Your gateway to the legal profession

Download our guide to why you should work at Legal Aid South Africa - (584KB) pdf

Legal Aid South Africa is the biggest law firm on the African continent. It boasts a unique pedigree of socially conscious legal professionals, who  in their everyday work, defend and protect the rights of the country’s most vulnerable groups including women, children, the elderly landless by providing legal advice and representation  in criminal and civil matters.

Legal Aid South Africa is an independent statutory body established by the Legal Aid Act (Act of 22 of 1969) and the Legal Aid Amendment Act (Act 20 of 1996). The objective of Legal Aid SA is to make available legal assistance to poor and vulnerable at State expense.

Through its candidate attorney recruitment programme (over 600 candidate attorneys recruited each year), Legal Aid SA provides an invaluable gateway to the legal profession and has made an enormous contribution to the transformation of the profession. To date, the organisation has about 1700 attorneys in its employment.

Once these attorneys have been recruited, Legal Aid SA offers them a comprehensive career path, which offers opportunity for specialisation in criminal and civil law.

Further opportunities are created for advanced levels of legal practice in the organisation’s high court units and in the role of senior litigator. In addition, legal professionals are afforded the opportunity to follow the legal-manager stream by advancing through the ranks to become a high court unit manager, justice centre executive and can even progress to the senior executive level of regional and national operations executive. The organisation offers specialist/technical opportunities in the form of legal training, development and research and is in the process of developing the role of legal call centre manager

Join us to:

• Build a reputation of being a tenacious and professional provider of legal services
• Make our Constitution a reality in lives of our people
• Build new research skills and techniques for trials
• Be exposed to various intervention programmes to train and develop your legal competencies
• Ensure effective access to justice for the poor and vulnerable

Professionals that we employ:

• Legal Professionals
• IT specialists
• HR
• Finance
• Corporate Communications
• Corporate Services

Skills Training

Legal Aid South Africa’s skills training programme includes a combination of both legal and support interventions.

Bursaries

Legal Aid South Africa offers bursaries to employees for courses that would enhance their performance in their current roles. On obtaining their qualifications, the employees are required to remain in service for a period equal to their studies. If they leave the organisation, they are required to settle the bursary amount in full.

Employee Assistance Programmes

• Telephonic counselling;
• face to face counselling,
• emergency trauma counselling and training;
• VCT, HIV and AIDS counselling and support;
• life skills training;
• stress management and lifestyle management.

Succession planning

Legal Aid South Africa has a staff succession planning programme, which involves the identifying and developing of talent to create a level of preparedness to deal with changes in critical positions. The succession planning candidates then go through a formal external executive development programme facilitated by the Wits Business School.