Getting the most out of the best.

By now, my monthly columns should have you convinced that computers are an important part of your law practice. But how can you serve your clients most effectively with the technology? Here are some tools and services that you may not know about or may never have considered using.

The LEXIS-NEXIS Advantage for Small Law Firms, formerly known as LEXIS MVP, is a flat-rate research tool designed for ATLA members whose firms have fewer than 10 attorneys. You choose the library or libraries your staff uses most, the state for which you want access, and, perhaps, your area of law practice. For a monthly fee, you get unlimited search and printing privileges for the areas you choose without paying full price for LEXIS-NEXIS service that your small firm may never use.

I use the service regularly to access information pertinent to my practice--Illinois cases, law reviews, and secretary of state records.

For example, recently I was preparing to argue against a defense motion to strike parts of my amended pleading in a lawsuit. My argument would hinge on the interpretation of the statute that formed the basis for the suit.

The afternoon before the morning oral argument, a colleague who was aware of the pending matter told me about a state appellate court ruling that might bolster my argument. The ruling had been issued about 10 days earlier.

It was too late in the day to go to the library to look for it. But even if the library had stayed open longer, the decision was too new to be in the advance sheets. So, when I went home that night, I sat down at my computer, activated the LEXIS software, and searched for the case using the plaintiff's and defendant's names, which my friend luckily remembered. I read a few lines from the decision, which clearly backed my argument. I downloaded the ruling, imported it into my word-processing program, and printed out copies for the court.

The next morning, I cited this case to the judge who appeared to be impressed not only with what the opinion said but also with its timeliness. And I caught opposing counsel completely by surprise.

The Advantage program is especially useful for routinely checking the status of corporations. In one case, for instance, I found that a corporation my client was suing had been dissolved for nonpayment of franchise taxes about two years before it became involved in the litigation. In another case, a company that had sued my client was not qualified to do business in our state and, therefore, was barred from going through with the suit. These findings resulted in tactical victories for my clients, and all it took was a few minutes online.

For more information about Advantage, contact LEXIS-NEXIS at [phone].

Working the Net with ATLA NET

You can't turn on your television set today without being bombarded by information about the Internet. Instead of tuning it out, listen and learn. The World Wide Web, together with ATLA NET--the association's online service and Web site--offers another opportunity to serve your clients economically and effectively.

As you grow more comfortable tapping into this burgeoning body of online information, you will discover at least two features of ATLA NET that will make your Internet adventure easier: ATLA members and staff have already done most of the searching for law-related Web sites for you, and you have instant access to online discussions of pertinent legal topics or areas of practice that nonmembers don't have.

The search. A huge percentage of information on the Internet is, as you might guess, irrelevant to the practice of law. Yes, powerful search engines, such as Yahoo!, Magellan, and Alta Vista, let you surf the Net to your heart's content. But if you've already caught this wave, you know you can spend hours online and have only limited success finding the bit of information you need.

ATLA NET provides a value-added service. Members and staff regularly browse the Internet and have compiled a list of Web sites, or home pages, that are the most likely to contain information relevant to lawyers. The staff sets up links between sites, allowing you to click on icons and underlined words or phrases that will take you quickly from one area of interest to another.

ATLA members who have a computer and modem can access ATLA NET at http://www.atlanet.org/. Just follow the online directions to register. The only cost is the amount you pay the commercial or local service provider, such as CompuServe, America Online, or Prodigy, which provides Internet access. To learn more about the features offered by ATLA NET, contact Michael Potts at [phone], ext. 308.

Online discussions. Another invaluable attorney resource is ATLA NET forums, or conferences. Members with similar legal interests can share information online. To illustrate the power of the medium, here are two personal examples.

In the years before ATLA NET, a group of lawyers and I were participating in an online forum using the CompuServe service. We griped that no reasonably priced time and billing software was available for small-firm lawyers. At one point, a young entrepreneur entered the conference, saying he was not a lawyer but, after reading our banter, was considering developing a reasonably priced time and billing software package for law professionals.

The young man was Mitch Russo, who soon after developed TimeSlips. Russo used us--the online conferees--as resources and testers for his emerging product. TimeSlips came to market for the suggested retail price of $99, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Similarly, the concept for the LEXIS-NEXIS Advantage resource originated in lawyer conferences conducted on CompuServe in the early 1980s. Many of us were discussing "shared subscriptions" to WESTLAW and LEXIS, whose pricing methods at the time were too expensive for sole practitioners and lawyers in small firms.

We worked out the details among ourselves in online conference discussions and later worked with LEXIS to create affordable subscriptions for small offices.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

Lawyers have been using computer technology to collaborate on cases for more than a decade. A team of lawyers may use a private online forum to discuss the case, or the group may access case documents in a remote depository set aside for that purpose. (Document Management Made Virtually Care Free, TRIAL, July 1996, at 101.)

To my knowledge, the first case for which lawyers worked collaboratively in this way involved an alleged computer-related crime in California in 1983.

In an online forum, several lawyers from around the country and I worked to research the law and craft a motion to dismiss the case. The case ended when the prosecutor's office voluntarily dismissed it before our motion was even heard.

Another helpful, yet imperfect, tool is optical character recognition (OCR) software. OCR is the more technical name for a computer software program that reads the scanned contents of paper documents, converts those images into text, and places the text onto your hard drive or a disk.

The whole process takes a fraction of the time it would take a staff person to input the material by hand.

Many lawyers understand the value of this technology but shy away from using it because conversion of a lengthy document into a new text file is not a,ways 100 percent accurate. Even a document that is 99 percent accurate will still have an error or two on each page. The question, then, is how do you avoid wasting valuable staff time trying to find these needles in the haystack?

The answer is most likely seated in a local high school classroom. Students--perhaps your own children or grandchildren can earn some pocket money doing the proofreading job on weekends or after school. One need not have the skills of a law office secretary to make these modest corrections.

You don't have the time to do this yourself, and your salaried staff is a,ready overloaded with day-to-day work, so just have the student put the scanned document on the computer screen, run it through the word-processing software's spell checker, and compare the hard copy of the original document with the spell-checked version.

Merge Coding of Documents

Readers will remember a recent column I wrote about increasing your productivity with HotDocs, which a,lows you to personalize standard documents by using the merge component of the software program. (Double Your Productivity, TRIAL, June 1996, at 72).

With HotDocs you can automaticaly insert specific information about a client's case into standard pleadings and correspondence.

The earlier column noted the importance of having an expert do this merge coding for you, but, let's face it. This is not rocket science. Computer-literate high school students have adequate credentials to accomplish the job. They are capable of learning the coding--a task that lawyers do not have the time, the inclination, or the patience to undertake.

Do these tools and services work in the real world? They've worked for me, and I'm willing to bet they will work for you. If you have other ideas on how to maximize your profits by using technology, please share your suggestions with the rest of us on ATLA NET.

Paul Bernstein is an attorney and law office automation consultant in Chicago. He can be reached on the Internet at [e-mail]. The opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not reflect an endorsement of any product by TRIAL or ATLA.