ABBYY and RealLegal Form Integration Partnership; ABBYY OCR to Enhance RealLegal Products.

Business Editors/Legal Writers/High-Tech Writers

LegalTech(R) New York 

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 2, 2004

ABBYY(R), a leading developer of document recognition and linguistic technologies, and RealLegal(R), LLC, the leading provider of litigation and practice management solutions for legal organizations, today announced that the two companies have formed an integration partnership. With this new partnership, RealLegal is able to integrate ABBYY's FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) technology into its products and enable users to take advantage of the award-winning FineReader software that recognizes machine-printed information on scanned documents or image files and converts them into editable and searchable text, which can be re-purposed or archived for retrieval later.

The integrated OCR capability will enable users of RealLegal litigation software to automatically search and retrieve scanned documents such as supporting exhibits, which before were static, non-searchable image files.

"The integration of OCR technology into our products is directly driven by customer requests and our on-going analysis of the industry," said Bill Feid, president and CEO of RealLegal. "After extensive evaluation and testing, we recognize ABBYY as the provider of one of the industry's most powerful and accurate OCR products."

"ABBYY is pleased to form this alliance with RealLegal, a leading provider of applications to the legal community," said Dean Tang, president and CEO of ABBYY USA. "OCR serves legal organizations extremely well, increasing productivity and efficiency in these paper-intensive environments, and we are looking forward to playing a role in extending the functionality RealLegal is already delivering in its own award-winning products."

About RealLegal, LLC

RealLegal provides a comprehensive suite of practical software applications and services for improving the business of law. The company is focused on developing practice and litigation management tools to assist law firms, corporate legal departments, insurance companies, court reporting firms, courts and government offices in managing the complex world of law. RealLegal's applications include Practice Manager(TM) for maintaining and managing matters and cases throughout all areas of the practice; E-Transcript(TM) for electronic transcript creation, standardization and delivery; Publisher(TM) for electronic transcript and digital exhibit bundles; Binder(TM) for transcript and exhibit management; E-Brief(TM) for electronic brief publishing; Exemplaris(TM) for online access to federal transcripts; and MA3000(TM) calendaring software and official docket information from the New York Law Journal. This breadth of product offerings combined with RealLegal's superior integration and support services has earned the company a client base of more than 1,000 law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies, and 4,000 court reporting firms. Headquartered in Denver, RealLegal's investors include U.S. Equity Partners L.P., a private equity investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co., L.P.

About ABBYY USA

ABBYY USA is a member of the ABBYY Software House Group, a world leader in document recognition and linguistic technologies. ABBYY specializes in the development of software for optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics, and electronic lexicography. Leading products from ABBYY include the FineReader line of OCR, ICR and barcode software, and FineReader development tools. Companies that license ABBYY OCR/ICR technologies include BenQ, C-Technologies, Cardiff Software, Cobra Technologies, Freedom Scientific, Kurzweil, Kofax Image Products, Legato Systems, Lexmark, Microtek, Mustek, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Optika, Panasonic, SER Solutions, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, and Umax. For more information about ABBYY, visit: www.abbbyyusa.com or contact ABBYY USA, 3823 Spinnaker Ct., Fremont, CA 94538. Phone: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. E-mail: [e-mail]

ABBYY and FineReader names and logos are registered trademarks of ABBYY Software House. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby recognized.