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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