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August 1998
Bureau Helps Small Law Firms
Technology is a great equalizer. When you communicate electronically, no one knows if you are dressed in high fashion or cut-off jeans. No one knows if e-mail comes from an international corporate headquarters or a home office.
With the right technological allies, a very small legal firm can take on huge cases. One of those key allies is InfoEdge Technology (Austin, TX, 512-833-5588), a litigation support service bureau with more that 90 employees that provides information management for the legal community. The company's clients are typically small law firms taking on giant cases.
As a systems integrator, InfoEdge provides software, technical support and database consulting. Founded in 1990, InfoEdge started by customizing Folio's text retrieval engine for legal work. To diversify, the company added systems built on Microsoft Access in 1994, and they used toolkits from TMS Sequoia (Stillwater, OK 405-377-0880) to add a built in image viewer. In 1996, InfoEdge replaced a home-grown capture system with InputAccel for document capture from Input Software (San Jose, CA 408-325-3800).
"I chose InputAccel because of its flexibility," says Chris May, vice president of operations at InfoEdge. "It runs on Windows NT, which we like for its scalability. It does scanning, OCR, coding and exporting to a variety of applications. All the functions can be customized, which is important to us because we never get two jobs that are quite the same."
InfoEdge's document acquisition skills are impressive. While high-speed scanners work great for capturing data from photocopies, old documents like index cards, onionskin paper, ditto copies and card stock do not scan well. InfoEdge's solution is to put these documents on microfilm and then digitize the film. "InputAccel doesn't care where the images come from, including microfilm," explains May.
That flexibility is also valuable because the nature of the service bureau business is feast-or-famine. When a huge job with a short deadline arrives, InfoEdge can outsource jobs to other firms. InputAccel unifies all the data. "We pull together relational databases, document management and imaging systems," May notes.
He estimates that by staying with InfoEdge's core competency, only about 15 percent of any project solution is customized. This standardization cuts costs and improves profitability.
"If an attorney sees it is going to cost more to mount a defense than to settle out of court, we lose a client," May explains. --Gordon E.J. Hoke
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