet only one person maintains. With no shared audit trail, silence is misread as neglect and delay as refusal.

Follow-ups aren’t verifiable, so “we never received it” becomes a defence. Attorneys then carry scope creep, surprise rates, and retroactive claims they can’t easily disprove when billing drifts and accountability blurs.

Good lawyers are disappointing each other not because they lack integrity, but because the system invites failure: informal inception, fragmented records, unverifiable cadence, and unmanaged closure. In that sequence, disagreement isn’t an exception—it’s the default outcome.

Rebuilding the pipeline: digital briefing as the first fix

Over the past year, Vezi & de Beer Inc. has worked with Auxcon to co-build a connected digital briefing platform—AuxBrief—to address the root of these breakdowns: how matters are initiated, agreed, and tracked.

At its core, AuxBrief digitises the briefing process between attorneys and advocates. Each brief is created and managed on one platform. Scope, fees, and timelines are locked upfront, removing the ambiguity that fuels later disputes. Every interaction—whether an update, acceptance, or clarification—is time-stamped and stored on a shared record visible to both sides. This becomes the single source of truth that underpins accountability.

The platform doesn’t change how professionals work; it changes what can go wrong. It creates structure where informality once ruled, makes transparency automatic, and replaces crossed wires with traceable engagement.

Digital briefing protects both sides: it locks scope and fee basis for advocates, and shields attorneys from scope creep and unagreed rate changes via a shared, time-stamped record.

While AuxBrief stands as a specialised digital briefing system, it also forms part of Auxcon’s broader modular ecosystem. For firms and advocates who choose to integrate, it can link seamlessly into Auxcon’s billing and administrative modules—creating an end-to-end, traceable workflow from briefing to billing to reconciliation. But even as a standalone tool, digital briefing represents a foundational change: every engagement starts with shared clarity and ends with a shared record.

How digital briefing could have changed the outcomes

• In Diederichs v Ravele, where the attorney disputed the quality and timing of work, the brief would have locked deliverables and deadlines upfront, removing ambiguity about performance or entitlement.
• In Maite v Borman Duma Zitha, where invoices and expectations clashed, the brief would have captured agreed rates and payment triggers, aligning billing with mandate.
• In Solomon v Junkeeparsad, where the attorney’s duty to pay was reaffirmed, each brief would have been traceable to a responsible party, turning principle into operational fact.
• In Dayanand-Jugroop v Ngento, with fees claimed and overreaching alleged, a digital brief would have locked fee basis and rates upfront, required any variance to be recorded, and given the attorney a verifiable trail to contest overreach—while closure prompts prevented drift.

Essentially, digital briefing doesn’t just fix record-keeping; it restores professional trust by ensuring that agreement, execution, and accountability live in one place. That is the shift: from recollection to record, from ad-hoc process to shared structure, and from avoidable disputes to predictable closure.

On 25 October, AuxBrief, will be formally launched, in partnership with the Johannesburg Society of Advocates (JSA), Vezi de Beer Inc. and Auxcon. From that point forward, every attorney and advocate who chooses to brief digitally will be working within a framework designed for fairness, traceability, and respect. Wider adoption turns individual fixes into collective reform. Trust stops being a promise; it becomes the record. Not just a South African first, but a world-first.