When JW van Zyl Inc is engaged · 05
Temporary South African in-house legal capacity.
An in-house legal team, or a founder who doubles as the legal owner, needs South African legal capacity on a continuing basis. There is not enough work to justify a permanent hire, and instructing a different firm for every question carries its own friction. A monthly outside-counsel retainer answers this: a defined workstream, defined capacity and a defined price.
Who this is for
In-house legal teams, legal business partners and founder-led life-sciences companies operating in South Africa
Typically instructed by: General counsel · regional and country legal counsel · legal operations · founders
What tends to go wrong
Where this workstream fails without South African counsel
- Ad hoc external instructions accumulate faster than they are resolved, and the internal team ends up doing the work itself.
- Different firms are instructed for different matters and no institutional memory forms.
- Small questions become expensive because each is opened, billed and closed separately.
Scope
What JW van Zyl Inc owns in this workstream
- Defined monthly capacity
- A recurring allocation of the principal's time in one of three tiers, with unused capacity and overruns handled on agreed terms.
- Institutional memory
- One lawyer who holds the client's matters, positions, templates and preferences from month to month.
- Predictable cost
- A monthly fee agreed in advance, invoiced on a fixed cycle.
- Specialist escalation
- Foreign-law, patent, tax, regulatory-science or advocacy input arranged within the client's chosen governance and under a defined instruction.
Monthly tiers
Three levels of continuing capacity
- 8 hours a month: light continuing capacity.
- 16 hours a month: regular ongoing work.
- 32 hours a month: programme-level capacity.
Outside this workstream
What the firm does not take on here
- Capped-fee project mandates, which are engaged separately.
- Litigation.
How the workstream is instructed
Discovery, scoping, engagement
- Discovery. You describe the flow of South African legal work the team is carrying and how it is handled today.
- Scoping. The firm runs a conflicts check and proposes a tier and a governance model for the workstream.
- Engagement. The retainer's scope, tier, fee and review cycle are agreed in writing before the first month begins.
Timing and fee shapeRetainers are priced monthly by tier and reviewed at agreed intervals. Work that falls outside the retainer's scope is quoted separately before it starts.
Illustrative situations from prior professional experience are available on request. Anonymised matters comparable to this work are listed under Experience.
Before you instruct
What helps the firm assess the matter
- The entities the retainer would serve, for the conflicts check.
- The kinds of South African legal work the team is carrying, and roughly how much.
- The internal approval route and any procurement requirements.
- When the capacity is needed from.