XML Lifts The Burden Of Paper
    (04/09/01, 10:54 a.m. ET)
By L. Scott Tillett, InternetWeek

    Even in the electronic age, the legal profession is buried under
    paper. Now service providers are offering attorneys and courts ways to
    turn some of that paper into bits and bytes.

    Service provider @court this week will offer eFiling, a service that
    electronically connects law offices and courts. The company equips
    courts with a free software tool kit that lets administrators connect
    their legacy systems to @court's Internet clearinghouse using Legal
    XML, an emerging standard.

    The @court clearinghouse will let attorneys file documents directly
    into courts' case-management systems. Today, those filings are
    physically delivered and scanned into a case-management system by
    court employees, or the documents might remain in paper form
    indefinitely. When an attorney files a document using the @court
    system, the opposing counsel gets an e-mail directing him to the
    @court site to view or download a copy.

    Kevin Nichols, CEO of @court, said law firms will pay about $15 per
    document to use the service, compared with the $125 they typically
    spend to produce and deliver a paper document to a court. Litigators
    create some 370 million legal documents each year, he said.

    Most court filings are paper-, time- and resource-intensive, said
    analyst Mark Levitt at research company IDC. It often means a lot of
    people at the law firm being involved and couriers involved and people
    at the court involved in processing of all the various metadata. Such
    manual processes also are prone to errors, he noted.

    Experts said at least two hurdles stand in the way of Internet-based
    legal systems: convincing attorneys and other creators of legal
    content to use such services, and getting the courts wired for them.

    Some courts are already handling e-filings. Vendor Court-Link has 77
    courts using its service, according to Craig Husa, senior vice
    president of court services for the company. Last week, the company
    added two types of cases-probate court cases and cases dealing with
    water-management issues in Colorado-that its Internet case-filing
    system can handle.

    Courts and attorneys can use FTP connections to plug in to the
    service. Integrating with legacy systems relies on Microsoft's Biztalk
    software and EFM's middleware, Husa said. Attorneys pay 10 cents per
    page to use the service.

    The U.S. District Court in the District of New Mexico uses a homegrown
    system called ACE (Advanced Court Engineering) to let judges and
    attorneys share information. It also lets participants in the legal
    process file documents electronically to the case-management system.

    The system takes advantage of a custom version of XML; the court spent
    $70,000 to design and develop the XML framework. The court is now
    transitioning from a Microsoft SQL Server database running on Windows
    2000 to an Informix 9.1.2 database running on Red Hat 6.2 Linux, said
    Mitch Elfers, chief of information services at the court.

    Officials said about 15 percent of lawyers use the system now, but it
    will require 75 percent participation to realize a return on the
    investment.


Justin........
My hindsight is 20/20.........



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