Our junior members regularly serve as mentors for pupils during their prescribed year of pupillage with the Pretoria Society of Advocates (Pretoria Bar), and both our senior and junior members regularly contribute to the training initiatives of the Training Committee of the Pretoria Bar by acting as lecturers and assisting with practical training workshops.
Being granted the opportunity to take up chambers in our group is a unique and rare privilege and is dependent on a fellow member deciding to leave our group. As and when chambers become available, there is often heavy competition among the members of the Pretoria Bar that apply for any vacant chambers in our building.
We strive to uphold the high standard of legal expertise that our group has become known for by ensuring that members of the Pretoria Bar that are granted chambers in our group are capable of providing the quality of services that attorneys and clients have come to expect from the advocates in the Brooklyn Advocates’ Chambers.
Completing pupillage with a mentor in our group will be advantageous in an application for chambers in our group. To this end, when applying for pupillage with the Pretoria Bar, it is possible to request that a specific advocate be allocated as a mentor. This request is generally motivated by an interest in the field of law in which the advocate practices and the interests of the aspirant pupil. This does not mean that an aspirant pupil's request will be granted by the Training Committee of the Pretoria Bar, but in general, if the proposed advocate supports the request, it will be favourably considered.
If you intend applying to the Pretoria Bar for pupillage and wish to have any one of our junior members act as mentor, we invite you to contact our office manager in order to arrange a meeting with the member. During such a meeting you will be able to ask questions regarding what can be expected should you be allocated to an advocate in our group and also enquire whether the junior member is available to act as a mentor.
Please note that as a general rule, the Pretoria Bar only appoints junior counsel as mentors, and it is in a rare and exceptional case that a senior counsel will consent to be appointed as a mentor. As with every chambers in the Pretoria Bar, our group has an open door policy and pupils allocated to junior members in our building are introduced to our established senior members and, dependent on their availability, invited to engage with our senior members should they have any questions or require advice.
As a group we are committed to assisting the Pretoria Bar, the General Council of the Bar of South Africa, and the Legal Practice Council of South Africa (LPC) in the provision of training for aspirant advocates who wish to become members of the Bar.