The dispute between attorneys and the Road Accident Fund cannot be adjudicated in haste, Pretoria High Court Judge Willem van der Merwe said on Tuesday.

"I know attorneys are unhappy and are up in arms about it, but we all have to calm down," he said.

The judge postponed an application by attorneys Röntgen & Röntgen Inc, seeking to declare invalid instructions to RAF staff to make settlement offers directly to claimants.

The judge said the fund should be given time to properly respond to the application and the court should look at the matter "calmly".

If needs be, this could even include a hearing before a full bench of the court, depending on what happened to the case of the Law Society of SA's urgent application about similar issues in the Cape High Court later this week.

Van der Merwe said: "We can only do more harm than good by forcing the application into the urgent court."

Attorney Konrad Röntgen Sr told the court the Law Society's application in the Cape had been placed on the roll for 8 August, but a pre-trial conference had been arranged for a possible agreement on some of the issues.

Röntgen's firm last week reached a provisional settlement with the RAF that the fund would for now not pay out their thousands of clients directly.

The fund this week also provisionally undertook not to negotiate settlements with their clients directly.

Several other attorneys have also this week turned to the court to stop the fund from making direct payments to their clients where the clients had given them power of attorney to negotiate and receive payments on their behalf.

Van der Merwe earlier on Tuesday granted an order by consent between one claimant and the RAF in terms of which the Fund will have to pay a settlement amount directly to the claimant’s attorneys, Gert Nel Inc.

A similar order was granted in favour of Pretoria attorneys Savage Jooste & Adams by another Pretoria High Court judge.

A Johannesburg High Court judge this week also granted three similar orders, forcing the RAF not to pay amounts directly to claimants who had legally appointed attorneys to represent them.

Sapa