Distribution deal opens door to 8000 US lawyers

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Wellington's Hyperbolex has signed a distribution deal for its analysis software with American legal site trialsmith.com, giving it access to around 8000 lawyers.

Hyperbolex makes a text and data analysis tool called The Mole which examines documents to find strands of relevant information around any subject chosen by the user.

Trialsmith offers contingency fee lawyers America's largest on-line depositions bank, with more than 147,000 depositions. Plaintiff lawyers can perform a single search and access all private databases and litigation documents from its partners. Trialsmith said its document database and litigation tools were jointly sponsored by more than 52 trial lawyer associations and litigation groups. It also holds all the depositions for major American litigation bodies, including Birth Trauma Litigation Group, the Medical Negligence Information Exchange Group and Attorneys Information Exchange Group.

Hyperbolex director Ted Thomas said the front-page endorsement from Trialsmith was fantastic for his tiny software company, which has six staff.

The company's software is based on research by Otago University's Roy Anderson, who explored linguistics and information science.

Basically, said Thomas, the software extracted meanings and connections from words and sentences and could dig through large amounts of unstructured text to extract meaning.

The firm already has several New Zealand organisations on its books, including the State Services Commission, law firm Rainey Collins and Airways Corporation.