The new rules have been published in a third draft and we understand that they plan to have it in place as soon as 1 March 2010, without any further comments.  The changes are quite dramatic, and attorneys doing Road Accident Fund matters will have to look at this work and see some of the specific references with regard to medico legal appointments and things like that.  In addition to that, time periods change, distances change – for example you only now need to supply an address within 15 kilometres of the court and not 8 kilometres as before.  You have 10 days to enter an appearance to defend a matter and 20 days to file your plea.  Like in the High Court, the dies stop running from approximately 16 December to 15 January each year and you will have to take that into consideration before issuing notices of bar.  There are new forms for all of the notices, although you can continue to use the old forms, subject to alteration (you may as well then use the new forms) for one year.  It is very interesting, for example, that when you file your notice of intention to defend, you need to specify an e-mail address as well as the fax number and whether or not pleadings may be exchanged in this way.  If you don’t agree to filing of pleadings in that way, the plaintiff can proceed to court and bring an appropriate application.  One imagines that firms that are involved in extensive amounts of litigation are going to have to set a certain catch-all address, and set up some sort of security protocol to make sure that they don’t miss a single e-mail because that could be pretty fateful!  As I have told you before, because it was the subject of which I made representations, summonses will, just as in the High Court, no longer lapse.  The majority of these provisions basically made the rules in the Magistrates’ Court much more similar, if not identical, to the ones in the High Court.  I have only had a cursory glance at them, but any attorney doing Magistrates’ Court work is going to need to be an expert on the subject shortly.