1st prize Technology Innovation:
$10,00 HP Business store award
Andrew Lavoott Bluestone, Bluestone Law Firm, New York, NY
Winning solution: Andrew Bluestone, a sole practitioner in New York City, concentrates in legal malpractice litigation. One of his biggest challenges is managing thousands of documents for each case. To deal with this, he scans every piece of paper that comes to his office, as well as articles and legal research – over four million pages thus far – using two HP flatbed scanners and one HP handheld scanner. This enables him to store, recover, transmit, analyze and refer to vast files right from his desk, thanks to a central document database, and litigation support software. A wired network connects eight PCs in the office used by Bluestone and his secretary. Documents and case notes are accessible at any workstation from a central file server. An HP iPAQ Pocket PC and HP business notebook PC help him manage the same tasks away from the office.
While other attorneys are storing paper in files, going to the files to read documents, and keeping the documents nearby, Bluestone is storing millions of pages digitally and reading files right from his computer screen. He even has a display permanently set up in portrait so the pages are life-size. He can flick through a 200pp transcript just like having it on his desk, not to mention being able to annotate, print, select and work with the document in many digital ways. Other firms still copy and ship paper documents for a document discovery response, but Bluestone writes documents to CD for mailing, saving him anywhere from $50 to $350 in photocopying costs plus $35 per delivery. Bluestone says he couldn’t maintain his practice if he had to physically find a paper document to read it. Nor could he store all the documents in his office; he would have to rent an additional office to store some 450 boxes of paper. HP products make the difference.