Ad-hoc | 20 July 2000 11:37

Ad hoc-Service: FORIS AG English

Ad hoc-announcement edited and sent by DGAP. The sender is responsible for the content of this announcement. —————————————————————————— FORIS AG Berlin, Bonn, Munich, New York Special announcement, Thursday, July 20,2000 FORIS takes over CompLex and acquires an interest in Qsearch 1. FORIS AG, German market leader in court financing, is taking over all business shares of CompLex Deutschland GmbH effective September 1, 2000. Effective immediately, FORIS is acquiring a 25.01% interest in the retrieval software Qsearch, which was patented in the United States in June 2000. 2. CompLex GmbH is a legal research service which can be used by jurists for a fee by telephone, fax and e-mail. The database contains more than 1,3 million documents in all areas of German and European law. The customer pays only if the research is successful. Currently, approximately 4,000 inquiries are processed per year. FORIS sees considerable growth potential here. CompLex also operates the German Legal News Service (Deutscher Juristischer Nachrichtendienst), which carries information about current rulings. 3. Qsearch is a specially developed software program based exclusively on a statistical algorithm. It generates a relevance relation between the search text and database documents. Whole sentences may be entered as search criteria. Qsearch does not depend on the familiar Boolean “and/or” structures. Unlike Boolean systems, Qsearch’s accuracy increases with the size of the database being accessed. Qsearch produces a ranking of the text strings found. The accuracy of the relevance relations generated is generally over 90%. The search speed is less than three seconds with a database of more than 1.3 million documents. 4. FORIS considers the acquisition of CompLex to be an outstanding substantive addition to the range of services it already offers as well as to the Internet platform currently under construction. As part of the full range of FORIS offerings, the research service will be greatly expanded in the future; it will then be available internally for court financing business as well as externally for all attorneys, students, court clerks, courts, legal departments and universities. 5. FORIS will participate in the further marketing of Qsearch. Qsearch can be used wherever documents and text strings need to be retrieved in large quantities of data. The use of Qsearch is in principle relevant to all languages as well as intranet and Internet searches. Additional information: FORIS AG, Matterhornstr. 44,14129 Berlin; phone (+49 30) 804-8640; fax (+49 30) 804-8642-4; e-mail FORIS-Berlin@foris-ag.de; Internet www.foris-ag.de End of Message