ARE LAWYERS BECOMING IRRELEVANT?

MBABANE - Are lawyers becoming irrelevant?

The Vice-President of the Law Society of Swaziland (LSS), Lucky Howe, yesterday said lawyers were fast losing their space in society. Howe was speaking during the launch of the 2019 - 2022 LSS Strategic Plan at the Royal Swazi Spa in Ezulwini, in partnership with the European Union, ICJ and Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network (SAHRDN). The vice-president said there were a lot of people who were eating into the core business of lawyers. He mentioned banks which he said wanted to eat into lawyers’ estate work, a lot of work in the tax department was handed over to accountants and that banks wanted to be drawing wills.

He told the gathering that this reminded him of former Chief Justice Stanley Sappire once said he did not understand how estate work was done by anybody yet it was Estate Law.
The strategic plan, according to Howe, is trying to look at how lawyers can become relevant again ‘because there is no price for guessing that we have been attacked and our relevance and presence is not there’. He said one of the objectives of the strategic plan was to create a modern and professionally run Bar Association, which entails the protection of the core business of attorneys and looking at how they can develop more business opportunities for themselves.

Howe said the LSS had engaged the Ministry of Finance with the new Bill that has been causing hardships for conveyancers. He mentioned that transfer and stamp duties had gone up immensely yet the amount of money paid to conveyancers went down. “We have a lot of people eating into your business. We have a lot of problems but the plan is to try and help us better the law society, get a better environment and be relevant as we used to be in the past,” said Howe. The vice president said, in line with some of the objectives of the strategic plan, they had engaged certain stakeholders like Chief Justice Bheki Maphalala. Howe informed the attorneys that there were a lot of complaints about lawyers’ conduct, about the Master of the High Court, the High Court and the law society.

He said disciplinary measures were hindered by the non-appointment of a chairperson, which the strategic plan also sought to correct.

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