I like to keep up with international legal developments and to that end I read quite a lot of legal literature, and in particular the American law journal, the ABA Journal.  What I find particularly interesting in the Journal, aside from all of the articles, are the advertisements and it is quite clear that in America there is far more emphasis on software and various computer programs to assist attorneys than there is in South Africa.  The programs that are advertised also appear to be clearly more sophisticated than South African systems, largely being based in the cloud and allowing one to manage clients, files and timekeeping.  Software also assists with their discovery process – which is far more sophisticated than ours, and often involves computers electronically searching through thousands of pages of records, looking for certain key phrases or terms to come up.  In other words, the entire job is not left to human beings and much of the discovery process is certainly electronic.  

I am particularly interested in technology because at de Broglio Inc we have spent a lot of money on ensuring that we have custom designed software that allows us, within about 5 seconds, to access any client’s file and to immediately be able to see the status of the matter and access the file electronically.  It also allows us to update our clients, update medical specialists with whom we work, as well as medical aids and advocates and it is certainly one of a number of factors that helps put us ahead of the competition.  There can be no doubt that attorneys who stay in the dark ages, and rely on having staff running around trying to find a file, and then getting the filing up to date before they are in a position to update clients, or others, will fall further behind.