6 June 04 Bar News

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has a contract with the Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association to provide free civil legal services to disaster victims. Although young lawyers organize the provision of legal services, volunteers can be lawyers of any age and experience level.

FEMA has asked the YLD to organize legal assistance to the recent storm and tornado victims in four Illinois counties. A toll-free hotline number, (800) 467-0385, is available for them to call for legal assistance.

The Illinois State Bar Association will assist by coordinating volunteer lawyers who are willing to help their fellow Illinoisans (see photo on page 1).

Once volunteers are screened, ISBA staff members will send intake forms by e-mail and send a caller's name and telephone number to a lawyer who has indicated familiarity with the area of law with which the caller needs assistance.

The volunteer lawyer will then be asked to contact a disaster victim and begin providing services. What is expected of volunteers?

By participating in this project, a lawyer agrees to provide free legal aid to referred tornado victims. Volunteers will not be reimbursed for telephone calls or other office expenses. Neither the ISBA nor ABA provides malpractice coverage associated with work on this project.

In many cases, the time required to respond to a single call will be minimal. Some victims' questions can be answered in a half-hour, or may require only the drafting of a few letters on a victim's behalf. In some cases, more may be involved.

Lawyer-volunteers should note that fee-generating cases are not covered under this project. If the victim has a case that is potentially fee-generating, the volunteer should refer the victim to another lawyer in the area. Volunteers will rarely provide assistance to flood victims in filing lawsuits.

It is difficult to estimate how long the hotline will be in service. Volunteer lawyers will be notified when it is no longer in use. If you are interested, here is what to do:

1. Send an e-mail to ISBA first assistant counsel Melinda Bentley at mbentley@ isba.org with your name, address, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address, along with a list of legal areas that you are comfortable addressing.

These may include insurance claims, landlord-tenant and other housing problems, home repair contracts, consumer protection matters, mortgage foreclosures, replacement of wills and other important legal documents, drafting powers of attorney, estate administration (insolvent estates), and preparation of guardianships and conservatorships.

2. You will receive a mini-manual via e-mail to help guide you through the volunteer process.

3. You will be notified by e-mail if you have been assigned a call. Respond to the victim within one business day. If you cannot return the call within that time, contact the hotline immediately so the call can be reassigned. If you plan to be out of town, alert your staff so someone can contact the hotline to reassign any calls that you will be unable to answer.

4. Keep track of the amount of time spent on each case and notify the hotline when you are finished providing services by e-mailing ABA YLD representative Judi Calhoun at jlcatty@hotmail.com with the Closed Case Closure Form.

On behalf of the victims who need assistance, we thank you in advance for your willingness to volunteer. Please do not hesitate to call Judi Calhoun at (765) 747-7801 or Melinda Bentley at (800) 252-8908 if you have any questions.

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Greg Anderson is director of career opportunities and development for the Northern Illinois University College of Law in DeKalb.

Roundtables generate reviews of ISBA programs

Recommendations that evolved from a series of ISBA roundtable discussions with bar leaders around the state have been referred by the Board of Governors to the budget committee for consideration.

Among them are continuation of the Bar Leadership Conference with changes in format and topics, and expansion of the affiliated bar association grant program with higher maximum amounts to underwrite local educational programs.

Also recommended were establishment of a non-voting ISBA membership category for executive directors of affiliated associations, and conducting continuing legal education in conjunction with local bar meetings and in the offices of regional associations.

The roundtables were conducted by the ISBA Committee on Bar Services and Activities to gain insight on the effectiveness of ISBA programs and services that are made available to affiliates. The meetings were held in Collinsville, Bloomington, Oak Brook and Chicago.

For more information, contact staff liaison Janet M. Sosin at jsosin@isba.org.

Sunday Runners resume activity on Saturdays

The ISBA Sunday Runners are off and jogging, or walking, through north Lincoln Park in Chicago but never on Sundays. The group meets at 8 a.m. each Saturday near the totem pole east of the intersection of Addison Street and Lake Shore Drive.

According to communiques from the coterie coordinator, past president Leonard F. Amari, the serious runners (three to six miles) have included himself, past president Donald C. Schiller and Second Vice President Robert K. Downs, who chairs the program.

Among others are Assembly members John G. Locallo and Gregg A. Garofalo, vice chair Robert L. Gamrath of the Young Lawyers Division and Leonard S. DeFranco of the Business Advice and Financial Planning Section Council.

Past president Thomas A. Clancy heads the walkers, and Jack P. Rimland, past chair of the Criminal Justice Section Counci, shows up occasionally on a bicycle.

After their workout, the participants head for breakfast at The Bagel on Broadway. For more information, call Amari at (312) 255-8550 or send an e-mail to lfa@amari-locallo.com.

The Sunday Runners have participated as teams in many charitable events to benefit such law-related organizations as the Illinois Bar Foundation and Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation.

Legal aid office attorney earns LTF Rothstein honor

Valerie McWilliams, managing attorney in the Champaign office of Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Program, is the 2004 recipient of the Esther R. Rothstein Award for commitment to supporting legal services.

The award was presented June 4 during the annual meeting of the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois, held in the ISBA Chicago Regional Office. Four LTF Leadership Awards also were given out, and fiscal 2005 legal aid grants announced (see story on page 15).

Showing a rare combination of creativity and initiative, McWilliams has developed two initiatives TRUC and PAID to help low-income clients better themselves.

TRUC is a not-for-profit car dealership that provides reliable transportation to needy families at favorable terms, so they can make transitions from welfare to the workplace.

PAID (Partnership Accounts for Individual Development) offers positive alternatives to the abuses of payday loan operations, and provides financial assistance in education to help participants get out of poverty and stay out. McWilliams is president of PAID.

"We want to give people the vision that no matter how desperate their circumstances are financially, they can choose to make it worse or they can choose to make it better," she said. "We're going to give them the education and tools to make it better, one step at a time."

LTF Leadership Awards were received by 12th Circuit Judge J. Jeffrey Allen of Joliet, Joseph R. Bartylak of Alton, Roslyn C. Lieb and M. Lee Witte, both of Chicago.

Allen was managing attorney of the Will County Legal Assistance Program for 25 years before becoming a judge. A past president of the Will County Bar Association, he has chaired the ISBA Committee on Delivery of Legal Services twice.

Bartylak retired last year after almost three decades as executive director of the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation and has since become associate director of the Lawyers' Assistance Program. He will receive an ISBA Board of Governors Award on June 18 (see story on page 8).

Lieb will retire this month after six years as executive director of the Public Interest Law Initiative. Before that she was executive director of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and chair of the Illinois Committee to Save Legal Services.

Witte retired in December after 20 years as executive director of the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation. She has received an ISBA Board of Governors Award and the General Practice Section Tradition of Excellence Award.

Fellows provide info booth

Fellows of the Illinois Bar Foundation will be present at an information booth during the ISBA Annual Meeting at The Abbey on Lake Geneva Thursday afternoon, all day Friday, and Saturday morning.

In addition to explaining the Fellows program, they will accept upgrades in status of current Fellows who wish to contribute at higher levels to the foundation's support of legal assistance and education initiatives.

The Fellows also plan to hold a reception in the Peoria area on Wednesday, Sept. 1. Call (312) 726-6072 for details.

The Bar Foundation is a co-sponsor of the annual ISBA reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, June 18, at The Abbey. Other sponsors are the ISBA Mutual Insurance Co. and Thomson West.

OCR software takes guesswork out of document scanning

By Alan Pearlman

The Electronic Lawyer

As any attorney or support staff personnel will attest, the advent of affordable scanners and scanning devices has created the necessary evil of scanning documents in the law office.

The problem, for several years and many iterations and generations, has always been in the optical character recognition of those docs. The OCR programs have left a lot to be desired, leaving us to pull out what little hair we have left.

I have never been too impressed with the several OCR programs that have been available to the legal profession - at least not until now. I have finally found what I believe to be the easiest to use, yet the best for recognition, OCR program in the marketplace.

I'm talking about the new Abbyy FineReader OCR 7.0 Corporate Edition. This new program has taken much of the guess work from hard-to-handle documents and made it almost fun.

The only major difference between the Abbyy Corporate Edition of 7.0 and the Professional Edition of the same version is that the former includes networking capabilities and bar-code recognition. Otherwise they are identical!

FineReader has a new technology that is even a help when working with low-contrast images, as well as documents with a colored backgrounds such as newsprint or magazines.

After the document has been recognized for the text, FineReader will re-apply all of the formatting elements, such as color, to maintain all the look and feel of the original document.

With its Intelligent Background Filtering system, it has the ability to detect and remove texture and background noise that many times interferes with text recognition. Grey or colored backgrounds with small dots can challenge even the best OCR programs.

Another interesting feature is that FineReader has the power to recognize 177 languages, which at present is more than any other OCR software in the marketplace. It also has the ability to spell-check with its dictionaries in 34 languages, again more than any other package.

As for the ease of use of the program, something that always frustrated me with others, FineReader has a unique Scan & Read Wizard. This device permits going through the OCR process in a step-by-step fashion, from scanning/opening an image, to OCR, to proofreading and exporting, or sending my result directly to several different applications.

Sending the results to applications requires one button click to MS Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and even WordPerfect. This one-step process eliminates the need to save the OCR result first and then launch your application to save the file.

Even if you are a novice when it comes to using this type of program, in short order you will love the way the wizard works for you. The program also allows for direct printing so you can make minor changes and print without first having to export the OCR result to another application.

As you go through the process, Fine Reader gives you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Editor that displays the OCR result with your full document layout intact, even to the point of having all your columns, tables and pictures right where they ought to be.

Let's talk a bit about the networking features of FineReader. You can install the Corporate Edition on both a server and on a local computer. Your administrator needs only to load the software onto the workstations via the network or directly onto the local computers using the enclosed CD.