South Africans have a particular affinity with Wimbledon and having been in London at the start of the tournament I thought I would make a trip to Wimbledon this past week. Firstly, Wimbledon is much further south of London than I would have imagined – requiring a long trip on the tube, followed by a train ride that was advertised at 20 minutes but which took 30 minutes. From there you have to catch a bus to the actual tennis courts, which is another 30 minutes and essentially, from Central London, it could quite easily take you 1 ½ hours to be outside one of the entrance gates.

Unfortunately for me, it is only at that time that you realise that even on the opening day, and even to go and watch “Mickey Mouse” play on the smallest outside court, the event is for all practical purposes sold out, and you have to join a queue, which takes 5 hours to get to the front of it, to get a ticket later that day. So, my first trip to Wimbledon did not meet with any success, only to note again while we have a culture in South Africa of booking tickets at the last minute, that does not work in big cities and if you want to do something, or there is an event that you are interested in 6 or 8 weeks’ time, you need to book tickets straightaway, book train tickets straightaway and be fully prepared – or stand in the queue, as I was offered, for 5 hours!

"Health law stands".  Thats how the New York Times reported today on the 5-4 decision in favour of Barack Obama’s health care laws in America.  The laws ultimate aim was to ensure that there would not continue to be millions of American uninsured for health care – a rare exception amongst rich countries.  The main point is that all people are basically forced to at least have a minimum insurance or pay a penalty if they refuse.  Insurance companies cannot, as a result, decline cover for the sick or elderly.

Republicans had sworn the law would change and now that the court has declined to hold it unconstitutional, they will have to make it their election campaign which carries many risks for them.  Those risks would include being seen as anti-poor when campaigning to remove health care from all people as it is always the poor that suffer the most in such cases.  Mitt Romney has always said on day 1 of a presidency is he is elected he will overturn the law – amazing considering its based on exactly what he did when he was Governor of Massachusetts.  

The Chief Justice John Roberts formed part of the majority, somewhat surprisingly as he was a Republican appointee and generally votes with the other Republican judges.

I stay in a residential estate where like in most estates people value their security as a top priority – which is why secure estates have become so popular. One always has to stay a step ahead, because the criminals will always find a way to get over the fence or if all else fails, dig underneath it!

The estate has recently investigated and is implementing a radar system and we attended a demonstration on how that works. It was fascinating to see how powerful this technology is, based on military use, and basically it can show the entire estate on a screen and indicate where people are moving. The radar also indicates in which direction the people are moving, which does not sound particularly impressive until you think about a thief, for example walking through the estate at 1am in the morning or an alarm going off and being able to look for any movement in the area as long as the person responsible for monitoring the system is awake, somebody walking through some veld at 1am in the morning is going to be able to be approached before they even commit a crime and if they get as far as committing that crime, it is going to be pretty quick to track them down afterwards. The only catch is that this particular system costs in excess of R3 million, so it’s a good thing the costs will be divided via hundreds of owners!

There has been so much in the news about Greece recently, with elections and of course all the debate as to whether or not they will be the first nation to leave the Euro zone.
A lot of people say that the problem is that Greeks are lazy or that they have a lot of corruption and a lot of tax evasion and while it is true that they have a lot of corruption and tax evasion, the Greeks typically work longer hours than anyone else in Europe. They work longer hours, on average for example than Germans, so clearly that is not the reason the Greece is in difficulties. The various economists have different arguments but Paul Krugman, whose opinions I generally read, says that he feels the problem is that the European nations made the mistake of trying to create a single currency without a single government to control that currency. He says that trying to make people suffer more and trying to blame them is not the answer either and that the people from the richer European countries who have that attitude need to accept that it is their system that does not work. At the end of the day Krugman says that the only way to resolve the problem is by the Germans and the European Central Bank spending more, and also accepting a higher inflation.

I read that a case was brought by a Milile Mpanbaniso in the Eastern Cape High Court to set aside a grossly exorbitant and unfair fee agreement in a Road Accident Fund matter. The attorneys somehow managed to get the client to agree to an 84% fee agreement in a matter that was settled for R787 000,00!

I am quite stunned when I read articles like that, as to how on earth the attorney ever tried to get his client to agree to such an agreement, or even to justify taking R690 000,00 for himself out of R787 000,00. It is even more astounding, having tried to get the client to agree to this, that at the first instance when the client challenged him, he did not settle the matter there and then but instead took the matter the whole way to Court somehow believing that he must have a chance of succeeding with an 84% agreed fee in a matter! The legal costs involved in running Road Accident Fund cases, as well as the vast expenditure that attorneys have to lay out, certainly means that the fees will never be cheap, but in a day and age when most people know that there are a number of attorneys who work on a percentage basis or at least agree not to charge more than a certain percentage, no matter how much time they spend on the matter, it is astounding that any attorney would try to push his client into such an unfair and ridiculous agreement and it is also surprising that any potential client would even sign such an agreement.

It is ultimately embarrassing for the legal profession when cases like this come out, but typically speaking the Law Societies do follow these up and strike the attorneys off for what attorneys call “over-reaching” – or fees that are excessive in their extreme.

A recent judgment in the High Court of Van Zyl vs The Road Accident Fund by Judge Satchwell has a lot of attorneys breathing a sign of relief. The judgment held that in terms of the new Act attorneys get five years to lodge a serious injury case, so long as the Form 1 was lodged within the three years allowed by the Act.
It is so important for members of the public to realise that they really do have to act with some haste in going to see an attorney, also to assist with the recovery of evidence, and to ensure that the claim is lodged within the three year period. Attorneys now have the benefit, if the claim is lodged within the three year period, of knowing that they have five years to complete the serious injury form, from the date of the accident, and have it lodged if money is being claimed for a serious injury. You can read more about RAF claims on our website dedicated to Road Accident Fund claims, namely www.accidentclaim.co.za.
 

The Walt Disney Company has announced that from now on all products advertised on its children’s TV channels, radio stations and websites have to comply with strict nutritional guidelines. If the products do not comply with those guidelines, they cannot be advertised anymore on any of the Disney channels. Last week New York City banned the sale of large soft drinks and other sugary drinks and this is Disney’s effort to tackle childhood obesity in America. In short, quite a few of their current advertising products, including candy, sugared cereals and fast food will no longer be able to advertise on any of their channels. Their theme parks will also reduce the amount of salt by 25% in the children’s meals served at the parks, and there are also going to be fun public announcements promoting child exercise and healthy eating.

I am sad that there are not websites for bad driving or one where you can, for example, co-operate with the Metro Police. That way, for example, when an old white Mercedes Benz 230E with the registration NKX412 GP, and a big dent in the left-hand side of the door, no doubt from bad driving, squeezes past you in the traffic and then cuts in front of two other cars like a cowboy, you would be able to report it. With cameras on cell phones, one would be able to video people driving through stop streets and send it in to the website or the Traffic Department and let those people get fines. The reality is that we live in a country with a terrible death toll on our roads, we have cars that are in a very poor condition, badly serviced and often in an unroadworthy state, and then on top of that they are being driven by aggressive drivers, with little or no driving skills – or at the least, no manners.

I am always interested in research on babies, and the recent search report by the University of Rochester, has found that children seek out situations that are neither too simple nor too complex. For example, when watching TV patterns on a screen they found that if the same pattern is repeated too often, the babies lose interest and don’t want to watch anymore, but by the same token, if the patterns become too complicated, or random, then the babies also lose interest. They say that the research indicates that children are much more aware of what is going on around them than what people may previously have thought, even at the age of 7 months and are watching and following patterns and trends.

The maker of BlackBerry, RIM, has now seen its shares down at 76% in the last year. Apart from South Africa, where in fact sales of BlackBerry are increasing, they are struggling around the rest of the world with their customers migrating to iPhones as well as Android devices. The competitiveness in South Africa relates to very attractive models in terms of data as well as the very useful BBM service. RIM has now acknowledged that it is considering “strategic business model alternatives” which basically means that it is now saying that they are hoping somebody will either buy the company or buy parts of the company and that its current business model is no longer working.

There is a delicious irony, after all the attacks on South Africa before we hosted the Soccer World Cup, in the alarmed calls we are hearing about that Euro 2012 taking place in the Ukraine and Poland. We are told that the spectators in both these countries are violent thugs, that they are racist and they are also anti-Semitic and a number of English football players, for example, are not allowing their families to travel with them to Ukraine and Poland because they believe the countries are very dangerous.

The people who criticised South Africa’s hosting of the Soccer World Cup before the event did their best to put people off coming here are probably the same type of people who are doing this now, and it is important that those who so eagerly embrace criticism, when it is criticism of South Africa, realise that the criticism can extend to their country of origin or indeed any country. The fact is that a lot of people basically make a living out of criticising other people and a lot of people use scare tactics their entire life in whatever field they are.

I grew up in Durban, and the Comrades Marathon was always a part of my life. There are pictures of the finish, when I was 10 years old, where you can see me applauding Bruce Fordyce and I never really doubted that I would easily get my green number. You get a green number when you run at 10 Comrades and I thought that was a foregone formality for me.

People used to say that one should not run such long races when you are too young, because it is not good for your bones as a man, and I am not sure whether they are right, or it is just a convenient excuse for me, but I honestly don’t think my legs benefited from the three Comrades I did do at an early age. Comrades is not very big in South Africa anymore, largely I believe because of very poor television coverage and worse commentary teams, but also because there is so much sport on television now that people forget that once this was one of the two or three huge events of the year in South Africa. I think that fields have suffered as a result, even though you now get 12 hours to finish instead of 11 hours as used to be the case.

For those who cannot imagine running the Comrades, I would say that it is not as difficult as people believe it is, from a physical point of view, but the challenge is much more mental – you are going to be in severe pain, it is going to hurt you and I always, if I know somebody has run the Comrades, have respect for them. I know they will be capable of finishing whatever task they have and are usually formidable competitors because regardless of your shape or your size, you can finish Comrades and it is all about whether you are mentally tough or not.

I have written quite a bit about TomTom before, maybe because I’ve had three TomToms that have failed to work, or it might have been four, and I am now onto my fifth one where the battery is now problematic. I was quite interested to read in a business article that TomTom accepts that the future of the company is no longer in the sale of the portable devices that go into cars – where sales have been going down for years. That is obviously because of all of the applications on telephones and iPads, etc. Their long-term vision is to work more closely with car manufacturers and phone companies to put their applications on phones, and I do think that is where they will succeed. Their live traffic data and technology is so superior to the competition that it makes you put up with what is clearly not a satisfactory GPS device. From a personal point of view, I think they need to take the step just because they quite clearly do not manufacture these devices with any staying power, even though their software and live traffic data is clearly exceptional.

Many of my newer staff as well as probably clients would simply have no idea of how one used to deal with the Road Accident Fund. In about 1998, they introduced a “defend everything policy” where, even if your client had a minor injury, as a passenger in a car that was struck from behind, they would defend the case, run to court on the merits, run up their own legal costs before eventually settling at the quantum stage.

As part of the Johannesburg Attorneys Association I wrote to the Road Accident Fund advising them that this was only going to increase their legal costs and requesting a meeting with the then CEO, Jacob Modise. My request was ignored and I guess, to stop one or two default judgments that may have been granted against them, they went from settling matters, which was typically the case with almost all the small matters, and certainly almost all cases under R100 000,00 which was the vast majority of cases, to defending everything. That led to them paying more money to their own attorneys, in fact considerably more money, and more money to plaintiff attorneys and while they always complain about legal costs, it is the Road Accident Fund itself that single-handedly doubled or trebled the legal costs by doing this.

There were so many other options open to them, for example, putting a team of experienced handlers in a position to make reasonable tenders, etc on an urgent basis and to stop the costs running up that way – something they still have not done to this day, while they continue to complain to Parliament about legal costs. My honest opinion is if I was in charge of the Road Accident Fund, I would empower trained professionals to make those offers quickly and robustly each and every day, and one would literally save millions a day, let alone a month. You could actually pay advocates R200 000,00 a month to make 8 or 10 offers a day, and still save millions – but that topic is for another day.

My recollection of those days when we used to call the claims handlers to try and get offers out of them and trying to avoid the litigation route is not so bad – I could certainly have a much smaller staff complement than I have now, because one did not need the huge staff numbers that are involved in litigation and one also got to speak to the claims handlers. The work that they did seems to me, and I am sure the Road Accident Fund will have a different opinion, to have simply been outsourced by them at great expense to their own attorneys now. I learned very quickly not to phone on Monday mornings, or on Friday afternoons when you are always greeted by responses such as, “Mr De Broglio, why do you always phone on a Friday afternoon – it’s almost the weekend” or within 30 minutes of lunch because you would be told, “Mr De Broglio, why do you always call just before lunch?” My wife remembers calling claims handlers for offers and speaking to somebody whose voice she would know, asking to speak to him only to have him saying, “Oh, I am sorry, Mr [so and so] is not in today”!