Back in 1993, Irving Rappaport and his business partner, Kevin Rivette founded Smart Patents. The company was one of the early legal software firms. Smart Patents’ goal was to create a “Digital Patent” and transition patent attorneys from working on paper to working on an electronic format. According to Irving Rappaport, co-founder and managing director of IP Checkups, Inc., “Smart Patents was the first software that enabled attorneys to search the text and images of a patent on the same screen, annotate the documents, and share the information with colleagues.”