About LawMatch

Who operates this site

LawMatch is operated by Ophir Technologies (Pty) Ltd, a South African company. The same company builds AttorneyOS, practice management software used by South African law firms, and Rateweb, which writes about banking, credit and personal finance for South African readers.

That combination is not a coincidence. Building software for law firms taught us what a firm actually wants from an enquiry, and writing about money for the public taught us how badly ordinary people are served by writing that assumes they already know the vocabulary. LawMatch sits between the two.

Why LawMatch exists

Most South Africans with a legal problem are stuck at a much earlier point than the legal industry imagines. They are not choosing between two firms. They are not weighing up litigation strategy. They are stuck on three questions that nobody will answer for free.

Is this even a legal problem? A landlord keeping a deposit, a boss who stops answering messages, a debt collector phoning about an account from 2013, a claim an insurer rejected in one line. Some of those have a clear legal answer, some have a free forum built for exactly that complaint, and some are simply unpleasant and not actionable. Knowing which is which is the whole battle, and it is the part that costs the most to find out.

What will it cost? Legal fees in South Africa are almost entirely opaque to the public. There is no menu. You phone a firm, they invite you in, and the first real number arrives later. People avoid getting help they need because they cannot estimate the downside.

Who do I actually call? A search returns advertisements, directories padded with firms that no longer exist, and no way to tell whether the person answering the phone is admitted to practise at all.

We built LawMatch to answer those three questions, in that order, for free. The answer to the third question is sometimes an attorney and often a court, a tribunal or an ombud that costs nothing.

Our editorial standards

Every page on this site is written to the same rules, and they are worth stating openly so you can hold us to them.

We write in plain English. Short sentences, ordinary words, and the Latin only where the Latin is the actual name of the thing.

We write about South African law only. No borrowed American concepts, no imported precedent, no advice that quietly assumes a jurisdiction that is not yours.

We never invent a section number or a case name. If we cite a statute, it is because that statute says what we say it says. Where we are describing how something generally works rather than quoting a provision, we describe it and do not dress it up with a fake citation.

Every figure that changes is flagged as changing. Legal Aid means test thresholds, transfer duty, court fees, sheriff's tariffs, the Small Claims Court limit, National Credit Act thresholds: these move, sometimes annually. We tell you the figure moves and where to confirm the current one, rather than freezing a number that will be wrong within a year and quietly misleading someone in 2028.

Worked examples are labelled illustrative. When we show what a calculation looks like with real numbers, that is a demonstration of the method, not a prediction of your result.

The free route is named before the paid one. If the CCMA, the Maintenance Court, the Small Claims Court, the Rental Housing Tribunal or an ombud scheme can deal with your problem at no cost, that comes first on the page, above any suggestion that you instruct an attorney. See free and low cost legal help for the full list.

How we make money

We think you should know exactly how a website that costs you nothing pays for itself, so here it is with nothing left out.

Law firms pay us a fixed fee for each lead they accept. When somebody uses the matching form, up to three firms receive the enquiry. A firm that declines pays nothing. A firm that accepts pays a fixed amount for that introduction, set per practice area and published to firms inside our portal before they accept anything. The price does not move with the size or value of your matter.

Firms may also pay a flat monthly fee for a featured listing, which places them higher in the directory and in matching, clearly labelled as featured. That fee is also a fixed published amount, and it buys position and a label, nothing else.

We show advertising served by Google on some pages, described in our privacy policy.

Now the part that matters more than the income. We never take a share of any attorney's fee. Not a percentage, not a referral commission, not a success fee, not a cut of a Road Accident Fund payout. Our income is the same whether your matter settles for R1 500 or R1 500 000, which means nothing we publish is written to push you toward the expensive option. And we never charge you. There is no fee to read a guide, use a calculator, download a template or submit the matching form.

The full commercial terms firms agree to are published at attorney terms, and the offer to firms is set out at for attorneys.

How we verify attorneys

Before a firm appears in our directory or receives a single match, we check it against the Legal Practice Council register. The firm gives us its LPC number, its practitioners and the areas and towns it serves, and we confirm that registration.

Until that check passes the firm is invisible. It does not appear in the directory, it is excluded from matching, and it sits in a verification queue until a person clears it. Firms that reach us automatically from the AttorneyOS directory are held to exactly the same standard: an LPC number plus a status meaning the register was genuinely checked, or the firm waits in the queue like everyone else. We would rather show you a shorter directory than a badge that means nothing.

Two limits on that. Registration can lapse or change after we check it, so for anything significant, confirm the practitioner with the Legal Practice Council yourself. And verification is a factual check, not an endorsement. It tells you the firm is registered to practise. It does not tell you the firm is skilled, affordable or right for your matter. Always ask for a written fee estimate before you instruct anyone.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not give legal advice. Ever, to anyone, about anything. We are not a law firm, we have not seen your documents, and reading this site or emailing us does not create an attorney and client relationship. Our disclaimer and terms of use set that out in full.

We do not guarantee outcomes. Nobody honest does. We will not tell you that you will win, that you will be paid, that your visa will be approved or that your fine will be withdrawn.

We do not sell your personal information. Your details go to the firms matched to your enquiry and nowhere else. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to a list. Our privacy policy says who receives what and how long we keep it.

We do not rank firms by who pays us most. A featured listing buys a position and a visible label, and that is the only paid placement on the site. Matching itself runs on practice area, service area and capacity, not on spend, and no firm can buy its way into a category it does not practise in.

We do not write content to sell leads. If the correct answer to your problem is a free tribunal, the page says so, even though that means we earn nothing from you.

What we have not done yet

One standing limitation, stated plainly because burying it would be dishonest: the content on this site has been reviewed by Shephard Dube, who holds an LLB. He is not an admitted attorney and is not enrolled with the Legal Practice Council, so that review is a check on the law we state and the way we state it, and nothing more. It does not turn a guide, a cost page, a calculator article, a template or a legal page into advice about your situation.

Everything is researched and written by our editorial team against the standards above. That is a real standard, and it is not the same thing as attorney review. When an attorney does review a page, that attorney will be named on it with their Legal Practice Council number and the date. If no reviewer is named on a page, no attorney has read it. We will not display a review that did not happen.

Tell us we got something wrong

We will get things wrong. Statutes are amended, institutions merge, thresholds move, and sometimes a sentence is simply badly written and misleads someone. If you spot it, tell us.

Email hello@lawmatch.co.za with the page address and what is wrong with it. If you can point at the provision, the notice or the official source that shows the correct position, that helps enormously and gets the fix done faster. Corrections from attorneys, paralegals, clerks and advice office staff are especially welcome, and we do not need you to be polite about it.

We read every one of these. If a page is wrong we correct it, and if the error was material we say on the page that it was corrected. You can reach us about anything else through our contact page.