Performance Training
for Advocates and the Bar
The pressures that come with practice at the Bar.
Sustained hearings, a heavy instruction load, opinion work under deadline, and a courtroom built to create pressure. Every advocate recognises at least one of these. They come with the work, and they build up over time.
Precision
A judge, an opponent and a deadline all demand precision at exactly the moment the mind is most loaded. The sharpness of last year’s practice is a little less reliable this year, and the advocate notices it first.
Load
Opinions, preparation, consultations and drafting all draw on the same limited attention. Switching between matters at different stages all day makes deep focus harder to reach and slower to recover.
Composure
Pressure disrupts the three things advocacy needs most: composure, structured thinking and precise language. Staying steady under it can be taught. Most advocates were never taught it.
Staying power
A practice that is excellent in its first five years gets harder to sustain without recovery and working habits that protect the mind. The advocates with the longest practices build those habits early.
Advocates are known for being composed, capable and controlled. But the cost of that expectation is often silence.
Sonja Cilliers, PMRI
Every session is developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and a member of the Pretoria Bar in legal practice since 1999, and delivered by the behavioural specialist. The mechanism is explained before the method, the examples come from practice at the Bar, and the tone is peer to peer throughout.
Three ways to work with us
Bar councils, societies, chambers groups and pupil programmes come in through one of three doors.
A single session
Ninety minutes to two hours for a group of chambers, a Bar council or a society function, in person at chambers or online, timed to your calendar. Any of the six sessions below.
A short series
Two or three sessions across the practice year, each building on the last and timed to the pressure points every advocate body knows. Sessions can be recorded for members who cannot attend live.
Pupil cohort training
Commissioned by the body running the pupillage programme and delivered alongside the LPC curriculum: how the mind performs under the pressures of the pupillage year, and how to protect it from the first week.
The sessions
Six sessions, each on one performance variable. Any one stands alone; two or three make a series.
Burnout prevention and cognitive load
What depletion does to an advocate’s work before anyone names it, and the recovery habits that protect a long practice.
High-performance productivity for advocates
Task switching between matters, protecting deep work during opinion drafting, and structuring the day so precision is available when it is needed.
Critical thinking under pressure
The thinking errors most common in adversarial work, from anchoring in negotiation to confirmation bias in assessing an instruction, and how to protect reasoning when fatigue is highest.
Communication and composure in adversarial proceedings
How threat activation narrows attention during pointed questioning or a hostile opponent, and how to recover composure quickly.
Purpose and motivation under sustained pressure
Why professional purpose erodes in a demanding practice and what rebuilds it.
Peak performance for advocates
The habits and working structures that keep an advocate at full capacity across a year of heavy instructions.
What it costs
Three figures a Bar council or convenor can take to the meeting.
The first conversation
An hour on Teams or the telephone with the convenor, the executive or the programme coordinator, no proposal required. If we cannot help, we will say so.
A session or a series
Quoted on the format and the size of the group. Every version includes preparation, a workbook for every participant, and a conversation with the convenor afterwards on what we saw. Travel and accommodation outside Gauteng are added at cost.
On your own
For an advocate who wants to start without a group booking: recorded webinars from R450 and two self-paced courses, each with a workbook.
Who delivers it
Maryke Swarts, Neuro-Coach · Behavioural Specialist · Co-Founder, designs the frameworks and delivers the sessions. Sonja Cilliers, Advocate of the High Court of South Africa and a member of the Pretoria Bar since 2005, co-develops every session and keeps the examples grounded in what practice at the Bar is actually like from the inside.
Next Step
Tell us who the group is and what the year looks like. We will reply within one business day with a recommended starting point and a price.
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