Hank Rosenthal (left), Richard Pacia (right) and Jay Rosenfield (seated) of CompBase Inc.
Richard Pacia didn’t need any more law books. The shelves of his offices at 50 Power Road in Pawtucket were tightly packed. It was the fall of 1993 and Hank Rosenthal was in to visit. They had done business for many years. If not law books, Rosenthal asked Pacia, than what did he need? To Pacia, a lawyer who had handled workers’ compensation cases for 20 years, the answer came easy.
“What I could really use is the appellate decisions of the Rhode Island Workers’ Compensation Court,” said Pacia.
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Rosenthal was intrigued. In addition to law books and journals, he had begun working with CD-ROMS. The law community, it seemed, needed endless amounts of information.
By chance, Jay Rosenfield, was also at Pacia’s office that day — working on the computers.
Rosenthal and Rosenfield got to talking. The idea was to gather the information, store it on disc and make it available to the legal community, and anyone else, for that matter. Technically, Rosenfield didn’t see a problem. Rosenthal pitched the idea to his employer. They didn’t bite.
But to Rosenthal, Rosenfield and Pacia it made too much sense. They decided to do it themselves.
In January 1994, CompBase, Inc. was born. In March of the same year, CompBase negotiated and secured a ten-year contract with the Rhode Island Workers’ Compensation Court system. CompBase took the court’s records, organized, converted, indexed and reformatted them for storage and access on a compact disc.
“It was almost like Goodyear discovering rubber by accident,” Pacia said.
As a lawyer, Pacia knew well that the demand for such a product existed. After all, the Rhode Island workers’ compensation system had been a well-documented mess for years. Reforms had been put in place. The situation was indeed improving. But years of disarray had taken a toll. The demand to modernize the records was strong.
“If you wanted to find an appellate decisionthere were these three big binders at a desk at the Garrahy Judicial Complex,” said Pacia. “It was like finding a needle in a haystack.”
The three partners – one a marketing specialist, another a computer expert and the other, a lawyer — went to work. CompBase was an immediate success, with business increasing each year, said Rosenthal.
Targeting city and town clerks
Those early days at CompBase included little long-term planning. Having gotten the idea off the ground, there was some sentiment to strike quick – to cash in on the sizzle.
“At first we thought we would come up with the product, sell it, make money and walk away,” Rosenthal said.
But something kept them committed – perhaps, the idea that CompBase could be so much more. Pacia recognized that workers’ compensation cases represented a narrow market. Mostly lawyers, he said. And with reforms beginning to take hold, the system was improving. Fewer cases were going to court. Fewer cases meant fewer appellate decisions.
CompBase soon had a spin-off product – ClerkBase, designed to catalog the minutes of public meetings in cities and towns throughout Rhode Island.
“We realized that we could use the same technology,” Rosenfield said.
The market was ripe. In Central Falls, for example, a federal prison was stirring emotions. Public meetings were becoming a weekly event. West Warwick was going through a financial crisis. In other cities and towns, residents were turning out to hear more about development projects.
“The workers’ compensation product had become a vehicle through which we learned what we could do,” Rosenthal said.
“It really provided a springboard,” Pacia said.
For Rosenfield, the computer specialist, the possibilities were exciting. Growth was inevitable.
“I have always looked for opportunities and dabbled in different projects, but this was one that we could build a company around,” he said.
ClerkBase received the same kind of response as CompBase. To date, seven Rhode Island communities – and a handful in Massachusetts – have signed on. Rates are negotiated on a case-by-case basis and depend upon the number of boards and commissions included and the length of the contract.
West Warwick Town Clerk David Clayton has used ClerkBase for four years.
“Meeting minutes had never been put on CD-ROM,” he said. “Everything was a manual search. Now, in addition to town council, the sewer commission and pension board are putting minutes on as well.”
Clayton said the program clearly saves time and trouble – lots of it.
“If someone has a question, you do a word search and find what you are looking for,” he said. “It’s been a godsend.”
In East Providence, Valerie Perry has been City Clerk for ten years. ClerkBase, she said, has made all the difference in the world.
“I don’t know how I lived without it all these years,” she said. “It saves me a lot of time in doing research – looking back at council meetings and resolutions. Before, not everything was indexed the same way. Now, you type in a key word and it’s right there. It’s simple to use.”
East Providence City Solicitor William J. Conley, Jr. no longer has to pore through reams of paper in the cellar of city hall.
“It has allowed us to create a single universe of information,” he said. “If a topic comes up before the city council, we can find out how it has been historically treated by the city. It has been a terrific resource.”
Public access mandates help
For a company that started “by accident,” its founders believe it has the potential not only to survive, but also to grow dramatically. They have attended national and international trade shows, each time drawing more interest from municipal clerks.
Rosenthal points out that the company’s product is tangible. It is high tech driven, but it is not high tech stuff, per se.
“We are a company that uses technology to deliver existing information,” Rosenthal said.
Pacia sees a thirst for such information, from both the professional community and the public at large.
“The wave of the future is that a city or town is going to need this,” Pacia said.
Rosenthal sees all of this as a clear-cut use of available technology.
“Some cities and towns have not embraced technology,” Rosenthal said. “But they are being mandated to provide information, public access. They are being dragged into it.”
