Geronimo Development Corporation produces CaseFinder, a complete Virginia legal research system that combines CD-ROM reliability with World Wide Web timeliness. Nineteen separate databases contain over 75,000 Virginia cases, statutes and rules and over 65,000 Federal cases, statutes and rules. The CaseFinder program and databases are contained on two CDs; the databases are updated and complete new CDs are re-issued every month. CaseFinder incorporates built-in web access to a searchable database on Geronimo's private web site, which is updated every 24 hours with new legal opinions rendered after the prior month's discs were shipped.

For searching CaseFinder's CD and web databases, Geronimo chose the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine. "dtSearch's search speed is nearly instantaneous, even through our massive databases" said Russ Armstrong, President of Geronimo. "Even more importantly, the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine let us build our CaseFinder program the way we wanted to build it. No other software could give us the flexibility we got with dtSearch."

CaseFinder was written in Visual Basic; the text files in the databases undergo extensive data preparation and hyperlinking. Even though CaseFinder uses a proprietary file format, dtSearch can handle the indexing. "Another important benefit of dtSearch is that it returns the offsets of the hits in a given file. This lets us render the text in our proprietary document viewer and highlight the hits. And dtSearch's configurable stemming rules were exactly what we needed."

For more information on Geronimo's data publication work, or on the CaseFinder legal product, please call 1-800-457-6045, visit www.casefinder.com, or e-mail info@casefinder.com.