The Law Society of Zimbabwe (LSZ) has approved the hiking of legal fees by lawyers across the board.
The move is a reaction to the depreciation in the value of the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) Dollar. A notice released by LSZ read in part:
Legal practitioners are professionally and legally obliged to charge fees for legal work which are fair and reasonable in all circumstances.
In order to assist the profession and the public in this regard and to seek a degree of uniformity and consistency, this tariff is recommended by the LSZ.
Valentine Mutatu, a law lecturer and human rights defender said:
You will notice that for senior lawyers, they used to charge US$300 (per hour) and the latest tariff shows they can now charge RTGS$1 200.
If you change that at the prevailing black market rate of today, which is around $420 for a US$$100 bill, it’s slightly lower than what we used to charge.