ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994                   TAG: 9404190057
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: C-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Daily Progress
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium


LAWYERS JOIN THE HIGH-TECH PARADE

It's hard to imagine a lawyer worth his hourly fee without a book-lined law library. Yet, more and more, attorneysare turning to technology to make their cases.

They can slip CD-ROM disks into personal computers to read state statutes or tap into computer data bases to keep up with federal case law.

And rather than being left in the dust, the 95-year-old Michie Co. has joined the high-tech revolution.

Established in 1899 by George R.B. Michie, and his two brothers, Thomas and Armistead, The Michie Co. is well-known in the legal publishing field. The Charlottesville company publishes statutes for 24 states and Washington, D.C., authored books on legal topics, books of state agency laws, and law school textbooks.

And since 1991, it also has published state law codes on compact disks.

Michie's CD-ROM business has grown from zero to 16 percent of its revenues in four years and company officials say it's their fastest growing department. Disk sales are expected to contribute significantly to a near-doubling of estimated revenues this year to $100 million from the "high $50 million" range last year, said Reginald Ryals, Michie's vice president of human resources and administration.

Michie does not release precise sales or profit figures; it's a unit of Mead Data Central, which is a division of the Mead Corp., a $4.79 billion paper and forest products company based in Dayton, Ohio.

Indeed, rapid sales growth of the read-only disks forced Michie to relocate 100 employees in the division to a rented office in Albemarle County last spring, about six months after the company completed its move into a new $8.5 million headquarters in downtown Charlottesville.

David Harriman, Michie president and general manager, said the rise in disk sales was "right about what we projected." Still, he says Michie is considering building an addition to the recently built 80,000 square-foot headquarters.

While the future looks bright in electronic publishing, Michie's not alone in the field. Michie's parent company, Mead Data Center, runs Lexus, a computerized data base offering international, federal and state case and statute law for the 50 states.

A major competitor in Minneapolis, Minn., West Publishing Co., provides a similar on-line service, WESTLAW, along with a CD-ROM library. Offerings include case law in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., statutes in 25 states and a heavy list of federal laws, Supreme Court decisions, and federal rules of practice and procedure.

The on-line services tend to offer a more up-to-the-minute take on many issues but Harriman said disks are often cheaper than paying the per-minute charges of the data services.

The company has expanded from about 400 employees to 701 over the past 10 years, with sales rising from about $15 million in 1984 to more than $50 million last year. Over the same period, it has expanded its product line and boosted its coverage from 16 states to 24. The states covered are mostly in the South, but the company is pushing westward, Ryals said.

"We'd like to have all 50 states," said Ryals, referring to the right to publish state statutes in both printed and CD-ROM form.

The company also is developing a European Community customs code, due out at the end of this year. And it is considering a further push into the international legal publishing world.

Along with new products, Michie is pursuing new electronic means of delivering its existing product line. The company is working on a new software product with Jurisoft, a sister unit of Mead Data Central, that would allow lawyers to move "seamlessly" between computer data bases, CD-ROM files and their own firm files, said Judi Schultz, spokeswoman for Mead Data Central in Dayton, Ohio.

So far, Michie seems to be successfully straddling the old world and the new.

Lawyers coming out of law school in the past few years seem to be more comfortable with computers than the older generation, said Evans Brasfield, 61, a partner with Hunton & Williams in Richmond. Yet he sees little resistance to the use of electronic sources by the gray-haired set because they offer such speed and convenience, making "more-in-the-dark" searches for information "much, much faster than going to an index in book form."



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