Terms of use

These terms govern your use of lawmatch.co.za and the matching service on it. LawMatch is operated by Ophir Technologies (Pty) Ltd ("LawMatch", "we"). By using the site you agree to these terms. If you are a law firm using the attorney portal, the Attorney terms also apply to you.

These terms are a legal agreement between you and Ophir Technologies (Pty) Ltd. Please read them before you use the matching form. If you do not agree with them, do not use the site.

What LawMatch is, and is not

LawMatch is a publisher of plain-English legal information and a referral service that connects people with attorneys. We are not a law firm, we do not employ attorneys, and nothing on this site is legal advice. Reading a guide, using a calculator or submitting the matching form does not create an attorney-client relationship with us or with anyone else. Our Disclaimer explains the limits of the information on this site in more detail.

Who may use the site

The site is for your own personal, non-commercial use. Anyone may read the guides and cost pages. To use the matching form you must be 18 or older and able to enter into a binding agreement, or you must be a parent, guardian or other person legally entitled to act for the person the matter concerns.

You may submit a matter on behalf of someone else only if they know about it and you are authorised to act for them. If you are a business owner submitting a matter that concerns your business, that is fine, but you may not use the form as a way of finding work, testing a competitor or gathering contact details.

If you are outside South Africa you are welcome to read the site, but the information on it deals with South African law only, and the matching service sends matters to firms practising in South Africa.

Accounts and the attorney portal

Members of the public do not need an account to use the matching form. Law firms have an account in the attorney portal, and the Attorney terms govern it in full, including verification, listings, leads, fees and termination.

If you hold portal login details, keep them confidential and do not share them. You are responsible for everything done under your login. Tell us at hello@lawmatch.co.za if you think someone else has your details, and we will suspend access while we sort it out.

Using the matching service

When you submit the matching form we send your details to up to three attorneys who are registered with the Legal Practice Council, practise in the category of law you chose and serve your area. Each firm decides for itself whether to take your matter. We do not guarantee that any firm will accept it, respond within a particular time, or be able to help.

Any engagement is between you and the attorney. You agree fees, scope and terms directly with the firm, and the firm is responsible for the advice and work it gives you. LawMatch is not a party to that agreement and does not supervise the attorney's work.

The matching service is free for you. Firms pay LawMatch a fixed fee for each lead they accept. We do not take a share of anything you pay an attorney, and no attorney pays us more to be matched with you. Firms that pay for a featured directory listing are shown as "Featured" wherever that applies.

To keep the service useful for everyone, you agree to give accurate contact details and an honest description of your problem, to submit a matter only if it is your own or you are authorised to act for the person concerned, and not to use the form for marketing, testing or spam. We may decline to match a submission that appears to be incomplete, duplicated within a short period, or not a genuine request.

If you cannot afford a private attorney, our Legal Aid page explains the free and low-cost routes that exist in South Africa. The attorney directory lets you browse firms yourself rather than using the form.

Acceptable use

You may use the site for the purposes it was built for. You may not:

• copy, republish or mirror our guides, cost pages, calculators or design on another website or in another product;
• scrape the site, or use a crawler, bot, script or any other automated means to collect content, attorney listings, reviews or contact details from it, other than a standard search engine crawler obeying our robots file;
• use our content, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune, evaluate or ground an artificial intelligence or machine learning system, without our written permission;
• extract the directory or any part of it to build a competing list, or to contact the firms on it for marketing;
• submit false, misleading or fabricated matters, or submit the same matter repeatedly to see how the system responds;
• upload anything containing a virus or other harmful code, or attempt to gain access to any part of our systems, accounts or data that you are not entitled to see;
• interfere with the site's operation, for example by overloading it with requests or by trying to bypass rate limits or security tokens;
• impersonate another person, a law firm or LawMatch itself;
• remove or obscure any copyright notice, attribution or disclaimer on our content.

Some of this conduct is also an offence under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002. Where we believe an offence has been committed we may report it.

Reviews

You may leave a review of a firm you were matched with. Reviews must be truthful, based on your own experience, and free of personal information about other people, abuse or content that is unlawful. We moderate reviews before they appear and may edit them for length or remove them. We do not pay for reviews and firms cannot pay to remove them.

How we moderate reviews

Every review is read by a person before it is published. We are looking for whether it reads like a genuine account from someone who dealt with the firm, not for whether it is flattering.

We remove or decline a review that names or identifies a third party such as an opposing party, a child or a witness; that discloses the details of someone's legal matter; that contains hate speech, threats, racial or gender abuse, or obscenity; that accuses a person of a crime or of professional misconduct as though it were established fact; that is advertising for another business; that appears to have been written by a competitor, an employee of the firm or someone who was never a client; or that repeats a review already published.

We may shorten a review, fix obvious spelling and correct formatting. We do not change its meaning or its rating. If we decline a review we tell the writer why where we have their email address.

A firm may report a review it believes is false, and we will look into it, which may include asking the reviewer to confirm that they dealt with the firm. A firm cannot buy the removal of a review, and we do not remove a review simply because the firm dislikes it.

Complaints about an attorney's professional conduct belong with the Legal Practice Council, not in a review, and we will say so when it comes up.

Content you submit

You keep ownership of anything you write, including your review. By submitting a review you give LawMatch a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish, store, display, format and distribute it on the site and in material about the site, for as long as the relevant listing exists. That licence lets us do the ordinary things a publisher does, and nothing more.

You confirm that what you submit is your own, that it is true as far as you know, and that publishing it does not breach anyone's rights. You can ask us to remove your review at any time by writing to hello@lawmatch.co.za.

The description you submit in the matching form is not published anywhere. It goes only to the firms matched with you, as described in our Privacy policy.

Templates, calculators and newsletters

Document templates are general forms and are not tailored to your situation; you use them at your own risk and should have an attorney check anything important. Calculator results are estimates from published rate tables and statutory minimums and can be out of date or not fit your facts. When you subscribe to the newsletter you can unsubscribe from any email at any time.

Your information

Our Privacy policy explains what we collect, who receives it and your rights under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013. By submitting the matching form you agree that we may share the details you gave us with the firms we match you with, including through the AttorneyOS practice management system where a firm uses it.

Advertising and links

The site carries advertisements served by Google. An advertisement is not a recommendation by LawMatch, and we are not responsible for advertisers' products or services.

We do not choose which specific advertisements appear on a page, and the advertiser has no influence over what we write. An advertisement for an attorney, a debt counsellor, an insurer or any other service is not a sign that we have checked that business or that it appears in our directory. If you respond to an advertisement, you are dealing with that business on its own terms and you should apply the same care you would anywhere else.

Links to other websites, including government bodies, courts and ombud schemes, are provided for convenience and we do not control their content. Those sites may change, move or come down, and their own terms and privacy policies apply once you leave ours.

Complaints about content

If you think something on the site is wrong, out of date, unfair to you, or breaches your rights, tell us at hello@lawmatch.co.za. Tell us the page address, quote the words you are complaining about, say what is wrong with them and, if you can, point us to the source you say is correct.

We acknowledge complaints, look at the page ourselves and, where we agree, correct it and update the date on the page. Where we do not agree we tell you why. If the complaint is about a review, we follow the moderation process above. If the complaint concerns a listing, we may contact the firm.

Where we hold information as a service provider under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, a take-down notification under that Act may be sent to hello@lawmatch.co.za, and it must contain what that Act requires.

Suspension of access

We may suspend or block your access to the site or the matching service, with or without notice, if you break these terms, if your use is harming the site or other users, if submissions from you appear not to be genuine, or if we are required to do so by law.

Where the problem can be fixed we will say so and give you the chance to fix it. Suspension does not affect any matter a firm has already accepted, and it does not affect your rights against a firm you have engaged.

Availability

We try to keep the site available and accurate, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site or the matching service at any time.

Our content

The guides, cost pages, calculators, images and design of this site belong to Ophir Technologies (Pty) Ltd or its licensors. You may read, print and share links to our content for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not copy our content onto another site, scrape it, or use it to train automated systems without our written permission.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, LawMatch is not liable for any loss arising from your use of the site, from reliance on information on it, or from the acts or omissions of any attorney you engage. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 or excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law.

Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you did, you agree to cover us for it. That means you indemnify LawMatch, Ophir Technologies (Pty) Ltd and its people against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of these terms, from content you submitted, from a matter you submitted that was not yours to submit, or from your unlawful use of the site.

This does not apply to a claim caused by our own breach of these terms, and it does not apply to anything the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 says cannot be shifted onto you.

Your rights under the Consumer Protection Act

Nothing in these terms takes away a right the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 gives you, and if any part of these terms conflicts with that Act, the Act wins for that part.

In particular, nothing here is meant to waive your right to fair and honest dealing, to information in plain and understandable language, to fair and reasonable terms, or to complain to the National Consumer Commission or an accredited ombud. Nothing here excludes liability for gross negligence, and nothing asks you to sign away a right the Act says cannot be signed away.

We have tried to write these terms in plain language for that reason. If a sentence here is unclear to you, ask us at hello@lawmatch.co.za and we will explain what it means.

Whole agreement and severability

These terms, together with our Privacy policy and Disclaimer, and for firms the Attorney terms, are the whole agreement between you and us about your use of the site. They replace anything said before, and no statement made elsewhere, including in an email or on a social media page, changes them unless we confirm it in writing.

If a court or other competent body finds that one part of these terms cannot be enforced, that part is treated as removed and the rest of the terms carry on unchanged. A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

Assignment

You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to another company in the same group, or to a buyer of the LawMatch business or its assets, provided your rights under these terms are not reduced. We will put a notice on the site if that happens.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed, and the version on the site when you use it is the one that applies.

Where a change is significant we will say so on the page, and firms will be notified in the attorney portal before the change takes effect, as set out in the Attorney terms. We do not email members of the public about changes to these terms, because we do not keep accounts for them, so please check the date on this page if it matters to you.

Governing law and contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa. Questions about them go to hello@lawmatch.co.za. Privacy requests go to our Information Officer at privacy@lawmatch.co.za.

Firms with billing questions should use billing@lawmatch.co.za. If you want to know how a listing works before you register, start at For attorneys.