A surprising thing, when clients complain about their attorneys, is so often they actually increase the fees and reduce the result by really not co-operating fully with their attorneys. Human beings are very busy, they always have other things to do, and as a result, even when they are paying other people to do a job, you will be amazed at how often they don’t supply necessary paperwork and documentation.

We had a case this past week involving a claim against the Road Accident Fund for a young widow whose husband had been killed in a motor accident and she really supplied us with every bit of documentation. Of course, the fact that he had been very upwardly mobile in his career as an IT specialist also made a huge difference to the result, but judgment in the case was given in the amount of R3,7 million. I don’t say every case will do that well, but certainly a lot more cases would go better if clients actually supplied any documentation at all – or at least did so on time!