Empowerment


Commitment

We believe that by practising Law in South Africa today, Attorneys are in the unique position of experiencing hands-on change management processes. In order to adapt and thrive in a dynamic environment, the policy of Black Economic Empowerment ("BEE") is to be embraced, not for the sake of compliance but because we believe it produces true team-spirit and results in greater efficiency by better harnessing the human resources our country has to offer. We would go further and unequivocally state that a BEE policy must ensure the transformation of the culture of companies to the point where they are not simply BEE compliant, but are truly South African at heart.

The Plan

Our strategy is to actively measure ourselves against the guidelines on BBBEE as published by the DTI in order to achieve the goals as set out by a three year plan which has been formulated in order to comply with all of the pillars of BEE. BBM Inc employs 118 staff member of which half are from previously disadvanteged communities.

We believe in building from within and in this way promote training and advancement for all staff. As examples, most of our Candidate Attorneys are from previously disadvantaged communities - in a firm where most Directors were previously Candidate Attorneys at the same firm, this is significant.

BEE Rating

As a result of the BBBEE guildelines published by the DTI early in February 2007, we urgently commissioned a rating agency to assess our position. On the basis of this process we had a preliminary rating as a Level 6 contributor on the Qualifying Small Enterprise (QSE) scorecard. As a result of our efforts in this area, we were subsequently reassessed as a Level 5 contributor and then as a Level 2 contributor! Most recently, we have been re-categorised under the Generic scorecard which has far more stringent requirements and our rating has dropped to Level 5. As a result we have made further improvements to those areas which were not previously rated under the QSE scorecard and are currently awaiting our updated rating which we anticipate will be Level 4.