Legal Insight

Summer’s the perfect season to go house-hunting, with the sun shining, new properties on the market, and sales surging. Let’s talk about what you should do when you’ve found your dream home and the agent asks you to sign an offer to purchase. We’ll lead you through the process and share some guidelines to help make it as simple, quick, and risk-free as possible.

Lying to get a job can cost far more than the job itself. A former V&A Waterfront chief information officer was ordered to pay nearly R2.9 million in damages after the Labour Court found that she had misled the company into employing her and into paying for two consultants who had worked for her private business. Just over R1 million of the award represented her total remuneration. The rest covered the consultants’ fees.

A 13th cheque is not automatically guaranteed. But where it forms part of your employment contract, your employer cannot simply withdraw it or replace it with a performance-based bonus without your agreement. The Labour Court ordered an employer that had done so to pay 45 employees a 13th cheque for every year it had gone unpaid since 2021.

Dog owners can face strict liability when their animals attack someone, meaning the injured person does not necessarily have to prove that the owner was negligent. But that doesn’t make owners automatically liable for every bite. Here, the claimant put his head over his neighbour’s boundary wall after being asked more than once to leave the guard dogs alone. The High Court ruling makes for interesting reading…

After their bond was withdrawn, the buyers were given time to arrange new finance. Instead, one of them emailed the conveyancer saying they would only apply for another bond after the seller repaired an alleged defect or agreed to reduce the price. The seller understood this to mean that the buyers would not proceed on the terms they had already accepted. She cancelled the sale, and the High Court agreed that she was entitled to do so. The buyers lost the sale and the money already paid and faced further financial consequences.

It’s unfortunately all too common a tale. Out of the blue, an older person, rendered vulnerable by age or illness, acquires a new “friend”. Before anyone in the family realises what’s going on, their loved one has died, and the fraudster claims to be sole heir in terms of a last-minute will. No surprise then that our courts must often determine whether a deceased person’s last will was tainted by incapacity, undue influence, fraud, or even forgery. The sad tale of a 90-year-old man who left behind two conflicting wills is a good example of how our courts approach these situations.

Under the current law, it is already illegal to employ someone who is not legally entitled to work in South Africa. This applies to businesses and to households employing foreign domestic workers, nannies or gardeners. A new Bill proposes additional duties and higher penalties for employers, but these changes are not yet law. Employers should therefore comply with the existing law and remain alert to the proposed changes.

Your fingerprint suddenly stops working at the estate gate. You can still get home, but only through the visitors’ lane. Can your homeowners’ association cut off your biometric access because it says you owe levies? A recent High Court judgment says an association cannot use biometric access to enforce an alleged default. The case also confirms that biometric access to your home can be protected as part of your possession of the property.

At the heart of your estate planning is your will (“Last Will and Testament”). Without it, you lose your right to choose your heirs, to choose the executor of your estate, and to choose who will look after your children and your family trusts when you die. But there’s lots of online chatter about other types of “will” such as offshore wills, digital wills, business wills, ethical wills and living wills. What are they and do you really need to put them all in place?

For decades, South African law used the husband’s legal home at the time of marriage to decide which country’s law governed a couple’s financial and property rights when they had ties to more than one country. A recent Western Cape High Court judgment declared that rule unconstitutional and introduced a gender-neutral framework for deciding which country’s law applies. Courts elsewhere in the country are not bound by the judgment but are likely to follow it.

In most cases hitting a pothole results in a damaged tyre or wheel. But for one unfortunate motorcyclist who hit a 60cm behemoth near George, it meant losing a leg. The High Court held the Department of Infrastructure liable for his damages, finding that the roads authority had failed to detect, repair or warn road users about a dangerous defect it knew, or should have known, about.

Home security cameras are increasingly common, but protecting your property does not give you an unrestricted right to monitor your neighbours. A dispute between Cape Town neighbours has clarified where the line may be drawn. The bottom line? CCTV surveillance of a neighbour’s private spaces can infringe their constitutional rights to privacy and dignity.

When a sale falls through, most people assume restitution means simply giving back the money and the property. A recent High Court decision shows it is rarely that straightforward, particularly if the property itself has changed in the interim. The ruling explains how restoration costs should be worked out, and why the condition of the property when occupation begins can matter years later.

When a trust’s founder dies, families often assume that whatever they said they wanted will be honoured, even if the trust deed was never changed to reflect it. A recent Supreme Court of Appeal decision confirms that this is not how trusts work. What governs a trust after the founder’s death is the trust deed itself, not the wishes they expressed at family meetings in their final years.

Paying rent under a residential lease does not automatically make you a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act. A recent Supreme Court of Appeal decision shows that the real question is whether the landlord is letting property in the ordinary course of business. That said, even where the CPA does not apply and a lease is validly cancelled, a landlord cannot simply tell a tenant to leave without following the correct eviction process.

The “Whistleblower’s Act”, formally known as the Protected Disclosures Act, encourages employees to expose corruption, criminal activity and other wrongdoing in the workplace. But what protections does the Act actually give whistleblowers? And what steps should employers and employees take to ensure they comply with it? We’ll answer all of these questions in the context of a recent Labour Court decision to reinstate a manager who was ostensibly fired for breaching ICT policies.

A tenant may be in clear breach of a lease, but that does not guarantee a successful eviction. A recent High Court judgment shows how an unclear cancellation notice and a failure to follow the correct legal process can derail an otherwise strong case, leaving landlords with an expensive lesson in the importance of getting the basics right.

A dementia diagnosis affects far more than memory. As mental capacity declines, families are often confronted with difficult legal and financial decisions. Many are surprised to learn that a Power of Attorney may no longer be valid. Understanding the alternatives can help protect a loved one’s affairs before a crisis develops. Read on for the low-down.

Your top employee resigns and immediately opens up a new business in direct opposition to you. Using your software, your client relationships and your business methods to springboard their new start-up and poach your clients. We discuss, in the context of a recent High Court case, how our law can help you put a stop to that sort of unfair competition. And we share some tips on how to protect yourself from it in the future.

Trusts remain a valuable estate planning and asset protection tool, but they also carry ongoing compliance obligations. Many trustees assume that a dormant trust with no income, assets, or activity can simply be left alone. SARS has made it clear that inactivity does not remove a trust’s compliance obligations. With penalties now being imposed for outstanding trust returns, dormant trusts may be attracting more attention than their trustees realise.