CHARITY NZUZA: Legal Practice Council will never align with any agenda to block access to the profession

A period around the Legal Practice Council (LPC) examination season always ignites robust conversations about how the LPC could promote high standards of legal education and training while promoting access to the legal profession, in pursuit of a profession that broadly reflects the demographics of the Republic.

As an institution entrusted with overseeing and providing for the admission and enrolment of legal practitioners, the LPC established several interventions prior to exams to ensure their success by enhancing the marking processes and standards.

Marked by experts in the profession, the LPC’s education department ensured that all exams ran smoothly, and were overseen in a fair and professional manner with marks calculated and moderated accurately to ensure that the over 3,000 legal candidates who sat for exams were awarded deserving results.

The LPC provided virtual workshops and free courses in all quarters of 2024 to ensure the success of all candidate legal practitioners and legal practitioners. These workshops were to empower and assist candidates in writing the exams for Advocates Admission, Competency-Based, Conveyancing, and Notary Examinations. While many received positive results, others were disappointed.

Moreover, this work by the LPC’s Education Standards and Accreditation committee has begun to show positive results, with a marked improvement in the pass rates in 2024 compared to the last 2 to 3 years.

However, challenges around exams persist, with low pass rates which at times pose doubt on the standard of the examination process.

The LPC is aware of accusations of systemic gatekeeping that price legal practitioners who are more likely to be professionals of colour out, putting barriers in place to reduce the opportunity for legal practitioners of colour, and subsequently resulting in underrepresentation of black legal practitioners especially those from underprivileged backgrounds and rural areas.

Our main goal is to create a conducive environment where all candidate legal practitioners are equally supported. This starts from getting the necessary support from the law schools, obtaining high pass grades and high-level training to getting sustainable and long-term employment.

We believe the legal profession to be crucial in safeguarding our democracy and judiciary. Hence, our legal education, training and admission model is against any culture that can be seen to be a particularly fertile ground for perpetuating inequality based on race, gender, class, privilege, and sexuality.

We are aware that research has shown that the reproduction of inequality in the legal profession is often guised under notions of regulation, which allows legal actors to explain inequality away due to the lack of specific animus towards diversity. Scholars have also discussed the disparities and racist nature of the model’s admissions criteria, usage of affirmative action, and disparities for students within law schools.

Furthermore, scholars focusing on admissions critiques usually describe law school admission as a process that discriminates against people of colour by under-admitting them through a myriad of both overt and colour blind processes.

As the LPC, we have several committees which include Transformation and Professional Affairs, these two I mention as they make sure we don’t fall into a trap of gatekeeping culture, where through our model’s active gatekeeping we produce under-representation leading to anxiety, isolation, and self-doubt.

Framing legal education and training results as a racial gatekeeper and further perceiving the legal profession as a profession that maintains and participates in exclusion based on racial hierarchies is a problematic narrative.

In the 2022/2023 admission cycle, thousands of black legal practitioners were admitted to the high courts; that amount had the highest number of young women who were admitted as advocates.

This debunks the commonly held notion that there just are not enough black legal practitioners being admitted to the crucial and significant courts of our country.

The LPC always opposes and will never align with any agenda to block access to the profession.

Our mandate is to ensure accessible and sustainable training of law graduates, especially those aspiring to be admitted and enrolled as legal practitioners. Our role in shaping the admission of candidate legal practitioners and legal practitioners in the 21st-century market really matters. The LPC’s integrity is crucial.

The Council continues to strive to produce a profession that is for everyone and so all candidate legal practitioners and legal practitioners must be given equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background.

We are an institution that believes one's background, race and class aren’t the determinant of one’s outcome in life. We are an institution where race and class cannot be allowed to interact to produce racial disparities in income, jobs, and access to resources and reinforce social stratification in line with both racial and class hierarchies.

As we have concluded the last exams for the year, we have prioritised feedback sessions where our panel would go through the exam papers and provide guidance to candidates who might have had difficulties during the exam proceedings.

We believe in the capabilities of all the candidate legal practitioners who are registered with us and strive to never create a threatening space where people wonder whether they belong or not.

We operate based on meritocracy and have no appetite to actively exacerbate prejudices and inequities within legal education.