The Texas Association of Bank Counsel (TABC) was formed in 1977 as a professional association for attorneys representing commercial banks. Since that time, the membership has broadened to include attorneys who represent a variety of financial institutions, including credit unions, mortgage lenders, and other credit grantors, as well as regulators who have oversight over many of these companies. Since its inception, the TABC has published a monthly newsletter for its members.



This newsletter, The Texas Bank Lawyer, is written and edited by students at the Texas Tech Law School under the supervision of Professor John Krahmer. The newsletter contains summaries of recent cases affecting credit grantors, including bankruptcy issues, debt collection practices, Uniform Commercial Code decisions, and general litigation matters relating to the granting of credit. From time to time, The Texas Bank Lawyer also publishes articles of subjects of interest to attorneys who represent financial institutions. Although intended primarily as a source of timely information about recent court or regulatory decisions, The Texas Bank Lawyer soon became a useful archival source for research on legal issues within its scope. However, by 1997, it became apparent that the sheer volume of material had gone beyond something that could be searched by hand and the preparation of a traditional index was cost-prohibitive. It was also apparent that a computer search system might provide a solution.

After reviewing a variety of search software, a decision was made to use dtSearch® as an efficient way to find commentaries appearing in the newsletter. This decision also necessitated the scanning and OCR conversion of several years of back issues since publication of the newsletter pre-dated computer preparation of the text. With the help of several students, this effort took about six months. By June of 1998, all of the issues had been converted to machine-readable form and a searchable index was created with dtSearch. This index, together with the run-time version of dtSearch, was copied to CD-ROM along with graphics files for each page of the searchable text. Even with the 8x to 12x CD drives that were then available, dtSearch almost instantly located any commentaries that used the search terms requested by the user, including complex searches for words appearing within a certain distance of each other (e.g., the word "check" appearing within ten words of "stop-order"). In addition to finding relevant text, the user could also use the image button to view or print the specific page as a graphics image in its original form. This CD was advertised and sold to members of the TABC to help raise scholarship funds for students working on The Texas Bank Lawyer and became a popular tool for researching past issues. Since 1998, the index has been updated on an annual basis and an updated CD made available to TABC members. With the evolution of operating systems to Windows 2000® and to Windows XP®, the 2003 edition will be prepared with dtSearch Publish® to be compatible with the newer versions of the Windows® operating system.

For associations or for any other group whose publications span several years and are now measured in megabytes, our experience with The Texas Bank Lawyer has proven the value of dtSearch as a replacement for manual searching or indexing of large volumes of text. Anyone interested in learning more about the details of our process to OCR, index, and prepare CD-ROMs with dtSearch is welcome to contact Professor John Krahmer by email sent to jkrahmer@krahmer.net. More information about The Texas Bank Lawyer and its sister publication, The American Bank Lawyer may be found at www.krahmer.net.