Legal Services Department

What we do

Our function is to provide an effective and efficient legal support service to Council in order to enable it to deliver on its constitutional mandate and manage and limit the legal risks of the City. We play a major role in ensuring that the decisions taken by Council and it’s structures, as well as the administration, are legally compliant and that legal support is available to the various line departments as and when they require it. This inevitably decreases the legal risk to which the City is exposed in its decision-making bodies which ultimately promotes service delivery.

We include

Office of the Director: Legal Services
The primary function is to mitigate risk against Council and its structures, the Executive Mayor, City Manager, and Executive Directors. This is executed by providing strategic legal advice (formally and in meetings such as Council and Mayoral Committee), drafting/procuring opinions and agreements, and providing legal assistance.

Legal Support Services
This is the central office for incoming legal process and/or correspondence and allocated to the responsible unit on a daily basis. The Legal Resource Centre ensures that a library of legal information is available to staff to ensure that they have the most accurate information at their disposal.

Corporate Advisory Services Unit
We serve all internal departments, committees of Council, Office of the Mayor, Speaker, and City Manager. The primary function of this unit is to mitigate risk to the City by providing legal advice and guidance, drafting/procuring opinions and agreements, providing legal assistance, and managing Magistrates and High Court litigation.

Statutory Compliance Unit
We provide access to information to members of the public on application, reasons for decisions taken, administering the Section 62 appeals, and administering the resolution of disputes/objections and complaints to the independent and impartial person in accordance with regulation 49 and 50 of the Municipal SCM (Supply Chain Management) regulations.

Legislative Unit
We are responsible for reviewing and drafting amendments to by-laws and policies and advising on changes to legislation. We also produce comments on national and provincial draft legislation and maintain the Municipal Code (list of applicable by-laws).

Municipal Courts Unit
We assist members of the public with the processing/receipting of fines and queries related to prosecutions and guide the various role players with investigations and preparation of dockets. We also prosecute traffic and by-law infringements and continually engage with internal and external stakeholders with the view to improve service delivery.

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