With 130 branches throughout the country, and having provided legal services to 400 000 South Africans during the past year, Legal Aid South Africa is the country’s biggest law firm.
It’s also one of the country’s Best Empowered Employers, according to the CRF Institute. With its accent on human rights and the provision of quality legal advice to indigent South Africans, Legal Aid has its eye on attracting and recruiting passionate law experts and — most importantly — ensuring they are well skilled.
Indeed, topping its list if HR priorities is the need to address skills gaps where they exist, which means that significant emphasis is placed on development and training. Although training interventions have been designed with an eye to increasing the overall quality of the skills profile within the organisation, they have also been designed to empower staff members as they take responsibility for their own development.
A second HR priority sees the company turning its attention to securing the next generation of leaders through the implementation of a comprehensive succession plan. This is enabled through interventions such as on-the-job coaching and mentoring, while the company has also joined forces with tertiary institutions to offer a targeted leadership development course.
While many candidate attorneys may not consider a position within the public sector to hold the same prestige that would accompany a job at one of Sandton’s plush law firms, careers at Legal Aid are attractive because of their scope.
Of the 600 candidate attorneys that are recruited each year, many go on to take positions in the court system, perhaps as a senior litigator or justice centre executive.
Moreover, one of the major perks of working for this organisation is, as most of its employees find, the opportunity to uphold human rights and bring justice to South Africans.
This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as a sponsored feature