Specialised Requirement – Rapid Response

On Monday 3rd November 2008 Richard West of Richard West &Associates wrote this:
I am interested in using your program for a different purpose. I am a bankruptcy attorney and regularly help my clients keep their homes from foreclosure. Many don’t know when their homes are to be sold, due to their ignorance of the legal system. I want to be able to run a comparison of my client list against the local sheriff sale list which I can download from the web. I need a program that will detect address matches. The files are dissimilar, not in a table or formatted well. It seems that Copycatch would do this for me.Because Richard was able to supply test data and relevant links to the Sheriff Sale lists we quickly established that Copycatch Investigator could indeed find the matches, but it was not the sort of program he needed, being designed to find similarity rather than always identity, so it found all the houses in a particular road, rather than just the one he needed to know about. So we agreed to modify the program so that it did just what Richard needed.

In the event we wrote a new program to handle the HTML files and the range of formatting within them to provide a report showing the county, the full record in the Sheriff List and the entry in the practice database. The program takes about 2 seconds to process all six counties in which the practice is primarily interested against the full client list. We sent the screen shots of it in operation on 10th November, and delivered the program on the12th.

This is what Richard says about it:
The program exceeds all of my expectations. I simply pull the names and addresses out of my practice management software, exporting them to a text file, and pull the html off of the internet sheriff sale data. I particularly like the fact that I dont have to convert the internet html to text files, I can just compare the html against the text file I generate.
It is also very convenient to be able to load all of my county sale data in the program at one time and do a single compare. Without this program I had to manually compare all the files individually.
I rest much easier knowing that the program will also catch the inadvertent, but inevitable, minor differences between my client data and the sale data from the web. Thus, “Hawksnest” will match to “Hawks nest” ensuring that I dont miss a potential sale.
I intend to recommend this program to every attorney who does this kind of work, to avoid loss of home for the client, and a malpractice claim against the attorney.

Richard E. West
Board Certified Consumer Bankruptcy
120 W. Second St. Ste. 1212
Dayton, Ohio 45402
937 748 1749
rew@richardwestattorney.com