Unleashed | Measuring progress

It would have been fun watching the first motor vehicles drive slowly through the streets of London. One can only guess at the sort of comments that pedestrians and observers might have made. I doubt that there would have been universal acclaim for the new machine and I imagine that there were some fairly salty comments along the lines of, “this will never catch on” and “it will be a long time before I drive one of those things”. Funny old thing, progress; it sort of creeps up on you and before you know it yesterday’s innovation is today’s norm. While of course those looking at the forerunners of today’s motor car would have had a degree of fear of the new there would also have been some jealousy of those that could afford the new technology. All change of course comes at a price, albeit these days when change happens the price often comes down very swiftly.

Speed of progress

About 30 years ago a bright young man came in to see me in my office trying to sell me desktop computers. After an hour he and I both decided that computers were not for me, as he agreed that they were really for “volume operations”. “All solicitors would not really need them,” he said, and while we had a good chat and I seem to recall something of a laugh about this new technology, it was not for a few years that I realised that computers were the way forward. Eventually another young man came along promising me the paperless office and explained that within a few weeks I would be able to make all my secretaries redundant and completely computerising the office would save me a fortune. Computers are of course wonderful and well suited to solicitors offices. Nevertheless in those early days we were not told that servers have a fairly short life-span, hard-drives go wrong very regularly and the software we are all using gets out-dated every three or four years. Nor was it explained to me that I would need either an in-house IT person to look after the day-to-day problems that invariably arise or alternatively invest in an expensive outsourcing contract for my IT woes. Quite what the future holds on this front I simply do not know. I doubt the desktop will be around much longer.

Speaking for myself the most interesting thing about computerisation has been the ability to save files and the quite amazing proliferation of email communication. Only recently I used to have a massive post bag and a massive DX collection. Now the post is basically just bills, junk mail and the odd returned client questionnaire from clients who cannot fill them in online. The DX gets slimmer and slimmer by the day and it is interesting that a lot of firms are simply not using DX any more as all their communications are by email, fax, text or courier delivered.

Progress has not however kept up with the DX system and I recently received my DX bill which amusingly enough had gone up in price despite the fact that my volume of DX received has been slashed and the volume of DX that I send out has also been massively reduced.

Left behind

It all reeks a little bit of the salesman a few years ago who tried desperately to sell me an advert in Yellow Pages. I patiently explained that nobody used Yellow Pages as much as they used to because people nowadays simply made a Google or Yahoo search. It was quicker, simpler and it was the way things were going. Indeed when I got my Yellow Pages this year I noticed it had been cut down in size to something of a notebook and there were fewer and fewer solicitor participants. Progress…

It would be useful for organisations such as DX to recognise that progress is moving on apace. Things are not the same as they used to be and never will be again. They may think it a good idea to move packages around on a guaranteed next day basis but people are not communicating in that way anymore. Email is being used by a n increasing number of clients. First it was only privately-paying clients who used email, now legal aid clients are catching on to the usefulness of email, and those without laptops or desktops are using their iPhones to communicate with their lawyers.

The days of the lawyer’s chunky postbag are long gone. Equally I would imagine that in ten years’ time DX too will be a thing of the past.

Progress is interesting to behold. Very few things stay the same, except perhaps Cosmo’s need for a bone and the fact that he receives his meals at 7.30am in the morning and 6.30pm at night. Dogs buck the trend.