Re: Kill/Lawyers

[kfrank@xxxxxxxx]

Bill Rich:

I am especially pleased to hear that your Law School uses XyWrite
because one of the focuses of this company going forward is on
what we call "Intelligent Document Processing". By that, we
mean building the capability into our products to absorb and
apply intelligence or experience about the relationships between
data (or facts) and words, enabling documents to dynamically
draft and redraft themselves to reflect the current state of the
relevant facts affecting the document or documents the user is
working on.

As you can imagine, this has special relevance in markets like
the legal market because of the intense word and relatively
"rule based" environments in which many lawyers operate. In
fact, in partial answer to an earlier message from Chet
Gottfried asking about the origin of our interest in XyWrite, we
acquired the products partially because we believed that to
really accomplish the goal of building products that were
capable of automatically doing truly complex written work, we
needed to be able to operate from within a powerful word
processor. Since I didn't think I could acquire Word for Windows
or WordPerfect, and since XyWrite was more powerful and maleable
in any event, we bought the product so we would have that
technology as the core of our future systems.

In fact we have a DOS version of such a system which is marketed
under the name "General Counsel" and we recently released a
Trusts and Estates application authored by two nationally known
estate planning experts which automatically evaluates the
efficacy of any number of estate planning strategies for each
client, preparing detailed research memos (10-50 pages) for the
attorney using the system, and also drafts virtually every type
of estate planning document. In the process, the user is led
through an interactive question and answer dialog in which
detailed substantive explanations are available, including
citations etc., for every decision the user is called upon to
make.

We have developed this line of products with as much emphasis on
its educational aspects as its document preparation
capabilities. While I was practicing law, I taught a course at
the University of Maryland Law School for ten years, I believe
there is a great deal of potential for this technology for
actual teaching in law schools.

If you would like to learn more about what we are doing please
let me know.

Kenneth Frank