Contact us

If this is an emergency, do not email us

Email is the wrong tool for an emergency and we do not monitor it around the clock. If you or someone else is in danger right now, phone.

• Police, ambulance, immediate danger: 10111.
• Gender-based violence, day or night: the GBV Command Centre on 0800 428 428.
• Arrested or facing a criminal charge and cannot afford an attorney: Legal Aid South Africa on 0800 110 110.

Those are the only telephone numbers on this page, and they are the only ones you should use to reach help urgently. LawMatch has no emergency line.

Who to contact for what

Pick the address that fits, because it gets your message to the right person instead of a queue.

• General questions about the site, a guide, a calculator or a template: hello@lawmatch.co.za
• Privacy, POPIA and access to your personal information: privacy@lawmatch.co.za
• Billing, invoices and statements, for firms only: billing@lawmatch.co.za
• A correction to something published on the site: hello@lawmatch.co.za
• A complaint about a firm we matched you with: hello@lawmatch.co.za
• A firm that wants to be listed: register at for attorneys
• Media and press: hello@lawmatch.co.za

General questions

Write to hello@lawmatch.co.za for anything about how the site works: a guide you cannot find, a calculator that will not accept your input, a template that will not download, a broken link, or a question about how matching works before you use it.

What we cannot do at this address is answer your legal question. It is the one thing people most want to send here, and it is the one thing we are not permitted to do. See the section below on what we can and cannot do.

Privacy and POPIA requests

Our Information Officer handles requests under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, at privacy@lawmatch.co.za.

Write to that address to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to direct marketing, or to withdraw a consent you gave when you used the matching form. Tell us the email address and phone number you used, so we can find the record, and say clearly what you want done with it. Our privacy policy explains what we collect, who receives it and how long we keep it.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your request, you may complain to the Information Regulator, which enforces POPIA and PAIA in South Africa.

Billing, for firms

Firms use billing@lawmatch.co.za for anything on a statement or invoice: a lead you believe was billed in error, a query on the monthly statement, a change of billing contact or VAT details, or a payment reference that does not match.

Almost everything else a firm needs sits inside the portal instead of an inbox. Your lead inbox, your firm profile, your practitioners, your service areas, your monthly cap, your statements and your API tokens are all there. The commercial terms are published at attorney terms, and the pricing and how the whole thing works is at for attorneys. Lead prices and the featured listing fee are fixed amounts published to firms in the portal.

A correction to something on the site

Send corrections to hello@lawmatch.co.za. This is genuinely useful to us and we treat it seriously.

Give us the address of the page, quote the sentence you think is wrong, and tell us what the correct position is. If you can point at the statute, the regulation, the notice or the official source, the fix happens much faster. We are especially glad to hear from attorneys, candidate attorneys, paralegals, court clerks and advice office staff who deal with these matters every day and can see immediately where a page has drifted out of date.

If a page is wrong, we correct it. If the error was material, we say on the page that it was corrected.

A complaint about a firm we matched you with

If a firm we introduced you to behaved badly, we want to know. Write to hello@lawmatch.co.za and tell us the firm's name, roughly when you were matched, and what happened.

Be clear about what we can do with that. We can remove a firm from matching. We can remove it from the directory. We can decline to list it again. What we cannot do is intervene in your matter, discipline an attorney, order a refund of anything a firm has charged you, or investigate a professional complaint. We have no power over an attorney's conduct and we should not pretend otherwise.

For that, take it to the Legal Practice Council, which regulates attorneys and advocates in South Africa and handles complaints about overcharging, trust money, neglect of a file and professional misconduct. It can investigate and discipline. We cannot. If your complaint is about a business rather than an attorney, an ombud scheme or the National Consumer Commission is usually the right door, and the routes are set out on our free and low cost legal help page.

A firm that wants to list

Register your firm at for attorneys. Registration asks for your firm details, your Legal Practice Council number, your practitioners and the practice areas and towns you serve.

Nothing goes live until we have checked that registration against the Legal Practice Council register. Until that check passes, your firm is invisible in the directory and excluded from matching. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the verified badge on every profile mean something. Read the attorney terms before you register. If registration itself will not work, email hello@lawmatch.co.za and describe what happened.

Media

Journalists, researchers and anyone writing about access to justice in South Africa can reach us at hello@lawmatch.co.za. Say what you are working on and what you need, and give us your deadline in the first email rather than the third.

We are happy to explain how the site is built, how matching works, how firms are verified and how the business earns its money. We will not comment on an individual user's matter, an individual firm's conduct, or anything that would identify a person who used the matching form.

What to put in your message

Short, factual messages get better answers than long ones. It helps enormously if you include:

• The page address, if your message is about something you read here.
• What actually happened, in order, with dates. A five line timeline beats five paragraphs of background.
• What you want from us. A correction, a deletion, a firm removed, an invoice explained. Say it in the first line.
• The email address and phone number you used, if you submitted the matching form and want us to find your record.
• Any reference number we or a firm gave you.

Please do not send us original documents, and do not attach identity documents, bank statements or medical records unless we have asked for them. Do not send passwords or card details to us, ever, for any reason. If we need something sensitive to deal with a POPIA request, we will ask for exactly what we need and nothing more.

What we can and cannot do

We will be blunt, because a vague answer here wastes your time.

We cannot give you legal advice. Not by email, not on the phone, not informally, not "just off the record". LawMatch is not a law firm. We have not seen your lease, your dismissal letter, your charge sheet, your policy wording or your court papers, and we do not know how your court deals with matters like yours. Emailing us does not create an attorney and client relationship, and it never will.

We cannot tell you whether you will win. Nobody honest can, and anyone who does should worry you. We cannot tell you what a court will award, whether an insurer will pay, whether a visa will be approved or whether a fine will be withdrawn.

We cannot act for you. We do not draft your papers, we do not write your letters for you, we do not appear anywhere, we do not phone anyone on your behalf and we do not sit in a meeting with you.

We cannot intervene in your matter. Once you are dealing with an attorney, a court, a tribunal, an ombud or a government department, that relationship is yours. We cannot chase your file, escalate your complaint, speak to the other side or ask a firm to move faster.

We can fix a page that is wrong, explain how something on this site works, deal with a POPIA request, sort out a billing query for a firm, remove a firm from matching, and point you at the free forum or the regulator built for your problem. Start with free and low cost legal help, the guides, the cost pages and the calculators, because the answer is often already there.

Response times

We read everything that arrives at these addresses and we reply to messages that need a reply.

We are not going to promise you a number of hours or days, because a promise we cannot keep is worse than no promise. Volumes vary, and some requests need us to check something before we can answer properly. POPIA requests are handled within a reasonable time, as the Act requires.

If your matter is urgent, do not wait on us. A dismissal referral, a visa appeal, a notice of intention to defend, a prescription date: these run on fixed clocks and an email to a website will not stop them. Use the free routes on our legal-aid page, or use the matching form to reach attorneys who can act now.