My firm gets asked on a regular basis to take on all sorts of maintenance cases. It is one thing we try to avoid like the plague. The bottom line is that an attorney may get you a better result than the legal official that is provided by the State for free, but the costs are so much higher that neither the attorney nor the client is going to end up being happy.

Of course, there are many excellent prosecutors and maintenance officers in the employ of the State and their system is not going to cost you anything. If you go to an attorney and the attorneys spends 20 hours on your matter, and it is quite easy to spend a lot more time than that, including a lot of time spent waiting at Courts, then you are going to pay R20 000,00 or R30 000,00 or more in fees. If, for example, you increase your maintenance from R2 000,00 a month to R3 000,00 and your fees are R30 000,00, it is going to take you 30 months of paying off the attorney before you are actually in a better position. It simply does not make sense, as far as I am concerned, except in the most extreme cases, to actually use attorneys in such cases and it is an example of another field of law where attorneys have largely lost out on the work – joining estates, debt collections and various other fields.

From an attorney’s point of view, there is little joy to be had in spending hours at Court, hours going through the client’s file and preparing and running a case and ultimately having to cut and reduce fees and then on top of that, wait forever to be paid.