September 19, 2000

Pritchard Law Webs announces LawMoose!

LawMoose is the new Minnesota legal search engine and law portal.

Search engines are the foundation on which the Web is built. Pritchard Law Webs founder LaVern A. Pritchard says, "LawMoose is for those who are interested in the Minnesota legal portion of the Web -- lawyers and non-lawyers alike."

Currently in private beta status, LawMoose will move through a public beta phase before its official launch, currently projected for October.

Visitors coming to the community law portal at http://www.LawMoose.com will see a site that resembles Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, MSN, Google, and other web portals -- with a vital twist.

At LawMoose, everything will be about law and Minnesota. "We pre-screen sites for relevance. Only Minnesota legal web sites are eligible for inclusion, so everything will be relevant."

From the legal web search core, Pritchard Law Webs will build other portal features, including an expanded version of its existing Directory of Minnesota Law Firms on the Web, the Internet's only comprehensive listing of Minnesota legal web sites -- currently listing nearly four hundred web sites published by Minnesota law firms with more than four thousand total lawyers.

Pritchard says, "We know people want to use the Web to find lawyers, and lawyers want to be found on the Web. We're building community infrastructure to make both sides able to find the other more easily. Visitors will be able to find a collection of legal and law-related information that has never been accessible through a single point before. We hope visitors will find LawMoose to be a great starting point for the Minnesota legal web -- and that our visitors will help us make it even better."

LawMoose is based on Pritchard Law Webs' proprietary LawMoose Agent web spidering technology. Pritchard Law Webs has completed several test rounds of web page indexing through Minnesota law-related web sites as well as its first production round. Already, the LawMoose index contains the most comprehensive single searchable collection of Minnesota legal web pages.

Pritchard Law Webs will be introducing LawMoose at the Minnesota Law & Technology Show on September 19-20. Terms for law firm and individual lawyer participation in the new portal are under development. LawMoose will accept advertising and offer members of the Minnesota legal community a variety of promotional options.

Explanatory Notes: The name "LawMoose" derives from the metaphor that LawMoose roams the electronic forest in search of knowledge. A web "spider" is an intelligent agent that navigates around web sites, acquiring information necessary to build a searchable web page index.

Pritchard Law Webs was founded by LaVern A. Pritchard, Minnesota's legal web technology pioneer, who conceived his first legal hypertext system in 1988 while practicing law at Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pritchard Law Webs' areas of focus include web-based law practice, web-based marketing, and web-database-driven knowledge management environments.

Mr. Pritchard is a regular speaker on the impact of the Internet on the legal profession. Mr. Pritchard will be a panelist in two sessions at the upcoming Minnesota Law & Technology Show: "Information Overload: Knowledge Management Systems to the Rescue!" and "Q&A with the Experts: Action Plans".

LawMoose was developed jointly by LaVern Pritchard and Greg Pritchard. Pritchard Law Webs is an Allaire Alliance Consulting Partner and a member of the Minnesota High-Tech Association.

LawMoose is a service mark of Pritchard Law Webs.