Elite Endorses New Standard for Electronic Billing and E-Commerce for Law Firms and Their Clients

LOS ANGELES, CA. July 19, 1999

Elite Information Systems Inc., a worldwide leader in practice and financial management systems for professional-service firms, announced its endorsement for the widespread use of the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) and has signed on as a member of the oversight committee for the new standard.

LEDES is a standard file format to be used by the legal industry for the electronic exchange of information.

PricewaterhouseCoopers developed LEDES and introduced it in January 1999, acting in response to the legal industry's lack of common standards for electronic data exchange. In May 1999, the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC) was formed by 17 prominent legal-industry organizations, including Elite, to assume responsibility for the promotion and further development of LEDES.

Elite not only supports the standard but has also successfully delivered a LEDES output utility to work in conjunction with the Elite software suite.

Mark Goldin, chief technical officer of Elite, is Elite's representative on the LOC. "LEDES was established to address the problem of numerous incompatible electronic invoicing formats in use between law firms and corporate legal departments," Goldin said.

"A universal format will lead to lower costs for all parties in an invoicing transaction. Our involvement in the LOC is consistent with Elite's goal to further e-commerce in the legal industry."

LOC plans to add an XML version of LEDES to make the format truly universal and Internet-compatible. Other refinements and enhancements are under consideration for development and introduction in 2000. The current standard is Y2K-compliant.

Chris Poole, Elite's chief executive officer, stated: "Elite is a market leader in legal-industry automation, and our participation on the LEDES Oversight Committee is no exception.

"With e-commerce quickly becoming an everyday standard, the legal industry needs to take the appropriate steps to ensure it can take advantage of this new technology. We plan to aggressively pursue initiatives such as this and to make them an integral part of our software."

Currently, the LOC is under the leadership of Acting Chairman David Adolph of Canadian Pacific Railway. Members include representatives from corporations, law firms, law-firm and law- department vendors, industry trade groups and top consulting firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Arthur Andersen.

Elite Information Systems is an international provider of a comprehensive suite of financial and practice management products including integrated time and billing, general ledger and accounts payable, as well as consulting services to legal and professional- service organizations of all sizes.

Elite is currently used by more than half of the top 100 U.S. law firms, according to American Lawyer Media's published results in the AMLAW 100 Survey, indicating that Elite is the system of choice for large U.S. law firms. Other professional-services markets include accounting, consulting, public relations, financial-services actuarial, government, software, security, insurance, market research and systems integration.

This news release may contain certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, that represent the company's expectations or beliefs concerning future events. Such forward-looking statements are about matters that are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could influence the matters discussed in certain forward- looking statements include the timing and amount of revenue that may be recognized by the company, continuation of current expense trends, unforeseen changes in the company's markets, continued acceptance of the company's services and products, and general changes in the economy. These factors of risk are also detailed from time to time in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including the report on Form 10-K for the year ended Dec. 31, 1998, and the annual report to shareholders. Actual results may vary materially.

Contact:

Elite Information Group Inc.
Los Angeles
Monty Lunn
Tel: +1 323/642-5200
Email: mlunn@elite.com

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

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