This step was taken after judgment in a case involving an East London attorney who signed a contingency agreement with a man seriously injured when a bakkie hit him in the Queenstown township of Ezibeleni in 2014.
Calling the conduct of Bulelani Rubushe "unscrupulous, rapacious and unconscionable", Judge Clive Plasket said: "Unfortunately, in this jurisdiction, this problem is all too common."
"In Grahamstown, a local costs consultant was so alarmed by the abuses he discovered in the course of his work that he wrote a detailed memorandum to judges in the Eastern Cape division," he said.
This resulted in the formation of the judges' committee, which will look into what Plasket called "a manifestation of endemic corruption embedded in the attorneys' profession".
Plasket said a copy of his judgment would be sent to the Cape Law Society so "as custodian of the ethical standards of the profession . it may consider ways and means of stopping the rot".
If the contingency agreement between Rubushe and Zama Mfengwana had been permitted, the lawyer would have got 25% of the R904,889 paid by the Road Accident Fund to the victim. Plasket nullified the agreement, saying it contravened the Contingency Fees Act, amounted to "overreaching on an outrageous scale" and was "cause for very serious concern".
Instead, he said, Rubushe should be paid standard fees for work that "leaves much to be desired".
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