Numbers are usually where these arguments start, so here are the ones that matter. By the end of 2025, 55% of the Johannesburg Society of Advocates' membership was black, and 39% was female. On paper, that looks like progress, and in a narrow sense it is. But sit with the next set of numbers a little longer. Of the 238 senior counsel at the JSA at the end of last year, 171 were white. Only eight were black African women. Advocate Kate Hofmeyr, representing the JSA before the Gauteng High Court earlier this year in litigation over the new Legal Sector Code, put it plainly: these membership figures, she told the court, “belie the stubborn inequalities that remain at the Bar.”
The attrition figures are harder to sit with. Over the past five years, 406 junior counsel with more than a year's seniority left the JSA. Of those, 272 were black. In the first four years of practice alone — the years that decide whether a junior survives at the Bar at all — 142 advocates left between 2020 and 2025. Eighty-five percent of them were black.
I chair the JSA's Transformation, Briefing Patterns and Pro Bono Committee, so I don't get to treat these as abstractions. They are the juniors I've mentored, the pupils whose progress I track, the colleagues who call to say they're leaving because the work simply isn't coming. And after nearly two decades watching this from inside the profession, I've landed on a conclusion I don't find especially comfortable: we have spent far more energy getting people into the Bar than we have spent making sure work reaches them once they're there.
Pupillage reform gets people through the door. Silk recommendations put a handful of us on the letterhead. Neither touches the mechanism that actually determines whether a junior advocate can pay rent — who an attorney picks, on an ordinary Tuesday, when a brief needs to go out. That decision has historically been made somewhere transformation policy struggles to reach: a phone call, a message, a relationship built over twenty years of shared chambers or golf or church. You cannot legislate a phone call.
Quotas have their place, and I don't think the JSA's transformation policies have been wrong to use them. But a quota sets a floor; it doesn't explain why attorneys keep returning to the same names for the work that actually pays. Left unaddressed, a quota becomes one more box on a compliance form — satisfied on paper, worked around everywhere it isn't strictly required. What we haven't done as a profession is take seriously how opaque the underlying decision still is.
Some of that opacity is starting to lift, and it's worth saying where credit belongs. Auxcon, the legal technology company founded by attorney Rose-Marie van den Bogert, spent fifteen years building a system to digitise how attorneys brief advocates — timestamped, criteria-based, visible to both sides rather than left to memory and relationship. I spent much of last year working with Van den Bogert and then JSA Chairperson Mahlape Sello SC to bring that system, AuxBrief, into the JSA, and Standard Bank ran the first live matter through it when we launched in October. It isn't my platform and I don't want to overstate my part in building it. But championing its adoption taught me something worth saying plainly: the profession has no shortage of good intentions about transformation. What it has been missing is infrastructure that makes briefing decisions visible enough to actually examine.
The same logic has to hold on the state side, where the numbers are arguably worse and the stakes — public money, public trust — are higher. Our committee has spent this year in direct engagement with the National Prosecuting Authority and the Special Investigating Unit's newly registered internal law firm, asking the same basic questions: where are briefs published, what does an advocate need to qualify, and who is actually getting instructed. Whatever tools end up answering those questions, government's legal spend deserves the same scrutiny we're finally starting to apply to private briefing.
None of this solves transformation by itself. Retention is a mentorship problem as much as it is a briefing problem, and I don't think the profession has fully reckoned with why 85% of the juniors who leave in their first four years are black. Six pupils and two mentees in, I know mentorship alone doesn't move a number that size. But briefing patterns are the one part of this problem we can actually see and measure, once we're willing to look properly. That strikes me as worth doing first — not instead of the harder work, but so the harder work has something to stand on.