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A young company’s software speeds the production of law-firm paperworkGARFIELD – A Garfield startup backed by a software entrepreneur says its product will change the way law firms work by improving productivity and cutting the cost of generating legal documents.

The Legal Assistant, as the product and the company are called, allows law firms to produce legal complaints, letters, e-mails, bills and other day-to-day documents from templates that can be customized for clients and stored electronically. The software carries a monthly subscription fee of $75 per attorney.

Attorney Gary Zalarick, who cofounded the year-old company, says 70 New Jersey law firms subscribe to the service and he hopes to sign up 1,000 tri-state practices by the end of the year.

Zalarick, a partner in the Garfield law firm of Sammarro & Zalarick, launched the software company last year with Shaleen Gupta, a former senior executive at Dendrite Inc., a Bridgewater producer of salesforce-automation software for pharmaceutical companies that was acquired by France’s Cegedim in May.

Gupta, a computer engineer who previously started another company, put $300,000 into the new venture. Gupta had worked at Dendrite from 1992 to 1994 before leaving to form a software firm that he sold for $16 million to Dendrite in 2002 and returned to the company as part of the deal.

He was serving as Dendrite’s vice president for global business development when he left the company again last year to team up with Zalarick, who had developed the Legal Assistant software to make his own work easier and began marketing it after impressed clients spread the word.

Legal assistant currently offers programs called Real Estate Assistant and Personal Injury Assistant, and plans to introduce programs for family law and bankruptcy law by the end of the summer, and for criminal and immigration law by the end of the year.

Zalarick and Gupta are seeking up to $2 million from angel investors to finance these programs and project revenue of $5 million to $10 million this year.

As a lawyer, Zalarick knows how members of his profession work. “In a small firm, if you want to do 300 closings a month, you need four or five paralegals,” he says. “With our software you can cut down that requirement to one.”

Of the 1.15 million lawyers in the United States, about half are solo practitioners, he says, and about 25 percent work in firms of 10 lawyers or less. “Our sweet spot is the small firm, although our software would work for larger firms, too,” he says.

Andrew Venturelli, a Passaic City lawyer who specializes in personal injury cases, was among the first to try Zalarick’s software. Venturelli had two full-time secretaries and one full-time paralegal at the time and he has since pruned his staff to one secretary and one assistant. “If a secretary could earlier do 10 complaints a day, with this we can do 30 or 40 a day,” he says.

Venturelli says Zalarik introduced a feature he requested that enables the personal injury specialist to make notes electronically instead of scribbling them on the back of paper files.

Competitors in this legal software field include All-State Legal, a 60-year-old firm based in Cranford that specializes in legal and other documents. Another program is Amicus Attorney, a practice-management tool from Gavel & Gown Software Inc. in Toronto.

Robert Busch, president and CEO of All-State Legal, says his firm does business with more than 35,000 law firms throughout the country. Marketing director Susan Jacobs says All-State has been selling document-assembly software for four years.

The product costs $650 per user per year plus a $250 subscription fee to cover legal updates and technical support, she says, and “helps law firms execute transactions efficiently” in some 15 practice areas that include real estate, family law and corporate litigation.

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