Levit & James Launches Beta Program for Best Authority

Software Automates the Building of Tables of Authorities

in Legal Documents

Washington, D.C. (August 18, 2004)

Levit & James, a leading provider of software utilities to the legal industry, has announced that it is launching a beta program for its newest product, Best Authority. Best Authority is an add-in for Microsoft Word. It will automatically mark citations and build a Table of Authorities (TOA) in a legal document. The company will be showing a prototype of Best Authority at its booth (#418) at the LawNet 2004 conference in Scottsdale, AZ, August 22nd through the 26th.

Best Authority processes documents in three easy steps: In step one, it scans a document to mark citations and build a working version of the TOA. In step two, unique to Levit & James’ product, the user works with a simple interactive wizard, that lets them easily review and modify the results of the scan. This wizard will save users a great deal of time and dramatically increase the accuracy of the TOA. In the final step, Best Authority generates the finished TOA, offering the user a wide variety of options for sorting and formatting.

“We developed Best Authority at the request of customers who told us that they were very unhappy with the older products they’ve been using for this function,” said Ian Levit, vice president of marketing for Levit & James. “These products were originally developed for use with WordPerfect and, in our view, never made a graceful transition to the Microsoft Word environment. Often, they don’t even get the page numbers right. The former products lack interactive features, and require manual edits in Word – which is a huge waste of the user’s time.”

“When a legal brief is to be filed, one of the last steps is to prepare a TOA. For a complex brief, this can take several hours, even though the output may only be two or three pages,” continued Levit. “Best Authority will slash this time by half, or more, which means that it will pay for itself in a few uses."

The beta program will be starting shortly, and the initial release is scheduled for May 2006. Organizations interested in joining the beta program for Best Authority should contact Ian Levit at ianlevit@levitjames.com, or (703) 771-1549.