Loyalty in a workplace is simply defined as an employee’s dedication, commitment and allegiance to the organisation. A loyal employee is fully trusted and more often has been with the organisation for a long time. Loyalty is regarded as a fundamental ingredient of an effective and efficient working relationship. To be able to have trust in your employee and/or subordinate is one of the ultimate goals for legal practitioners. Loyalty makes working together easy and enjoyable as people can rely on each other without fear of failure or disappointment from others. Even in the presence of failure or disappointment, loyalty encourages and fosters healthy engagements between legal practitioners and employees.
It is important for legal practitioners to strike a good balance between thriving to have a loyal employee and still maintaining good business practices. Good business practice has a broad definition and many components to it but for the purpose of this article, we are going to focus on the segregation of duties. ‘Segregation of duties … involves breaking down processes so that no single person is responsible for every stage in a process. When a single individual carries out all the phases in a process with no checks, the potential exists for errors to be made or for fraud to occur’ (University of Oxford ‘Segregation of duties’ (https://finance.admin.ox.ac.uk, accessed 3-5-2025)).
In addition, over-reliance on a loyal and trusted employee over maintaining good business practice may jeopardise the objectives of a legal practice. Too much trust placed on employees or individuals may create risks to the legal practice that are detrimental to the achievement of goals. Often you find in some legal practices, where there is too much trust in individuals, good business practice suffers. For example, in a payment process where an individual is responsible for loading payments onto the online banking system for review, approval and release. Legal practitioners (approvers) will tend to selectively review certain payments and leave out others not checked, because of the trust placed on the individual responsible for loading payments. Hence, proper checks and balances of every payment and documents are not looked at diligently for accuracy, validity and correctness. Many will argue that it is not practical to check every transaction and document because of work pressures and tight deadlines, fair enough. However, it should not be an everyday routine that all payments are not checked thoroughly because it does create an unwanted culture that certain payments will never be reviewed, hence creating an opportunity for employees that it is feasible to get away with errors and/or fraudulent payments. So, from time to time, legal practitioners must ensure that a comprehensive review is done on all payments at a particular time without the knowledge of the trusted employees.
Moreover, for instance, handling petty cash, where a petty cash officer is designated to manage the fund and ensure that proper procedures are followed. If an unwanted culture is created that petty cash management is not reviewed because a legal practitioner has trust over the petty cash officer, an opportunity will be created for the officer who then might be tempted to withdraw and return the funds back without anyone noticing. Hence, it is important that a surprise cash count or petty cash management reconciliation must be carried out to ensure that the cash on hand matches the recorded balance. It is important to note that most people are not born with a mindset to steal or deceive but when an opportunity presents itself over time coupled with personal financial pressures as a result of a bad economy or pressures to provide for their families etcetera, in the absence of good business practices were internal controls are airtight to prevent and hinder employees from having corrupt ideas, the likelihood of fraud or theft to occur will be high.
Furthermore, some legal practitioners place high reliance and trust on their accountants or bookkeepers to an extent that when asked a question relating to their trust accounting records, they refer you to them. They lack the appreciation and know-how of what is recorded in their own accounting records. More often, they brag that they fully trust their accountants because they have worked for them for a long time and have earned their trust and are loyal, and their only focus is practicing law. Certainly, we cannot all be masters of every trade but as a legal practitioner, if you know very well that you lack certain essential skills that are fundamental to your legal practice, it is vital to ensure that no work or processes goes unchecked. For instance, from time to time, have someone independent from a specific process but who has an understanding and appreciation of the work done. For instance, you can ask an external trusted independent accountant to have a look at your prepared trust accounting records (not audited) and obtain some comfort that your bookkeeper is doing the right thing, as opposed to believing and trusting every word they communicate. Someone independent can either be in-house or external and they will check the work being done and provide feedback. Some legal practitioners would argue that the work of accountants or bookkeepers is ultimately reviewed and checked by external auditors, but that mindset is wrong because that is not the purpose of auditors. It is not the responsibility of auditors to identify existing errors or prevent fraud that might occur but that of legal practitioners.
It is a goal for every legal practitioner to have loyal and trusted employees in their firms because it comes with numerous benefits, but legal practitioners must not be blind sighted. Continuous upholding of good business practices is paramount to the success of the legal practice by always performing the necessary checks and balances.
Joel Zinhumwe (FP) SA CFE BCompt (Hons) Accounting Science/CTA (Unisa) BCom (Hons) Accounting (MSU) is a Practitioner Support Supervisor at the Legal Practitioners’ Fidelity Fund in Centurion.
This article was first published in De Rebus in 2025 (June) DR 13.
