Contact the firm
Speak to the firm about your matter.
A summons, a letter of demand, a CCMA notice, a contract nobody read before it was signed. Whatever has landed, the cheapest hour you will spend on it is the first one. Phone, email, or write it out below.
If a clock is already running, phone rather than email.
Summonses, CCMA referrals and letters of demand all carry deadlines, and some of them are measured in days. A call gets the diary checked today.
Send an enquiry
Write it out once, properly.
Most first enquiries are three lines long and cost a week going back and forth for the detail. Take ten minutes over it now and the first reply can actually say something.
Before you send it
- Contacting the firm does not create an attorney-client relationship. That begins only once the firm has accepted your matter and the terms are agreed.
- Until the firm has run a conflict check and taken the matter on, treat what you send as an enquiry rather than a privileged communication. Send enough to be understood; hold back anything you would not want read if it turns out the firm already acts for the other side.
- Time limits keep running while an enquiry sits in an inbox. Sending this form does not stop a clock, and nothing on this page is legal advice.
What to expect
What happens after you send it.
No firm can honestly put a fixed turnaround on a website, because court rolls and hearing dates do not arrange themselves around one. What can be promised is the order things happen in.
If your matter is urgent, say so in the first line of the message and phone the office as well.
It gets read properly
The enquiry is read with whatever documents came with it, before anyone replies. Twenty minutes on the file is worth more than an hour on the phone repeating it.
You are told whether there is a matter
Straight answer, including when the answer is that you do not have one, or that what you would spend running it is more than what you would get back.
Scope and cost are agreed before work starts
You will know what is being done and what it will cost. Nothing is started on the assumption that you would have said yes.
You know who is doing the work
You are told who is handling the matter and how to reach them, so that finding out where it stands does not become its own project.
Help us help you
Six things that make the first reply worth reading.
You do not need all six, and you should not delay sending the enquiry to go and find them. But every one of these turns a cautious “it depends” into an answer you can act on.
Dates
When it happened, when you were served, when the deadline falls. Dates decide more matters than arguments do.
The documents
The contract, the summons, the letter of demand, the payslip, the hospital file. Send them even if they are incomplete.
Who the other side is
The registered company name if it is a business, not just the trading name, and the person you have actually been dealing with.
What has already been said
Emails, WhatsApps, minutes, the letter you already sent. What is on the record counts for more than what everyone meant.
The amount at stake
What is owed, claimed or at risk. Even a rough figure changes what is worth doing about it.
What you want to happen
Paid out, left alone, a person back at work, a relationship kept intact. The strategy follows the answer, not the other way round.
Rustenburg
On the platinum belt, not flying in for the meeting.
The firm works out of Rustenburg and acts across the North West: the mines and their contractors, the businesses that supply them, the farms, and the towns in between. Being here matters: a Department query, a CCMA set-down or an urgent application is a different proposition handled from in town than from Sandton.
Meetings are held at the office by arrangement. Phone or email first so that the right person is available and has read the file before you sit down. Call or write to fix a time and get directions.
If travelling is the difficulty, say so. A great deal of first-conversation work is done by phone and email, and documents can be sent through electronically.