Legal:
Beveridge and Diamond Law Firm - Reams Makes Sense of Environmental Jumble
When Fortune 500 companies think "environment," they think Beveridge and Diamond; a law firm with offices in Washington, New York and San Francisco , B & D was formed about the time that the U.S. environmental movement was emerging. It is heavily oriented toward assisting major corporations navigate the sometimes confusing tangle of state and federal regulatory regimes associated with protecting human health and the environment.
Its environmental practice group is long-standing and highly-skilled. As such, over the past two decades the firm has built one of the most comprehensive environmental libraries in the country. The firm also has a very extensive litigation database reflective of the complex litigation matters it handles.
"At this point, we have a few million documents in the system," said the firm’s director of Management Information Services, David Devcich, "and every one of them has to be available immediately, not only in three law offices, but if necessary, in client offices across the country. That’s the basic reason we began to investigate document imaging."
He contacted Reams Computer Corporation, a full-service dealer in data processing equipment and worked with Carl Long, who at the time was a Reams systems consultant. He set them up with a document imaging and retrieval system—Laserfiche on an AT&T wide-area network and has trained at least 16 of the firm’s paralegals and legal staff in operating the system. Long is now the President of Reams Document Imaging (a division of Unity Business Systems Corporation).
Now it is possible to safely and securely search for and retrieve any one of those millions of documents and display it on 200 or more desktop PCs in the three B & D offices, in client offices and on the laptops of B & D attorneys anywhere in the world, all in a few seconds.
With the award-winning Laserfiche software, typed or printed documents are run through a scanner at less than a second per sheet. The document image is instantly converted into an electronic format, any text in the document is read (through OCR) and both the text and actual image are stored on the system. The image and the text can then just as quickly be retrieved and displayed on individual desktop PCs and be printed or transmitted electronically. Retrieval is accomplished through keyword (using Boolean operators) and full text searches.
The process is simple and straightforward. A novice can learn the basic steps of storage and retrieval in a half-hour to an hour. "Most lawyers are not techno-wizards," says Devcich. Our attorneys want something that is easy to understand, easy to use and which provides a competitive advantage. Their primary focus is to practice law and if they’re spending all their time trying to figure out how a system works, it defeats the system."
“With Laserfiche, our attorneys don’t spend a lot of time learning a new system,” says Tom Richichi, the Chair of the firm’s Technology Committee and the former head of its Litigation Department. “Perhaps Laserfiche’s greatest advantage,” he says, “is the ease with which an attorney can use it to search out and gather disparate documents and data, perhaps relating to specific sites and dates or times then wrap all this material into a manageable electronic notebook, focusing strictly on the issues or arguments in one case all within minutes.
"We’ve gotten new business because of the system and other existing clients get better more cost-effective service," he said. "It has definitely been a strength in marketing our efficiency capabilities to clients. We can do things much more efficiently with this system searching any word or phrase which is not only in our database, but also in any bibliographic coding that we want to do. That’s what really makes this system shine—the ability to find and extract information, anywhere within the system."
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Monday, September 08, 2008 
