Initial Diligence Questions
Initial Diligence Questions
Table of Contents
Executive Summary.....................................................................................................................2 Key People......................................................................................................................................3 Organizational Chart..................................................................................................................6 Current Capitalization................................................................................................................7 History..............................................................................................................................................8 Selling Points.................................................................................................................................8 Technology.....................................................................................................................................9 Content..........................................................................................................................................13 Traffic Overview..........................................................................................................................14 Growth...........................................................................................................................................15 Industry & Customers.............................................................................................................15 Competition/Barriers to Entry..............................................................................................16 Web-based Technology Acquisitions 2007 - 2008.......................................................17
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Forms Processing Automation for Legal Services
MANAGEMENT Brian C. Poe, CEO & Founder
Founder, Author of “Guide to Expungements and Clemency”
Robert E. Simpson, President & COO
Databeam, CTO SDG, Owner, VP, CIO
Rich Bowen, Director of Development
Member, Apache Foundation, Author “Apache Cookbook” and “The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite”
SOLUTION & VALUE PROPOSITION Over 87 million American adults have a criminal record and as a result are routinely denied jobs, housing, and the opportunity to be fully involved in their communities. EAS has developed a web-based, automated solution that helps those who are eligible for relief navigate the complex and unique processes in all 3,100+ U.S. jurisdictions. EAS’s consumer oriented solution, ClearMyRecord.com, is more efficient, more effective and far less expensive than the limited available alternatives. COMPANY BACKGROUND EAS initiated nationwide operations in 2006 after an extended period of gaining process and statutory knowledge. From its inception, the company’s strategy has been to automate the process of forms creation and completion for criminal record relief. Varying levels of automation have received beta testing to date and—as of November 2008—the company’s solution has been fully automated for all 50 U.S. states. The early results of the online, nationwide product roll-out have been very promising.
EAS has built a team with extensive experience in developing web-based applications that utilize large and complex database support, launching new technology into emerging consumer and professional markets, and organizing and running technology start-ups.
MARKETS EAS’s solution serves potential customers in all 3,100+ U.S. legal jurisdictions, including Federal and Military (as well as some in Canada and the Bahamas), which allows the company to address nearly all of the 87 million Americans that have criminal records. MARKETING, DISTRIBUTION, AND SALES STRATEGY The bulk of EAS’s revenues are realized through direct to consumer sales via the company’s website (ClearMyRecord.com). Demand generation requires mass media advertising and aggressive internet advertising and support. With appropriate additional funding, EAS will blanket sites and web resources used by ex-offenders, leverage distribution channels in suitable non-profit and for-profit sectors, implement radio and television campaigns in targeted markets and mediums, and pursue other similar strategies that will bring the message of record relief to a much broader audience that is currently unaware of the existence of this unique solution.
Kevin McMahon, Director Sales & Mktg
ArchVision, VP Bullard, Dir Mktg & Engineering
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
23 FT, 1 PT
SALES REVENUE
$3+MM since mid-2006
CURRENT INVESTMENT
Angel Capital Totaling $2.8 MM
COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE The traditional source of record relief assistance, licensed attorneys, has little expertise in this infrequently practiced area of the law. Furthermore, the cost of an attorney can average well above $1,000, which is often prohibitive for individuals seeking criminal relief. In the three years since EAS began national INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY operations, several other region-specific EAS has developed two areas of patentable companies have entered the market. But the IP involving i) form auto-filling and ii) record- high cost and difficulty of amassing the forms relief process delivery. Provisional patent ap- and procedures for all 3,100 jurisdictions has plications have been filed for both elements. given EAS a significant first-mover advantage in this emerging industry.
Financial Projections 2009 Revenue Expenses EBITDA
$3,644,000 $3,751,000 ($107,000)
2010
$11,537,000 $6,307,000 $5,230,000
2011
$19,081,000 $9,478,000 $9,604,000
2012
$24,091,000 $10,282,000 $13,808,000
2013
$30,186,000 $11,223,000 $18,962,000
Executive Team Company Positions & Bios
Brian Poe, CEO, Founder
Mr. Poe began the EAS project in 1999. Years of research, travel and interviews resulted in a successful do-it yourself e-book; A Guide to Expungement in 2004. Due to high demand for more personalized service, Expungement Assistance Services, Inc. was launched in the spring of 2006 and became EAS Technologies via angel round investments. Mr. Poe has been a featured speaker regarding expungements and pardons in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and New Orleans. Mr. Poe has founded 3 previous companies and managed hundreds of employees and contractors. His business to business networking relationships led to partnerships and contracts with high profile clients such as Nike, ESPN, CBS, Toy’s R Us, Michaels, University of Louisville, University of Kentucky, the Armed Forces, Toyota North America, Gatorade, Ramada Inn, Comfort Suites and many more. During this time Mr. Poe received several honors for business achievements, including recognition by Historian Magazine as one of the “Top Young Entrepreneurs in the South” in the early 1990’s and was recently nominated as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 40 CEO’s Under 40. Mr. Poe served on active duty in the armed forces (Navy) during the first Gulf War and Panama campaigns; he was accepted into the United States Naval Academy Preparatory School. While serving on active duty Mr. Poe received Sailor of the Quarter and Sailor of the Year honors. Mr. Poe attended Transylvania University in Lexington, KY, and is a trustee with the local and state Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Poe is an Associate Member of the American Bar Association, contributing member of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Urban League, and various ExOffender Programs.
Robert Simpson, COO, Investor
As Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Systems Design Group, Simpson worked in a senior business development role to define and develop a strategic business direction for SDG while leading the development and operations of the Security Services Group. As COO of EAS Technologies, Simpson provides technical direction, research, project management and strategic consulting and is a frequent seminar speaker. Simpson possesses 13+ years experience in operational management within a technology startup company plus six years as an executive at a technology services focused company. He is responsible for setting the direction and managing the customer support, information services, professional services, and operational functions. Major accomplishments include initiating, defining and organizing a formal IT department and operation, creating a profitable consulting services line of business, defining and organizing a complete manufacturing operation, and implementing product cost and inventory reduction programs.
3
Dan Fulks, PhD, CPA, CFO, Investor
Dr. Fulks is Professor of Accounting and Director of the Accounting Program at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. Dr. Fulks also serves as the university’s Faculty Athletics Representative and is a research consultant for the NCAA. As the latter, he is recognized as the country’s foremost authority on financial aspects of intercollegiate athletics. Dr. Fulks has over thirty years of academic experience and has been a practicing CPA since 1967. His current practice is primarily in the areas of taxation and forensic accounting.
James Thomerson, Esq., General Counsel
After graduating from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering, Mr. Thomerson was employed by Goodyear Atomic Corporation in Oakridge, Tennessee. He received his law degree, with High Honors, from the University of Tennessee in 1986 and then spent one year working for the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before joining the firm of Stoll, Keenon & Park in Lexington. While with that firm, Mr. Thomerson practiced in the areas of insurance defense litigation, as well as employment and media law. He opened his own law office in 1996 and has continued in that practice, focusing primarily in the areas of civil litigation and the representation of individuals and businesses.
Bob Babbage, Consultant, Investor
Bob Babbage is the national managing partner of Babbage Cofounder, a government relations and corporate business development firm. Babbage Cofounder manages state and federal public decisions with major corporations, assisting CEOs, executive teams and organizations through change initiatives and advocacy. Bob served as Kentucky’s elected Secretary of State, 1992-96 and State Auditor, 1988-92. He was a Lexington City Council atlarge member, 1981-87. A charter class member of Leadership Lexington, he is the originator of Leadership Kentucky and helped start the Lexington Forum, the Louisville Forum and the Hugh O’Brien Program. He served as assistant to the president of the University of Kentucky, 1984-86. Bob serves on the ownership board for the Lexington Legends (A) and the Omaha Royals (AAA) minor league baseball teams.
Phil Wilkins is a speaker, consultant, and the author of “Own Your Business, Own Your Life!”Phil owns three businesses: Diverse Wealth Systems, a training and consulting organization, Rising Star, Inc which owns four McDonald’s® restaurants in Lexington, Kentucky and PJK Holdings a real estate investment company. As a speaker and lecturer, he presents to corporations and professional organizations on topics such as client acquisition and diversity and his clients include: Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Fifth Third Bank, RBC Dain Rauscher, A.G. Edwards & Son’s, Wachovia, State Farm Insurance and the Security Industry Association.
Phil Wilkins, Consultant, Investor
J. Whitney Wallingford, II, Esq., Consultant, Investor
Mr. Wallingford is a well established attorney that has been practicing law since 1979. He earned his Bachelors (with high distinction) in Political Science, and his JD in Law from the University of Kentucky. Mr. Wallingford has served with several large law firms in the past and established his own firm in 1998. His primary areas of law concentration are in Estate and Business Planning as well as Employee Benefits and Employment Law. Mr. Wallingford has also published articles on Employment Law, and has given many presentations over the years. These presentations were on topics ranging from Family Law, Employment Law, Medical Board Certifications, Business Law, and Tax Planning. Mr. Wallingford is a former Marine, and has earned many achievements throughout his prestigious career.
Richard Bowen, Director of Development Prior to joining EAS, Mr. Bowen led Asbury College’s effort to automate its mission-critical systems. Projects included building a Content Management System to manage the College’s website (http://www.asbury.edu), complete with access control, multi-level permissions management, full inline image editing interface, and management of news stories and their related RSS feeds. He has also assisted in developing the new Date/Time libraries included with the popular Perl programming language. Much of this work is now included in the default distribution of Perl. Other parts of this work are available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) online. (http://cpan.org/). Mr. Bowen founded and assisted in the initial development of the Habari blogging software package. (http:// www.habariproject.org/) Mr. Bowen is also an international speaker on Apache-related topics, recently speaking at conferences in Amsterdam and Chicago. He is the author of 10 books, including Apache Cookbook, The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite, Apache Unleashed, and Apache Administrator’s Handbook. His books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and German. Kevin McMahon, Director of Sales & Marketing Prior to joining EAS, McMahon provided marketing and business development leadership to dozens of regional technology start-ups as president of V~Squared High Velocity Marketing & Strategy. He also served as marketing vice president for ArchVision, an early stage technology company specializing in 3D animation technology development. While at ArchVision McMahon tripled the company’s revenue and doubled the firm’s domestic and international distribution. Mr. McMahon gained extensive distribution development, quality system, and lean process management expertise while managing marketing, business development, and product engineering activities for E.D. Bullard Company, an $85MM manufacturer of worker safety and health protection equipment. McMahon was pivotal in the development and launch of the company’s thermal imaging technology product line which ultimately resulted in revenue increases of 50% and an improvement in profits of 150%.
HISTORY What has driven the historical growth that the site has achieved? The primary factor is the prevalence of personal information available via the web and the ease at which the web has made it to perform background checks on individuals with relative ease and low cost. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 stressed the need for wide spread availability of personal background data. Due to the ease of obtaining criminal background data, over 70% of all employers now perform background checks on applicants and with the job markets tightening, ex-offenders are the first to be discarded from consideration. This is driving the demand for the need to erase past mistakes. The natural growth of the total number of potential customers driven in large measure by the increase in minor wrongdoings, as well as, drug and DUI arrests, offenses that pull in middle class citizens – people for whom a criminal record presents a significant barrier to continued upward economic mobility will, most likely, always be a factor. As to growth due to marketing; other than Nov 06 to March 07, the only considerable advertising has been online presence. During this nominal marketing phase, the company generated nearly $1 million dollars in revenue (as well as a vast backlog). Online marketing was intermittent and adword campaigns inconsistent since April 07 due to research and development activities. Organic growth has been damaged with the URL name change from Removeit.org to the more marketable clearMYrecord.com, efforts have begun to reclaim organic strength. KEY MILESTONES SINCE THE BUSINESS LAUNCHED 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Company has raised close to $3M in seed money for R&D Company was awarded $500,000 in KY State Technology Funding Company has processed almost 10,000 cases during R&D Company has generated over $3M in revenue during R&D Company has developed the only fully automated smart logic process and database encompassing over 3100 judicial districts in all 50 states.
Other notables: • Company has been contacted by major news media and Hollywood. • Employee count reached 52, reduced by half due to automation success. • Company resides in Class A office space at less than $15 per sf.
THE TOP 5 SELLING POINTS TO A POTENTIAL INVESTOR/PARTNER? a. Low demand risk. Vast market opportunity, renewable resource and low required penetration rate to be successful. Over 85 million Americans have a criminal record (Over 8 million per year are new offenders added to that number.)
b. c.
Financial proof of working concept with revenue history ($3M in sales). Technology that works. The only low cost and totally automated expungement and pardon process available. We are TurboTax of this industry. Technology is cutting edge and patentable (filed). Our turnaround time is immediate. Execution and Experience. We have processed almost 10,000 cases manually, in all 50 states. Competition is primarily attorneys. (Q2 2009 we will launch the annual subscription web based software platform, JudicalSoft, designed specifically for attorneys and law firms, the only automated legal software for expungement and pardon processing). Other notables: • First to market. • Excellent brand. • Price point is unmatchable. • Company has had Federal Pardon approved by President George W. Bush. • No real web based competitors. • Fights a problem many organizations and governments are working to resolve. • Privacy of transaction for customer
d. e.
TECHNOLOGY This software project has been developed with the collection of technologies collectively referred to as LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The code has been written in PHP using the MVC (Model View Controller) framework called Cake. (http://cakephp.org/) Developing in Cake allows us to develop new functionality very rapidly, and with minimal quantities of code. And the code that is developed adheres strictly to a programming style guide (The PEAR style guide), which results in code that is very legible, traceable, and efficient, both by execution measures and developer measures. It also means that new developers entering the team can be brought up to speed very quickly and be productive in a shorter time than would be required on completely home-grown code. The separation between the data model and the controller logic further enhances our security posture by greatly reducing the chance of SQL injection or other common security exploits often associated with PHP code. Automation: Definition and Rationale ClearMyRecord.com provides a service to persons with criminal records. We assist them in navigating the complex process of expunging, or otherwise reducing the impact of, their criminal record. By its very nature, this process is embarrassing. People are doing this specifically because they don’t want the world to know about their past. So, the prospect of discussing the details of their criminal past with a complete stranger is, quite understandably, an unsavory one.
Giving our clients the option to complete some, or, preferably, all, of that process online, anonymously and in the privacy of their home, greatly reduces the chance that a client will quit halfway through, and thus greatly increases the chance that they will have a successful experience, resulting in the desired outcome. Additionally, from the perspective of running a profitable business, the current process is extremely man-hour-intensive, with hours spent on the phone with the client obtaining the necessary information, and filling out the necessary forms. If the bulk of this work can be completed by the customer themselves, and the forms automatically filled out based on the answers that they provide, this frees up our internal staff to spend this time with the customers who have more complicated cases, and so need the additional personal assistance. Software and Technology Stack Overview: The technology stack used by EAS is a fairly standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, with our proprietary code sitting on top of that. The part of this that constitutes our product is entirely internally written by our own engineers, and uses the LAMP stack, along with several FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) products to provide the functionality which is common to all web applications. Our complete stack is diagramed below:
The components of this stack are as follows: Linux: Our code runs on a server running the GNU/Linux operating system. Our code operates just as well on a Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X platform. Further documentation on Linux and the GPL may be found at the following locations: MySQL: Our data is stored in a MySQL RDBMS database server, running on a Linux server. Apache: The Apache Web Server is an Open Source product, which serves content from websites to the web clients. It is developed by the HTTPd team within the Apache Software Foundation, and is licensed under the terms of the Apache Software License, version 2.0. As an aside, Rich Bowen, our Director of Development, happens to be a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a participant on the Apache Web Server project, and wrote much of the documentation for that product. PHP: All of our code is written in the PHP programming language, our product consists only of the textual source code that implements our instruction set. As an aside, Rich Bowen is also a member of the PHP documentation team. Cake: We are using Cake as our development framework, which allows us to develop code quickly, securely, and in a standardized fashion that enables easy maintenance across revisions. ImageMagick: In order to generate PDF output from original paper sources, intermediate graphics libraries are utilized to modify those sources and insert user-generated content. EAS Proprietary Code: All of the code that constitutes our actual product was developed in-house, by our developers. It is 100% original clean-room code, and does not borrow from any other source, except in trivial ways, as from How-To and tutorial-style documentation of common-practice techniques. All of this code has been developed using a revision control system (Subversion, also known as SVN), and thus we have a complete and auditable revision history going back to the very first line of code written on this project, including which developer wrote which line of code, and when each line and algorithm was introduced to the product. Development tools: We use a wide variety of development tools in the process of writing our code. Each developer is permitted to select their own preferred development environment, which is something that is enabled by the textual nature of the PHP programming language. Some of our developers use proprietary third-party development products such as Microsoft Visual Studio, while others choose humbler development editors such as VIM and Emacs. In each case, the development environment is appropriately licensed. Client-side Stack: The client-side technology stack is the same as used by any standards-compliant web application, and does not use any proprietary or licensed technologies. This stack is illustrated below for the sake of understanding how everything fits together, but this is in no way different from what you
would see in any web technology development shop. The resulting HTML, JavaScript, and CSS output is protected under standard copyright provisions, but nothing we are doing on the front-end could be considered patentable or otherwise worthy of legal protection.
Summary: Although we make use of many third party products in the development of our Software Product, 1) all of it is under permissive Open Source/Free Software licenses and 2) none of it is actually included in the resulting Software Product. Everything that actually constitutes the Software Product is developed 100% in-house. LIST OF EMPLOYEES THAT PLAY A ROLE IN TECHNOLOGY All development staff are employees, no contractors are currently being used. Rich Bowen James Osborne Nathan McConathy Andy Folwer Jim Lerza Jay Voskuhl Ben Parks Jamaal Shelton Director of Development Sr. Developer Sr. Developer Jr. Developer Jr. Developer Web Development Mgr Web Developer II IT Support Heads development effort Lead developer Sr. Lead Developer Jr. Developer Web Developer Web Developer Web Developer IT support staff
LIST OF THIRD-PARTY SERVICE CONTRACTORS (HOSTING, ETC.) Zimcom Communications, Inc. www.zimcom.net - Web Hosting Nuvox Communications www.nuvox.net - Phone and Internet Service Senture www.senture.com - Inbound Sales Call Center
CONTENT The primary goal of the clearmyrecord.com site is to engage prospective customers and to convert them into paid customers. Towards that end, the site works to educate, to build confidence, and to drive the visitor to action. Apart from the “working “portion of the site, our content must fall into one of these categories. One of the challenges we face is the general lack of awareness of prospects that record relief is even possible. As a result, we must educate and demonstrate that EAS and ClearMYrecord are reliable and reputable, increasing our legitimacy at every opportunity. Our site makes few demands of the customer, allowing them to check their eligibility for free and without being required to leave personally identifiable data to do it. Only once the prospective customer decides to become an actual paying customer do we begin collecting data. Our content strategy must also fulfill another role, and that is one related to search engine optimization. From our homepage to interior pages, we attempt to work in key phrases and terms to improve our organic search performance. All content on our site is generated internally with the exception of
government reports or data which is made available for use without restriction. The content development and management team includes four individuals that work full-time for EAS Technologies. A search for a fifth individual is currently underway who will provide design and technical support for the site. All content is fully owned. Employees that play a role in content development includes; Brian Poe, founder and CEO, Kevin McMahon, Director of Sales and Marketing, Jay Voskuhl, Web Development Manager, and Ben Parks, Web Developer. Content is also supplied via a contracted public relations firm, Spark PR, a nationally recognized firm specializing in Silicon Valley technology. TRAFFIC OVERVIEW SEM - Google Adwords + Yahoo. We currently have several thousand terms running for ClearMYrecord.com, with terms that are both direct and oblique references that people might use in their search about criminal record relief options. Ads are deployed both for search and for content/context specific instances. SEO - We continually update the site to add fresh, meaningful content so that we might positively impact our organic performance yet maintain practical readability and value on the site overall. Advertising & Promotion - We ran several small scale banner advertising tests during 2008 and will roll out a large scale banner ad campaign in 1Q of 2009 targeting sites catering to the ex-offender community (i.e. www.prisontalk.com) We will leverage the 60,000+ members of the hard2hire.org community via direct messaging and promotion. Beginning in 2Q of 2009 we will begin running a coordinated television, print, and OOH campaign to drive traffic to www.clearmyrecord.com. We anticipate total ad expenditures for the year to total $3.75MM+. Trends - In 2008 we reached our high water mark for site traffic during the springtime months. We consistently achieved 3,000+ unique visitors per day during that period. During that period we learned that marginal expenditures above $15,000 per month on adword support did not yield increases in traffic at comparable percentages. We also learned that the quality of that marginal traffic was of a somewhat lower quality overall, resulting in a lower conversion rate.
GROWTH What are the top 3-5 growth opportunities for the site in the next 12-36 months? • • • • • • Large scale rollout of ClearMYrecord.com services with significant media buys (not unlike freecreditreport.com and Legal Zoom) Rollout for Judicial Soft, a professional-grade version, directed toward practicing attorneys Leveraging the member base of hard2hire.org for sales and referrals Organic growth via extensive PR strategy (Spark PR of Silicon Valley) College and vocational career centers Non-profit affiliate partners
What is the single most important thing EAS would do if you were given $1-2mm to invest in the site over the next 6-12 months? • Advertising/promotion to support customer acquisition, Company has proven success when advertising and educating people that a record relief option is available and affordable. INDUSTRY & CUSTOMERS The industry itself can hardly be called an “industry” at this point. Clearmyrecord.com represents the only national competitor in the assisted Do-It-Yourself record relief business (ala TurboTax). Competitors are generally local with a couple that might be called regional. The intensive use of technology to provide an automated solution for customers exists only at ClearMYrecord.com. Other providers are handling their customers with high levels of labor costs. That said, increasing numbers of very small players are beginning to materialize, as any Google search would reveal. But the barriers to becoming a national competitor are significant and will likely prevent the rise of an additional national player(s) for at least several more years. That said, with nearly 90 million people laboring under the weight of a criminal record, with the rise of more Americans serving as their own lawyers, and with the rate of pre-employment criminal background checks now exceeding 80%, new entrants will surely emerge in pursuit of revenue. The best source of information relevant to this industry is the United States Department of Justice. They provide detailed data relating to arrest data and even the economic impact of high rates of incarceration. Towards that end, the Department of Labor is also quite useful. As government records become more and more technologically advanced, the more readily available the records information becomes. Even if the government organizations begin to automate themselves, we are readily positioned to provide them the ability to rapidly deploy their services and then extend them on into their backend processing systems, making the process even more streamlined for the government and judicial entities.
There is a prime opportunity for someone to become the defacto leader on a national scale in this space. That leader could then swallow up smaller competition as needed, expand into international territories, create partnerships and associations with big money funding organizations to make CMR more of a community based assistance and self help program. The ability to become a leading voice, knowledge expert in the space and to define, promote and support future regulatory actions and legislation in regards to criminal record relief is a position the Company is readily prepared to acquire. COMPETITION Criminal records relief is a highly fragmented industry. EAS’ principal competitors are small law firms whose practices include criminal law. Most law firms charge $1,000 and up for criminal records relief and do not offer the RSVP service of communicating the relief to the criminal records databases. There are internet based companies that claim to offer criminal record relief, but unlike EAS, none are automated, none offer services on a multistate, multijurisdictional basis, and none offer a service similar to RSVP. A listing of internet-based businesses that claim to offer criminal record relief would include: www.recordsremoval.com ; www.clearyourrecord.com ; and www.americanpardons.com. The internetbased businesses typically offer their services from $199 and up, but are not automated, not multistate, and do not offer the RSVP service of communicating the relief to the criminal records databases. Automation is a key issue with the internet based businesses because without automation, it is impossible to profitably and quickly process a volume of applications for a fixed price. This realization, based on actual experience, drove EAS to develop its automation platform. BARRIERS TO ENTRY The ability to scale via automation is the only means to truly reap substantial profits in mass processing of record relief. Data must be collected from over 3100 jurisdictions. Forms of relief, applications, eligibility, and filing procedures vary from one jurisdiction to another. This data is not available online and must be procured via phone, fax and in many instances, personal visit. EAS employed over 50 employees during the data gathering process, an effort that has taken over 8 years. The patent pending technology required specific experts in the disciplines of Apache, Cake, and PHP programming. Full scale development has been underway for 2 years. Our engineers are keynote speakers on these development platforms. The process involves many moving parts with ever changing aspects; the fact that EAS has processed nearly 10,000 applications demonstrates unmatched expertise in the field.