I hope that I will be fully retired before we move into a world populated by electronic files. There is every reason to believe this to be a realistic aspiration. It is not that I am against electronic working, far from it, however the experience we have had, with just a couple of firms, demonstrates how difficult this will be for an organisation like ours.
Whilst differing paper file management systems give us a headache these are surmountable. Imagine, however, every firm we work for with a different (often bespoke) ECMS, nightmare. Add in compatibility issues, time lost to glitches/crashes, user error on both sides, the difficulty of remote access and you have potentially insurmountable problems. Imagine that multiplied between the LSC and all UK LA firms and you have a potential problem beyond my comprehension.
Perhaps this is why moves in this direction have been so slow and faltering.
