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        Copyright 2000 New York Law Publishing Company 
               New York Law Journal

               April 25, 2000 Tuesday

SECTION: MANAGEMENT & TECHNOLOGY; Lawyers & Technology; Pg. 5

LENGTH: 604 words

HEADLINE: New Toolbox for Lawyers Appears On-Line

BYLINE: By Mark Voorhees, American Lawyer Media

BODY:
  Ed Koch has a site of his own, at www.thelaw.com, and Harvard Law School's
Arthur Miller is the pitchman for another, at www.americounsel.com. But these
sites, which provide legal services to consumers, compete with real-live
lawyers. What about the sites that help lawyers do their jobs better?

  One such site is LawOnTheWeb, at www.LawOnTheWeb.com. If luck is the residue
of hard work and hard knocks, the site may be lucky. Kenneth Frank left a
partnership at Piper & Marbury LLP a decade ago, hoping to build a better legal
tool kit. He has finally built it, and the test will be now to see whether
lawyers use it. (Mr. Frank is the chief executive of Baltimore's Technology
Group.)

  Today, the site is aimed at those who practice estate law. The site houses
the Wealth Transfer Planning program, a buffed-up document assembly and creation
system. The system asks you questions and, based on your answers, produces a
tidy pile of documents - anything from durable powers of attorney to wills,
revocable living trusts and even irrevocable life insurance trusts.

  This help is not cheap. An annual subscription costs $ 1,000 a year.

  But this is a work in progress.

  Mr. Frank plans on offering a pay-as-you-click model in the near future.

  There will be many other practice areas, too. Intellectual property,
environmental law, elder law and employee benefits are some of the upcoming
subjects.

  "We're not trying to replace lawyers,Mr. Frank said. "We're trying to give
them tools."

Long Road

  The chief of the Wealth Planning Transfer program is Jonathan Blattmachr, a
partner at New York's Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Mr. Blattmachr is "to
trust and estates what Frank Sinatra is to crooning,said Kyle Krull, an
Overland Park, Kan., attorney who uses the site.

  When Mr. Frank left Piper & Marbury a decade ago, the Web, as we know it, did
not exist. The lawyer simply had the romantic notion that there ought to be "a
better way to capture the knowledge of an enterprise and re-use it."
                                   PAGE  6
           New York Law Journal, April 25, 2000

  There have been many twists, turns and torments in Mr. Frank's efforts to
commercialize that notion. He started by building a document management system
for Wang minicomputers, only to see Wang go belly-up.

  Then he bought the word-processing program XyWrite because there was not an
existing software platform capable of handling the "intelligent documentshe
wanted to create. About four years ago, Mr. Frank issued Wealth Transfer
Planning on CD-ROM, just before the world went Web-crazy.

Pay As You Go

  But the Web may ultimately be his salvation. He will soon be selling services
"by the drink,in his words, rather than by subscription. The Web facilitates
pay-as-you-go transactions in a way that traditional software does not.

  Document assembly, of course, is not a new concept. West Group, for example,
publishes Drafting Wills and Trust Agreements on CAPS, a document software
program.

  But a Web-based solution can be especially attractive for several reasons.
Andrew Hook, a partner at four-lawyer Oast & Hook in Portsmouth, Va., said that
he likes the convenience of accessing the software from home. He also hopes
Web-based software will be easier for his firm to maintain.

  One of his employees now spends about half her time on network and computer
issues. Mr. Hook's only complaint about LawOnTheWeb is that material downloads
too slowly with his 56 kilobits-per-second modem. That is nothing a digital
subscriber line will not solve, and his firm is planning that upgrade.

  Looking back on the past decade, Mr. Frank says wistfully, "This was a very
exciting and naive thing to do."

GRAPHIC: Illustration, no caption, ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN MacDONALD

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH