About the firm
Tshepo Masilela Attorneys Inc. is a commercial law firm in Rustenburg. It acts for the businesses that keep the platinum belt running, including contractors, suppliers, employers and landlords, and for the private clients whose matters end up in the same courts.
The director
She is an admitted attorney and the firm’s director. The practice carries her name, which is a deliberate piece of exposure: there is no committee to disappear behind, and no version of a matter in which the client cannot find out who is answerable for it.
That shows up in how the work is run. Files are taken on in the volume they can be done properly. Advice goes out in language a business owner can act on without a second lawyer to translate it. And where the honest answer is unwelcome, it is given early, while it is still cheap to act on: that the contract says the opposite of what you remember, that the dismissal will not survive the CCMA, that the claim is not worth what it will cost to run.
The firm practises across nine areas covering commercial and mining work, labour, civil litigation, debt collection, deceased estates and trusts, divorce and third party claims. That range is not ambition. It is the spread of what businesses and families in this part of the North West actually walk in with.
A client rarely asks what the law says. They ask what happens now, what it will cost, and how long it takes. Those are the questions the firm answers first.
What the firm stands for
Any firm can hang words like these on a wall. These four are on this page because each of them costs the firm something from time to time: a fee it could have billed, a conversation it would rather not have had.
You will be told what your position actually is, including when it is weak. An opinion that flatters the client is worth nothing when it is tested.
In practice: an opinion that says the claim is not worth running, in the first meeting rather than the fourth.
The outcome should follow from the law and the facts. Where that requires a fight, the firm is prepared to have it.
In practice: a matter taken the whole way when settling early would have been easier for the firm than for you.
You will know who is doing the work, what it will cost, and where the matter stands without having to chase for it.
In practice: a named attorney on the file, and the cost of the work agreed before the work starts.
A business in Rustenburg is entitled to the same standard of legal work as one in Sandton, at a price that makes sense here.
In practice: the same drafting and the same preparation whether the matter is a lease dispute or a mining right.
Ownership and B-BBEE
The firm is 100% Black female-owned, a B-BBEE Level 1 contributor and B-BBEE certified. That usually gets printed as a badge and left there, which wastes it, because there is a number attached.
Under the B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice, a Level 1 contributor carries a procurement recognition level of 135%. For preferential procurement scoring, every R1 000 of fees you pay this firm is recognised as R1 350 of B-BBEE spend. The legal work you had to buy anyway does a second job on the way through.
The same spend counts toward the sub-targets most scorecards struggle to fill: procurement from suppliers that are at least 51% Black-owned, and from Black women-owned suppliers. Your verification agency confirms how it lands on your own scorecard, and the firm’s certificate is available for your supplier file whenever you need it, preferably before year end, when everyone asks at once.
Procurement recognition
135%
of what you spend with a Level 1 contributor counts toward your preferential procurement, under the B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice.
The platinum belt: the mines, and the businesses that supply, feed, house and transport everyone who works them.
Why a Rustenburg firm
Rustenburg is a mining town with an entire commercial economy stacked around it: contractors, plant hire, transport, engineering suppliers, security, farms, landlords and the businesses that serve everyone on shift. Those are the firm’s clients, and their problems have a local shape: a dispute that follows a shift roster, a supply contract written for a mine’s procurement portal, a right that needs the Department’s queries answered properly the first time.
Distance is expensive in law. A firm briefed from Johannesburg bills the travel, meets you twice and reads your site off photographs. Being here means an attorney can be at your premises, at the magistrates’ court, at the CCMA or the bargaining council on the day it matters, and can look at the thing in dispute rather than a description of it.
It also means knowing the forums themselves: how the rolls run, what each registrar wants, the small local differences that cost an unprepared attorney a day. And when a matter has to go up, the North West Division of the High Court sits at Mahikeng, in this province rather than another one.
Working with the firm
Four things, in the order they happen. None of them is unusual for a law firm to promise. The difference is whether you get them without asking.
You explain what happened, in your own order. Bring whatever paperwork exists: the contract, the letter of demand, the disciplinary notice, the hospital file, the WhatsApp thread. Incomplete is fine. It is more useful than a tidy summary written afterwards.
Before anything is drafted or issued, you get the firm’s view of where you stand, what the realistic outcomes are, and what the other side is likely to do about it. If the answer is that the matter is not worth running, that is the answer you get.
You will know what work is being done, who is doing it and how it is charged before it begins. Nothing significant happens on your file without your instruction.
You are told when the matter moves, and when it does not, and why. Silence is not a status. If a court date slips or the other side goes quiet, you hear it from the firm first.
You do not need to arrive with the matter organised. Bring the documents, or bring the version you can remember, and the firm will tell you which parts are a problem and what can still be done about them.
Rustenburg, North West · Qualified. Competent. Committed.
