Pagination of the court files is a practice that has been used by the courts for centuries. The significance of pagination is shown by incorporating pagination into the rules of the courts. The current rules require legal practitioners to physically or manually paginate the court files. More often than not, candidate legal practitioners are asked to attend to the pagination of the court files. Technology is advancing regularly and the South African courts ought to be abreast with these development. This implies that there comes a time when the rules of indexing and pagination will be “abrogated by disuse”. The implementation of the CaseLines system in the courts is a path that strives towards using digital technology in civil proceedings. By introducing the CaseLines system, the South African courts are showing that they fully appreciate the provisions of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002. It appears that South African courts are competing with the United Kingdom’s Electronic Working Pilot Scheme, which is regulated by Practice Direction 510. This is an attempt to fully embrace technology in civil procedure in the United Kingdom. This article reviews pagination in the context of the utilization of technology in civil proceedings.

 

Keywords: Pagination; technology; a thing of the past;civil procedure; Electronic Communications and Transactions Act; Rules of courts; United Kingdom; Practice Direction 510.