Message from the Founder Jacob R. Powell

I am a Utah lawyer. I graduated from BYU law school in December 2004 and took the Utah Bar in February 2005. I clerked for Judge Schofield at the fourth district court from 2005 to 2006 and have worked at the law firm of Scribner McCandless & Fowlke, a small general practice law firm in Provo, from 2006 on. My practices includes family law, contract/business litigation, real estate, bankruptcy, criminal law, and occasionally other areas.

In addition to being a practicing lawyer, I am a computer and math nerd. I have been programming computers since I was 10 years old, and my undergraduate degree was in computer science with a minor in math. I also got a master's degree in computer science, which I finished in the middle of my second year of law school.

I thought about making my own e-filing system ever since the Utah Bar told us about e-filing. I initially thought I might make a system just for our law firm and add convenient automated features as it occurred to me. However, once I actually looked into it, I learned that anyone attempting to do that would have to pay a substantial fee for training. The testing cost was so prohibitive that it was clear it would not make financial sense to build my own system unless I made a product that competed on the open market with the other providers. So the idea of Judicialink was born.

At the present time, the entire organization of Judicialink consists of me. The organization is deliberately small and light, because I am determined to be the low-price leader among e-filing providers. I am Judicialink's lawyer, its computer programmer, its sales department, its customer support person, and when I feel like talking to myself, the company psychologist too. I have plans to expand as the organization grows, to meet the needs of the attorneys filing with me.

In addition to being determined to be the low-price leader, I am also determined to develop Judicialink into the most convenient service for attorneys of all those out there by developing time-saving interface features. I have developed the back end in PHP, which is the king of open-source web languages and constantly has open-source tools developed for it. Because I will be filing documents with my own system as an attorney, I will always be on the lookout for ways to make my system more convenient for the filers. I have developed several features already that I think attorneys will appreciate, and hold out the promise of more to come.

I look forward to working with you. Feel free to call Judicialink at (801)877-1596 or e-mail at support@judicialink.com for more information.