Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Thailand "Paper Chase". Just kind of an aside, people have asked me before if I enjoy the movie The Paper Chase; it is sort of a film about going to Law School. Lawyers don't like movies about Law School I am here to tell you. I suspect that is much similar to for example I would doubt insurance salesman want to watch a movie about an insurance seminar. It is just not something we really are in love with. Sometimes there are good movies made about being a lawyer, but no, the thought of watching a movie about going to law school, in this case going back to law school, that is like watching a movie about going into a black hole, I wouldn't really want to watch that either.

The reason I made this video, I was recently reading an article from our friends over at the Thaiger that is, thethaiger.com, article was titled: Top 10 hard truths of living as an Expat in Thailand. I just thought this was really great insight, I wanted to add to it a little bit. 

Under number three of the top 10:

3. Thais love paperwork. Oh boy howdey do they! Quoting directly: "Thais and Thai Bureaucracy loves paperwork. You will be bewildered by the amount of paperwork generated for the most simple task. We have decided that there must be a huge building somewhere in Thailand that just holds mountains of paperwork that will never ever be seen again." Actually, in point of fact there is. I have seen mountains of paperwork at Immigration before. Literally. There are storage areas where there are bales of paperwork at the Immigration, the main one, the Immigration Division 1. I have seen that before. Quoting further: "Despite computers, modern Banking and the concept of a paperless office, you will see paperwork generated at the expense of perfectly good trees in quantities difficult to fathom. Quoting further: "The problems with completely useless paperwork extend from the 7-Eleven receipt to small businesses keeping administrators employed to process and shuffle paperwork around as a daily chore. Thailand is drowning under a sea of receipts and paperwork." 

Again, hats off to the folks over there at the Thaiger. I urge those who are watching this video to go read that whole article in detail. There is a lot going on in there, a lot of insight, a lot of good stuff. This channel is very narrowly focused in my opinion on just the legality, the sort of legal world and Immigration. It has got an expat touch but I didn't really intend to make this channel as a lifestyle channel about like living in Thailand necessarily. There are plenty of places on YouTube you can find that. I was talking to somebody today actually and I really hadn't sat down and thought about what I originally intended for this channel at the beginning until recently. This channel in my opinion is a reference, it is a point of reference and there are things that may stray a little far from the law books directly but for example like this we see a lot of frustration our clients get into especially when they come to us if they have gotten into a kerfuffle of their own, they are just about to throw up their hands at all the paper you have got to deal with in Thailand.

It was something that took some getting used to for me coming off a country, the United States 15 years ago even that was going pretty paperless, to Thailand which is pretty "paperfull". I mean there is plenty of paper here in Thailand. Do I think it is going to change? Not anytime soon. I have asked folks that work in Government Offices most notably Immigration in the past, “why all the paper”, and there is a hard paradigm that a hard copy somewhere is just a good idea to have and frankly that may not be a bad idea. The digital world is what it is but if you really do kind of think of it, it is a little bit more fragile than we would like to believe. The internet can go down. It is not omniscient and all-encompassing and all around us all the time. It could go away just as quickly as it came up. I doubt that will happen but it may not be imprudent to have hard copy files of certain documentation.