"Anything that can keep work in-house as opposed to outsourcing will save time and money. Imaging and OCR software are modern tools that every lawyer and law firm should be using in some form."
Patrick M. Muscat
Assistant Prosecutor from Michigan
"Anything that can keep work in-house as opposed to outsourcing will save time and money. Imaging and OCR software are modern tools that every lawyer and law firm should be using in some form."
Patrick M. Muscat
Assistant Prosecutor from Michigan
by: ROBERT EVATT World Staff Writer
When lawyers compose legal documents or gather copies of court cases and other transcripts, they generate paper -- almost countless sheets of the stuff.
Simon Aleman, president of iDea Mill Technologies Inc., experienced the piles first-hand while working for a litigation support group. When he decided to open a software company, taming the mess was the goal of his first product, Breeze.
"A lot of the time, the turnaround for litigation support takes a day or two," he said. "With Breeze, the firm can do all the sorting themselves."
Aleman said his Tulsa company finished Breeze just two months ago but already has sold it to 50 law firms across the nation. At $850 a copy, he said, the price is low for such specialized software.
At its core, Breeze is a sorting program. When physical documents are scanned in, Breeze sorts them and stamps them with page numbers and notes, such as "confidential." Breeze also uses optical character recognition to transform image files into text files and vice versa.
When finished, the information can be stored digitally, rather than in filing cabinets.
To persuade law firms to use Breeze for performing tasks that formerly were outsourced, Aleman said he made the interface as simple as possible.
"Any paralegal, secretary or lawyer can figure out how to use it in five minutes," he said.
Aleman hopes Breeze will help his company grow from six people to 15 by the end of the year. He's also looking for investors to raise the $100,000 in required matching funds for a grant that Breeze recently obtained from the Technology Business Finance Program at the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology.
Aleman said he's not aware of a similar product on the market, though he expects that competition will surface soon.
"We know we have to establish the market quickly and become the Brand A," he said.
Copyright © 2008, World Publishing Co. All rights reserved
