Court Ruling Hits Black Lawyers' Path to Ownership

For Black lawyers in South Africa, the climb toward senior leadership, ownership and high-value work remains steep, and a new court ruling has now complicated one of the government’s main tools for changing that. The Gauteng High Court has overturned a Black economic empowerment code for the legal sector, finding that Trade Minister Parks Tau failed to properly exercise his powers when he approved the measures.

The judgment, delivered on Wednesday, does not touch the code’s constitutionality or its racial transformation ambitions. Instead, the court focused on process. It found that Tau did not independently assess and justify the measures before approving them. The court set aside his approval of the code, promulgated in 2024, and referred the matter back to the minister for reconsideration. He was required, the court said, to independently assess whether the code, and its departures from general Black empowerment rules, were justified before deciding whether to approve it.

The code had set sector-specific targets for Black ownership, management and procurement. Among its goals was a requirement that large law firms reach 50% Black ownership within five years, with Black women holding 25% of that stake. For supporters, those targets addressed a concrete reality: despite greater diversity among junior lawyers, Black practitioners remain underrepresented in senior leadership, ownership and high-value work.

The challenge was brought by four major commercial law firms, Deneys Reitz (formerly Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa), Bowmans, Webber Wentzel and Werksmans, alongside the trade union Solidarity. Dirk Hermann, Solidarity’s chief executive, welcomed the outcome, calling the ruling “a huge victory over the government’s reckless racial policy”.

Tau’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision deals a setback to the government’s efforts to accelerate racial transformation in one of South Africa’s most influential professions. At the same time, it stops short of challenging the country’s broader affirmative-action framework, leaving that architecture intact even as this particular code heads back to the minister’s desk.

Meanwhile, the ruling arrives at a sensitive moment. South African policies designed to redress the legacy of white-minority rule face renewed political and legal scrutiny, including criticism from US President Donald Trump. The court’s finding adds a judicial dimension to that wider debate, though its reasoning was rooted in procedural grounds rather than the merits of transformation itself.

For the profession’s practitioners, the immediate effect is uncertainty. The targets firms had begun working toward are now set aside pending the minister’s reconsideration, and the question of how the sector addresses persistent racial disparities returns to a process the court has said must be carried out with proper independent assessment. What remains undisputed, in the words of those who backed the code, is the underlying problem the measures were meant to address: the gap between the diversity visible among junior lawyers and the leadership and ownership of the firms where careers are made. Whether the minister can now satisfy the court’s demand for genuine independent assessment, and how long that takes, will shape what comes next for the sector.