Technology Spin-off of Preston Gates & Ellis Offers Tenfold Productivity Gains in the Practice of Law

SEATTLE, March 17, 2003 ― The overwhelming flow of electronic information encumbering many corporate legal departments and law firms, and a new approach that turns the problem into opportunity, are the primary forces behind the creation of Attenex Corporation.

Increased reliance on technology that produces countless terabytes of e-mails, word processing files, PDF files, spreadsheets, and Web pages is creating headaches for the lawyers who must manage an organization’s risk, ensure the integrity and consistency of contracts and agreements, plot litigation strategy and produce responsive documents in the discovery phase of litigation. Attenex's software tools, integration services and best practices go right to the heart of the matter, delivering tenfold productivity gains over and above the usual methods of doing business. Using Attenex technologies, processes that once required 100 attorneys working thousands of hours can now take just 10 attorneys working hundreds of hours. Tenfold productivity gains in turn make law firms more efficient and competitive and at the same time, provide corporate counsel with more capacity for management and strategy.

Attenex was derived from the term "at ten X", which communicates the company's focus on making the electronic discovery process and other document-intensive business processes faster and better. Tenfold productivity increases dramatically impact how electronic information is managed and used.

Attenex is staffed with a veteran team of software industry executives and engineers, as well as seasoned business and legal professionals. Chief Executive Officer Skip Walter brings over thirty years experience in document and knowledge management, product development, visualization technologies, and product design expertise to Attenex and its customers in the legal arena. Recognizing the unique confluence of computing power, emerging visualization and analytic technologies, and the legal profession's growing need to handle huge volumes of electronic documents—both in the drafting and in litigation, Walter has worked collaboratively with senior partners, IT professionals, litigators and production-level attorneys at Preston Gates Ellis to develop two products that provide dramatic productivity gains in actual use. Walter leads a well-rounded team of nearly 30 at Attenex with a wealth of experience managing document-intensive business practices, as well as delivering innovative technology applications to market.

Attenex's suite of productivity tools are in line with a recognition among leaders within the legal community that electronic information and communication, even if an improvement over paper methods, is not making it any easier to practice law, and is in fact contributing to overwhelmed legal departments and rising costs, said Skip Walter, CEO of Attenex. “Attenex's tools combine technology and sophisticated systems to deliver unprecedented productivity results and return control to those who routinely draft complex legal documents or manage litigation.

Attenex currently offers two software products, as well as best practices and systems integration services in association with those products. The Attenex Patterns E-Discovery Platform is software developed specifically to increase the speed, quality and efficiency of the review portion of the discovery process in litigation. Combining a deep understanding of the workflow of document review for litigation and patent-pending document deduping, content analytics, and visualization technologies, Attenex Patterns increases productivity (hence reducing time and costs) during the review phase of discovery—often comprising as much as 50% of pre-trial litigation costs and months of work—by a factor of ten or more. The Attenex Structure Knowledge Assembler improves the speed and quality of the legal document drafting process by capturing and providing a way to build upon the intellectual assets of an organization’s most experienced attorneys. Providing a highly-flexible drafting environment which is tightly integrated into Microsoft Word, Attenex Structure provides lawyers with a firms’ own proven clauses, model documents, best practices as well as a place to capture both the formal and informal knowledge to help create the clay from which complex legal documents are drafted, revised and kept current and consistent.

Attenex was founded as a result of the Working Smarter initiative at Preston Gates & Ellis LLP. This ten-year research and development program focuses on creating technology tools that would aid the firm in increasing its internal efficiencies and service to clients by designing tools for tasks as diverse as electronic discovery, complex document drafting and assembly, document collaboration, municipal bond document automation, and extranet communications with clients. The most promising of those efforts have been successfully spun off to form Attenex as a separate company. More information on Attenex and its products can be found at www.attenex.com.