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Ken Lopez's firm has provided support for lawyers in several big cases, including the Enron hearings (above). |
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.
"It saved us an enormous amount of time," he said. "If we wanted to build LawProspector the old-fashioned way by hiring programmers and writing code, we could have easily spent a year and spent an enormous amount of money."
Instead, the lawyers created the software in a couple of months, and use Salesforce .com's computers to run it. Salesforce.com recently began featuring LawProspector on the customer showcase section of its Web site, and says the company expects to gain more than 1,000 customers within the next three years.
"We've been very grateful and very lucky that this product is in demand as people are trying to grow sales and cut costs at the same time," Lopez said.
The 1992 UMW grad traces the roots of his creative endeavors back to his sophomore year, when he bought his first Mac. He started playing around with its graphic capabilities and began creating fliers and posters for the Honor Council and debate team, both of which he belonged to, as well as friends in his dorm.
"I kept that creative streak going through law school," Lopez said. "It was there that, oddly enough, I picked up computer animation as a hobby."
Although he had plenty of offers from law firms when he graduated from Widener University in Wilmington, Del., in 1995, Lopez decided he didn't want to be just one of the herd.
"The only thing that struck me that was unique about me was that I had this knowledge of graphics, and animation and the law," he said.
He founded Animators at Law to help lawyers make complex information easier for juries to grasp, and then spun off LawProspector after working with his sales team to create a unique way to identify information about their market.
"My ultimate goal is to grow both firms and sell them as they mature," Lopez said. "I'm the proud father of 1-year-old triplet girls. I'd love to spend more time with them."
Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
