“Why one legal tech company launched its latest product early, and is not charging”

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Alan Bass got on a flight from Cape Town to Toronto on the evening of March 12th. When the flight landed at Pearson on that fateful Friday the 13th, the president of Korbitec Inc knew the world had changed. On Monday, he told his team they were moving the launch of their latest product from July to April.

Korbitec provides document automation and task management solutions to the legal community. The tech company has focused, largely, on the civil litigation space by providing streamlining technologies like their automated civil litigation platform ACL5. Korbitec’s latest product, the one Bass launched sooner, is called xchangedocs, a secure portal for legal document transfer. Bass knew, on the eve of Canada’s lockdowns, that this product designed for security, convenience and efficiency was about to become more essential.

“We had already done nine months of pilot work on top of two plus years of development, and we mobilized to finish the marketing materials, email blasts, and webinars,” Bass says. “Of course, given the situation that we are all facing, we decided to offer it for free at this time.”

Bass’ prediction that his clients would need xchangedocs proved prescient. As courts began to shut down for civil litigations, lawyers were suddenly faced with more pressure than ever to get their pre-trial casework in order, so that the instant courts reopened, they wouldn’t be left waiting years for a trial date. Getting that work done, though, required legwork, communication, and the movement of huge files of documentation and evidence. At the same time, some firms were laying off non-essential staff, and clerks, assistants and lawyers were adapting to working from home. Law firms needed a simple tool to securely send hugely sensitive documents. Korbitec’s xchangedocs was working overtime from day one.

The function that Bass says might have proved most crucial in these times is how xchangedocs functions as a portal for serving documents electronically. For any document served by the portal, xchangedocs generates a record of service that replaces the need for the affidavit of service. The rules state that the Record of Service must be produced by the portal to be valid, and the only way in turn that a portal can produce this document is through an integration with a document automation engine – and that’s where ACL comes in.

“Well, document automation is what we do very well,” Bass says about his platform’s key functionality.

Underpinning all these functions is security and ease of use. Bass stresses that email, USB keys, CD’s and third party sharing platforms are not private communications. Moreover, even for less sensitive documents, email is rife with size restrictions and process issues that can frustrate or stymie any exchange. Korbitec’s xchangedocs is designed to be both secure, and limitless in the file size it carries, crucial in any civil litigation case where huge documents are involved.

In the midst of the pandemic, though, Bass says his platform is proving its value for lawyers far outside of the civil litigation practice areas Korbitec has traditionally served. xchangedocs is filling a need across the entire legal profession. At this time, people really do not want couriers or process servers coming to their homes.

“The tools we use are becoming more and more essential,” Bass says. “A law firm ideally wants to adopt a technology that can be a platform for many functions, document automation, task management and now document exchange. They want it to be easy to use, supported, affordable and from a dependable company that's been around for 44 plus years.”