Staying ahead A Honolulu attorney who has helped several hundred local law firms cross the digital divide now wants to build his own bridge, to the mainland.
of the paper chase
A software-savvy isle attorney,
By Tim Ruel
whose forms expedite the flow
of legal data in Hawaii,
is looking to expand
Star-BulletinEdward Smith, 34, has made a name for himself among Hawaii attorneys for creating a software program that lawyers can use to store information about their cases and clients, from home addresses to annual salaries.
In turn, the software, called ManaForms, can print out the avalanche of forms and motions that attorneys must file regularly with Hawaii's courts and state agencies.
That's it.
But that's enough. Smith says ManaForms has become necessary equipment for between 300 and 400 law firms, and growing. His next plan is to gear the software toward attorneys in every state who work with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Smith, a family law attorney, is not your average tech geek. His formal training in programming entails a few computer-language courses taken at his New England boarding school. But he has tinkered with the inner workings of computers since the TRS-80 came out in 1977, when he was still an adolescent in Sacramento.
"That was the first [personal computer] that Radio Shack put out, and it was the competitor to the Apple II," recalls Smith.
Smith came to Honolulu in 1993, shortly after he finished law school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His entire family had just relocated to the islands from Sacramento, Calif., and he came here to be with them.
Smith soon began practicing law in Honolulu and found that local law offices were in desperate need of automation. Despite their hundred-dollar hourly fees and the boom in the Internet, Hawaii attorneys were still using typewriters.
Smith wasn't happy with that. "I didn't want to type on a form at all," he says. He created his own software where he could type up forms to file with Family Court. He noticed others had done the same thing, and were having some measure of success selling it.
Kailua family law attorney Frank Lockwood started selling software to Hawaii attorneys as early as 1991.
"I converted lots of lawyers to the use of computers who had never touched them before," says Lockwood, who teaches an annual computer seminar for Family Court attorneys.
Typewriters were simply habit, Lockwood says.
"I even have some of my staff insist they have to have a typewriter right now, and I slap their hand every time they do it," Lockwood says.
Lockwood and another company, M Power, were having some success in selling software to Hawaii attorneys, but their potential was limited by the small number of forms that they offered.
For a year and a half, Smith had secretaries scan dozens of forms. He put ManaForms together with the commercial software program FileMaker Pro, which allows the program to operate on Windows and Macintosh.
Smith's primary investment became his time, which he evenly split between law and programming. His offices at the downtown James Campbell Building turned into a farm for his old computers, which he converted to serve newer machines.
One barrier was Hawaii's District Courts, which did not accept copies of any forms, whether they were made by computer or by copy machine.
Targeting other courts, Smith released his first commercial version of ManaForms in 1997.
The software quickly caught on.
Gavin Doi, a Honolulu family and bankruptcy attorney, had been looking for such a program, which had already become common in California, but not in a small market like Hawaii, he says.
The problem was that lawyers don't usually understand technology, while techies don't know law. Smith covered both bases, Doi says.
"I looked at Ed's product and it just blew me away," says Doi, who began using ManaForms in 1998. "It was very polished. It's more polished now."
The greatest appeal of ManaForms is that it keeps track of financial information for each client, Doi says. In divorces, attorneys often have to calculate and recalculate income statements whenever the numbers change. Doing that with white-out and a typewriter enough times is tedious.
On the flip side, Doi now depends so much on ManaForms that he found himself in trouble recently when his office computer network went down, as networks often do.
"I was scrambling to find things to do that wouldn't involve a court form," Doi says.
Smith's former competitor, Lockwood, says he has since left the business and now buys his own software from Smith. "I basically lost money doing it. It was a fun experience and I actually lost," Lockwood says.
Smith's main advantage was the comprehensive scope of his program, says Lockwood, who estimates he reached about 80 customers in Hawaii.
In late 1997, the state Supreme Court opened the gates further by changing the rules for District Court, which began accepting copies of forms.
ManaForms now covers the Bankruptcy, Circuit, District and Supreme courts in Hawaii, as well as some state agencies. It does not do taxes, however.
These days, to keep up with changes in court forms, Smith regularly updates the program and posts the changes at his Web site, www.manasoftware.com.
Smith notes that not all of Hawaii's 4,100 active attorneys would need his program. Personal injury lawyers, for example, more often need to write up long documents than fill out forms, although they can manage their cases with ManaForms, Smith says.
His prices range from $600 to $3,000, depending on the number of people licensed to run the software at the same time.
"The mark-up of producing a piece of software is pretty huge," Lockwood says.
Smith's customers don't seem to mind. "I keep telling him to jack up the price," says Doi.
Smith now has his eyes set beyond the islands. He plans to go national by gearing the program toward attorneys in every state who work with the INS.
There are official state and federal Web sites where attorneys can pick up legal forms and print them out to fill in by hand. The software that displays the forms, Acrobat, is made by Silicon Valley software giant Adobe Systems Inc. The latest version of Acrobat will allow attorneys to fill out the forms on their computer before printing them. But the new version does not offer its own database to store the information entered. The Acrobat option
Enter Cecilia Goodwin, a Sweden native who recently joined Smith's firm as a legal secretary, and who is now project manager for Mana Software LLC.
Goodwin, who came to the United States in 1994, knows what it's like to deal with strict INS forms.
"If there's a comma in the wrong place, they're going to send it back to you and your case is going to take another three months," she says.
Going national would open the company to far bigger pool of customers, since the INS rules are the same in every state. Smith could market the company through ads in bar association journals, as well as through pre-release tests done by a sample of mainland customers.
The move, however, raises at least one important question for Smith: What happens when a customer in Maine wants him in their office to fix a computer right this second?
We're working on it, he says. In the meantime, his office is about 30 percent of the way through recreating some 300 INS forms.
"I would think it would work good for any kind of legal work that has a lot of forms," says Honolulu attorney Sam King Jr., another customer and supporter of ManaForms. "It would be great if he could do it."
In native Hawaiian, mana means divine power or authority, but appropriately enough, it also translates into "version." Defining 'mana'
Source: Hawaiian Dictionary by Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert, 1986 revised edition.