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UMW graduate develops new software to help lawyers find clients Date published: 2/26/2009
BY CATHY JETT University of Mary Washington grad Ken Lopez's law firm used to spend months researching big lawsuits in order to drum up business. Animators at Law used the information to win contracts to provide trial exhibits, animation, graphics and jury research for lawyers involved in everything from the Enron hearings to Hurricane Katrina lawsuits to some of the largest patent cases around. "It turns out there is a lot of information stored in publicly available places, such as court records, but it was hard to get at them," said Lopez, who lives and works in Alexandria. Now he and other lawyers at his company have made accessing that information a lot easier. Their new software, LawProspector, puts more than 90,000 legal contacts and information about nearly 20,000 cases in an easily searchable format geared to law firms and litigation-support companies like their own. Staff in Virginia and India collect LawProspector's data using a patented process, and users can sort the data and turn it into pie charts and bar graphs. The software application is available for lease at anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 a year, depending on a client's size. "We set it up as a separate company. It's actually going to be a larger company than my 14-year-old company by the end of the year," Lopez said. "We really, really have a hit on our hands. In this sort of economic climate, it's something we're insanely grateful for." LawProspector is already being used by four big accounting firms, some of the country's top 100 law firms and litigation-support firms with gross revenue of $1 million to $800 million, according to the entrepreneur. "Major law firms are using it to identify new business for themselves, new litigation clients," Lopez said. "Even more interestingly, they're using LawProspector to identify lawyers at competing law firms whom they might want to hire in an effort to get more business for themselves." The software runs on a platform developed by Sales force.com, which means that Lopez and the other lawyers in his office didn't have to write any of the underlying computer code.
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