Also a lawyer here, I think the biggest hurdle is MS Word. MS word is the defacto IDE of the law world. We spend most of our time in Word.
The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client.
But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track changes/comments. I even stumble upon bugs in MS Word while working on such documents.
You also need a reliable compare tool to generate redlines.
Video conferencing is also important. You may access zoom/teams through web but it won't be as convenient as the desktop client.
For an independent lawyer / small-mid sized office, linux may work. But for large companies the tooling may not be there.
For example is there an easy way to clean metadata off of documents in Libreoffice, are there any compare tools, drafting assistants etc.?
And if you're doing any litigation, the e-signature systems (dongles) also need to work reliably.
I’m glad this is working for him, but it’s only been three months. The most important thing Word gets me is an excuse. If someone sends me a Word doc and I open it in Word and something is screwed up, I can say “oh, um, maybe something is wrong on your end.” If I’m using anything else—LibreOffice, Pages, Google Docs, anything—then there’s a possibility that it’s the software’s fault. I can’t be messing around with that in moments when it counts. Like it or not, Word is the standard, and anyone using software that is not the standard is carrying a burden.
I’m an attorney and it’s my job to practice law, not be ideological about my tools. I keep a Thinkpad with Debian on my desk and use it to track my tasks in Taskwarrior, because it’s the best tool for the job. For document exchange, there is absolutely no substitute for a Windows PC with Microsoft Word. I say this as someone who hits Word bugs and loathes Word. But I’m a lawyer, not a professional Linux tinkerer.
For me it’s always been a hobby. I also write my own software tools in Haskell. I’ve used other distributions—Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, and SUSE.
I used to think about some sort of software career but I now know that doing it for a living is nothing like doing it as a hobby. Plus I like my job. Writing a good legal opinion has surprising commonalities with writing good software.
A bit like writing a not type safe program, which won't get run until there's a disagreement and litigation, and then, the program gets interpreted, by an a bit unpredictable machine (a human) ? :-)
Definitely some if and or else, in the contracts, ... For loops are unusual though, are they not. And while true loops too
> I'm curious to know how you and the parent comment came about to know about HN, what an IDE is, Debian.
I started using Linux while I was at university, reading law. But I spent as much time with computer science and computer engineering friends as I did with other law students - in fact, probably a lot more - and spent plenty of time tinkering with servers and networks. And that’s stood me in good stead for tinkering with legal stuff to do with networks, servers, and related things.
Keep in mind there are thousands of lawyers out there whose job is to write software patents or litigate for big tech companies. I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers not working in tech who know about tech stuff just out of curiosity, but the ones who are in tech definitely know much more than surface-level things.
Retired lawyer (from the 80s and 90s). Second career as a sysadmin now with the lofty title "enterprise architect", which in my case is more like "a senior guy who can do all kinds of stuff".
Back in the day DisplayWrite and WordPerfect were the standards, with Word coming up behind fast. I used XyWrite in my own tiny practice. That said, Word Online under a Microsoft 365 sub would get you most of where you need to go, but I have to admit that some are going to be more comfortable with the desktop version of Word for the reasons given above. In that case... KVM virtual machine running Windows! So long as the host has sufficient horsepower (4 or 8 cores, 32 GB RAM), that can actually be an added benefit: two computers for the price of one.
On the scanner driver issue, I'm going to curb my natural urge to go into full on problem solving mode (an occupational hazard for both sysadmins and lawyers). Network scanners are a "hive of scum and villainy" if there ever was one. My own adventures with an HP MFP can be found in this gist: https://gist.github.com/plembo/1630c74806c1c97c2dcee03752865.... The TLDR is that HP supports SANE through their own proprietary api, which is probably not going to work with a different manufacturer's scanner (for example, Canon).
With regards to the scanning issue, you could scan to FTP; new Brother workgroup MFC printers can even scan to SFTP and I'm sure other manufacturers are the same. (Note that smaller, cheaper $150 Brother lasers cannot scan to FTP/SFTP; that feature seems to be reserved for printers in the $400+ range.)
For example, you can scan multi-page documents in B&W or color (even double-sided) to individual JPEG's PDF's right from within the printer's sheet feeder itself, and have them uploaded via SAMBA or SFTP. I'm sure the very large enterprise printers/copiers/etc can probably do this with for multiple accounts as well, so that each user on an entire floor could scan directly into their own incoming directory.
I've been a hacker long before I've become a lawyer. Started programming at 10, lived and breathed computers, grew up online.
Actually, it was hard for me to adjust to becoming a lawyer, but I succeeded somehow.
I'm a hacker by birth, life led me to law. Most of my computer geek symptoms disappeared after working as a lawyer for a couple of years. Now I'm just a lawyer who was a computer hacker in a previous life.
I'm principally a transactional attorney. The one piece of software that keeps me tied to Windows in addition to Word is Workshare Compare. To my astonishment, even after jacking prices after the recent acquisition by Litera, there is literally no substitute for elegantly and cleanly preparing redlines. This cannot be that difficult. Somebody build a competitor!
Word's built in compare feature works fine these days, in my experience. It handles changes/moves pretty well now too. Assuming your employer has a recent version of Word, not an ancient one because that's what works with all of their wierd doc formatting macros.
Not a lawyer. Zoom client on Linux works and is IMO more reliable (e.g. doesn't BSOD me) than windows, about the same reliability on Mac.
Teams is unreliable on every platform (having used it for years on Linux, Mac, Win). Would recommend against it.
Clearing documents metadata in Libreoffice, yes. It existed as far back as 7 years ago when I was running my own company, and my lawyers and I would be exchanging documents with potential investors.
This said, I also (when needed) run windows 10 in a kvm window, with Office installed, when libreoffice, or office365 is simply inadequate. This is ... rare. I mostly boot the kvm to patch it these days. Haven't needed its capabilities in at least a year (then again, I am not a lawyer).
Dongles (yubi-key, etc) all work great on Linux/Mac. YMMV though, if they aren't common systems. Again, you can run windows on a VM, and pass through that specific port (USB, etc.). It works, though sometimes the software is buggy so that it sends a reset, and you have to unplug/replug the dongle. This is from my Yubi-key experience on my windows kvm running on my linux laptop.
Agreed, if a Windows machine is BSOD'ing then it's almost always a hardware issue: usually RAM or the video card.
On the note of stability, at my old (pre-COVID) gig, the brand new top-of-the-line Mac computers were the least stable computers we used; they'd regularly crash during video editing and couldn't be trusted for live-streaming our events. For live-streaming, they used Windows or nix computers (depending on the function). All of our broadcast partners used Windows or *nix computers as well.
I'm not the only one at my co that has experienced it BSODing. Windows generally BSODs on work machine at least once a week. Windows 10 patched monthly, locked down as hard as a machine can be under Windows.
30 plus years of Windows tech has taught me not to trust it with anything important.
If you have a system that is experiencing BSODs on the order of once a week, you have a _serious_ problem that is absolutely atypical of normal Windows behavior.
Blaming the operating system hasn't brought you to a solution, perhaps the issue lies elsewhere.
I don't think you understand how enterprise managed windows machines work. They come full of very intrusive tooling and usually custom built windows images.
Dell on the other hand - on of the largest suppliers of enterprise PCs - offers no warranties for any custom image Windows machines even if they use Dell official driver bundles.
I once came into a Windows Enterprise shop with the same arrogance and thought I could easily fix their issues, but I was proven wrong. You're welcome to try it yourself.
I don't directly deal with Windows desktops but am directly responsible for an estate which includes north of 40k Windows Server systems. As a result, I do have a pretty solid handle on managing Windows at scale (at least in the datacenter). We don't see a BSOD a week across that entire estate, let alone a single system.
BSODs are a sign that something is SERIOUSLY WRONG. Usually, failing hardware or sometimes shitty drivers. Almost never is it a sign of something fundamentally wrong with the operating system itself.
Or they're simply running Blender. I had a tonne of BSoDs when running Blender back when I ran Windows. It probably exposed some bug in the NVIDIA driver or something
Basically all of these things are teething problems. The early adopters have problems, the problems get solved, then they're solved for everybody.
What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine and proprietary systems increasingly moving your documents to The Cloud, often without telling you or making it obvious that it's happening.
That could drive early adoption by law firms that don't want to be the first to get burned by that.
> Basically all of these things are teething problems. The early adopters have problems, the problems get solved, then they're solved for everybody
It's not just teething problems.
Using OpenOffice and Linux means that you're opting out of the substantial ecosystem of legal-specific Word add-ins - document templates for court filings, semantic analysis for contracts, metadata scrubbing, etc. Most of these tools are only available for Windows although some of them support Macs. A small practice can get away with using Linux but a large firm would be foolish to do so.
Those are the teething problems. Somebody has to convert the templates or make it so LibreOffice supports them. The early adopters have to deal with that, but then it's done.
A lot of that also isn't as hard as you would think. Semantic analysis is looking at text. That isn't likely to be Word-specific and the author could plausibly add support for plain text files in an afternoon, if it isn't already present.
“What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine”
Not really. If I take a file to Kinkos to get copied, it’s still privileged.
Contrary to the thinking of many technophiles, for almost every “How is the law going to deal with X technology?” there are useful analogies that were figured out decades ago.
> Not really. If I take a file to Kinkos to get copied, it’s still privileged.
What happens if you take a file to Kinkos to get copied and don't notice that the service agreement allows them to keep a copy of it and sell the contents to third parties or use it for advertising?
Then the other side gets to argue that everybody knows or should have known that The Cloud works like that, and accuse you of doing it intentionally because you wanted the cost savings or convenience of the product with those terms.
Also, "jurisdictions vary" can be quite a relevant caveat for all the people in the jurisdictions that vary.
Maybe so. But your client will still be pissed that, from their perspective, your carelessness put them at risk. In my practice, it would be a disaster for this question to even arise.
I'm a regulatory lawyer working in telecom and commercial space policy, though I'm not sure it's my practice area that's primarily driving my thinking here. (Though it may also be true that, since I am not primarily a litigator, I have different confidentiality concerns in mind that some other lawyers. My firm and I do take these issues very very very seriously--perhaps in ways that would be impractical for a different firm in a different area of practice.)
Although I'm certainly aware of the proliferation of outsourced doc review and e-discovery, I would hope that the firms using these services are reviewing their agreements with these providers to make absolutely sure that they do not include language like GP posited: that they may "keep a copy of it and sell the contents to third parties or use it for advertising." Whatever the implications may be for attorney-client privilege, this also creates a risk of actual disclosure to hostile third parties, which would be a huge issue if you were working on anything commercially sensitive.
I'd also note that, depending on one's practice, you might also find yourself adverse to national governments. That creates a whole new risk profile with respect to could-hosted document management services, etc.
I worked for one of the online legal databases for several years. They had a Windows desktop app in addition to the website for accessing content.
I managed to get the desktop app working in Linux after messing with Wine and permissions (it had some cache files written to a relative directory and what not) and after telling management about it they figured the potential market for such a thing would be small enough that they could just send any support requests about it directly to me for setup help, and likewise tell the sales reps to forward inquiries to me if Linux came up on a sale or demo install.
In the decade I worked there I got exactly one call from a Linux admin at a law firm asking for the docs on using the desktop app.
He says it has worked for him so far--with only minor issues.
Personally, in that situation, if I really didn't want to use Windows for everything (and I've barely used Windows for the past 10 years), I'd probably get a Windows system for running Word and any other necessary Windows software and have my computer system of choice for everything else. In the grand scheme of things, computers are cheap these days.
(Or as someone else commented, run Windows in a VM. Though I might consider even that to be potentially unpredictable as a platform that my entire business essentially depended on.)
> He says it has worked for him so far--with only minor issues.
I'd say the same about Word. Mostly fine, but some minor issues, usually linked with auto-numbering getting in a fluster, or deciding to turn all the numbering into black blocks.
But I definitely prefer Word's flexibility for displaying tracked changes.
I mostly use Google Docs these days and, in general, I'm a fan of how it's focused on the 90-95% use case. But every now and then I run into something it just can't do or that it does relatively poorly. (Revision tracking from multiple people in particular, complex section breaks of various kinds, doubtless other things.)
Textmaker by Softmaker Office is a 100% Word-compatible Linux native word processor with mark-up. And much cheaper than Word. There's a Window version as well.
> But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track changes/comments. I even stumble upon bugs in MS Word while working on such documents.
I stumble on bugs in Word Online with far, far fewer participants (e.g. 2).
> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point?
If your goal is to run Linux as your host OS, then it solves the problem of not being able to do X with software Y
You can do everything else in Linux, including looking for alternatives
You can copy/paste files from host/guest, including sharing clipboard
Also using a VM helps you fixes in time your windows install, problems? bugs? shitty updates? destroy that VM image and swap with a copy of the install one, BOOM you are in power
Docker and QEMU stories are the proof that having choice frees and empowers everyone, enables countless of possibilities and options, who would have thought
>Most peoples’ goal at work is to do their job, not run Linux as their host OS.
This. I spent six years doing IT infrastructure for a large law firm (~1000 lawyers+2000 support staff).
Legal services are pretty much the same as other professional services (I spent 12 years consulting too), where the goal is to maximize utilization and realization[0].
As has been mentioned by others in this discussion, the work product of lawyers are mostly documents (actual in court activities are a tiny proportion of the work that lawyers do), and in a firm of more than a few people, documents are almost always worked on collaboratively.
There's an entire ecosystem of tools and applications that support such document production, including collaborative redlining tools, document management systems, legal citation tools, workflow management systems and a raft of other tools/systems that enable efficient development, editing and distribution of attorney work product.
Those systems are primarily Windows-based, many of which are Word plugins, and attempting to integrate them all -- even in an all Windows environment -- is challenging.
In fact, until 15 years ago or so, WordPerfect was the tool of choice for most law firms. And migrating to Word was incredibly painful without any changes to the underlying OS.
That said, most of the systems I implemented ran on Linux or BSD, as they were network support platforms (change management, logging/monitoring tools, authn/authz platforms and Internet-facing applications).
However, attempting to move an existing law firm of more than a couple lawyers from the existing ecosystem to one that runs on Linux would be folly. Because of the lack of tooling in the Linux environment (e.g., try running a software development shop using only Nintendo Switches), and, more importantly, the loss of billable hours fighting with such an environment.
There are lots of other issues, but I just tried to hit the high points.
Could Linux be a good platform for law firms? Absolutely. But the workflow and tooling that exists in the Windows environment would need to be replicated first.
It's a chicken and egg problem -- why would legal software developers write code for Linux when the entire ecosystem is based on Windows? And why would law firms use Linux when the tools they require to generate revenue don't exist on Linux?
> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point?
"Your honor, with all of the evidence we've leveled today, my client would like to motio- hold on, what's this? Wait, no I didn't tell you to install updates now! Cancel, cancel, does anyone here know how to stop a Windows update?"
It happens all the time. In the middle of medical malpractice cases, divorce cases, murder cases - a virus update, an acrobat update, an email notification, etc. Everybody deals.
My favorite was at a hearing where opposing counsel had printed off that morning a copy of a letter he felt was dispositive. Word automatically "update(d) fields" and so the six-month old letter bore the date of the hearing. The judge didn't understand the concept and said the letter could not possibly be accurate; what other content was changed? His motion was denied. Thank you, Word!
Non sequitur - Step 1 with a new Word install should be to uncheck the “Ignore All-Caps Words” in the spellcheck settings. Works well in minimizing section heading faux pas.
> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point?
Precisely. When I was new to Linux, trying to figure out how to do things, I was inundated with people telling me to just dual boot or run a VM. The whole point of switching was to be free of other systems.
There is something to be said about writing a considered response rather than a postcard-type reply to an email. The practice has (out of court, at least) and that has affected the quality of the work.
Short version, IIRC: Microsoft made MS-DOS, but their application software offerings for MS-DOS (Word, Works) were not compelling enough; other vendors had that market (WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony) pretty much sewn up. Then came Microsoft Windows. Other companies did not want to spend huge amounts of resources porting their applications to what was essentially a niche Microsoft add-on on top of MS-DOS. Microsoft, on the other hand, had every reason to bet big on their own product, and they invested massively in porting their own software to Windows. Then, when Windows became popular, all other application software vendors were way behind in producing reasonable graphical Windows versions of their software, except Microsoft, who gained a massive user base of the Windows versions of their programs, since they were much better in the Windows environment than everything else. Microsoft used this advantage to stay on top of the PC market for years, and arguably still do.
> back in the 80s, law firms were in love with WordPerfect for some reason. When did the switch occur from WP to Word, and why?
When my then-law firm was switching from MS-DOS to Windows, I was on the committee that was deciding: WordPerfect for Windows, or Microsoft Word? Some said "WP, of course, because it's the standard for law firms." My response: Who gives a [hoot] what other firms are doing - we exchange a lot of documents with clients, so what are they doing? That made the answer obvious: Word.
I would strongly disagree with you on the "works well" part.
(it is hell on earth on a wayland machine. It can't screenshare unless you're on gnome or something, and on sway it seems to have a 50% chance of crashing every time it opens a meeting.)
On the other hand, the web version is coming along nicely. I may uninstall the desktop app since it's such a PITA.
PopOS! Gnome & Wayland. Native Zoom works very well. Never crashes. And finally has virtual backgrounds.
Only issue is Firefox windows are invisible when screen sharing, so I use Chromium for those sessions if I need to show a browser.
I also would think that Libre Office just wouldn’t cut it with all the track changes. It’s a bit of a shame that the industry is so cemented to Word, git is 1000 times superior than track changes IMO. But I understand that git has a bit of a technical hurdle that a lot of lawyers might struggle with.
I am not a lawyer, and don’t work in law. I was just observing how that industry is cemented to Word. I personally hardly ever use word, and have no need for a Linux replacement for Word. My work is all plain text mostly in sublime or vim.
Why not latex and track changes? I already know the answer of course, but it's interesting how much of this type of thing is 'cultural' and institutional momentum.
TeX and any derivatives aren't WYSIWYG. People (non-tech and even some in tech) don't want to write code to generate their document. They want to pull up Word, type some stuff, click the table button or something, and go on their merry way.
If there's an issue on page 45 of the printed document, they know exactly where that is in Word due to it being WYSIWYG. In TeX, it's not that simple.
TeX is extremely powerful. I love it (although it does feel a bit "hacky"), but for the majority of people, it's overkill. Word's change tracker is good enough.
LyX is available as a (almost) WYSIWYG editor for TeX. The developers actually describe it as WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) but the key point is that the user is not limited to writing raw TeX code.
Fixed pagination is not guaranteed, even in Word. Especially when you consider features like change tracking. If you want fixed pages, export to PDF.
Or the change in paper size when you send a document that has been set up for letter paper and the person receiving it has A4 as the default, not to mention different styles and German quotation marks.
If you are going that route, you might as well just use git instead of latex. Why add the complexity of latex if you can just use plain text and version control?
> But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track changes/comments.
Other industries have figured out the problem of how to allow many people to work on text based documents.
The fact that the Legal world still runs on antiquated software is because of the billable hour. Until that changes, law firms will resist any meaningful improvement to their workflow.
Similar work profile, but: MS office is a huge pain to work with. 30 pages, 3 authors, comments, revi sions, deleted images, and it often crashs.
And track changes doesn't work on tables (!)
Mind: LibreOffice is properly worse, but that doesn't change that MS office is abyssmall.
I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses and have the same issue: Word and Excel are defaults. Funders expect them and other organizations use them. Proposals typically have complicated formatting patterns other needs.
I wonder if it would be legal to offer Windows Machines as a Service. So that you connect via Remote Desktop and pay by usage ... might violate MS' TOS though.
Pretty sure you can edit most office documents in google docs via the browser without issue. Only additional step would be uploading them to Google Drive.
> Pretty sure you can edit most office documents in google docs via the browser without issue.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Using Google Docs means that you're opting out of the substantial ecosystem of legal-specific Word add-ins - document templates for court filings, semantic analysis for contracts, metadata scrubbing, etc.
if your endgame goal is solely more money and have a slave like life where you can't make any choice, then i don't think any of that matter at all anyways
but you can still save money by not being dependent on their bloated (now you need better hw) and more expensive offering (now you dependent on their bloated cloud infrastructure)
but hey, that's just my opinion, we can still have choice, right, right?
Everything is relative. It’s been a long time since I ran a Linux desktop (use it on the server plenty, though) and I could describe a “slave like life” where I had to endlessly fix driver issues, updates that broke functionality, etc etc. I expect my life would have been easier if I bought hardware specifically intended for Linux but then we’re back to “you can’t make a choice”. Linux saves money in the most straightforward sense: the software is free. But if it ends up being more work to maintain or to train people to use then it is costing you money still. Your time is worth money.
IMO it’s healthier to see pretty much every tech decision we make as boxing ourselves in some way or another. Use Windows PCs, you’re boxed into Windows. Use Linux PCs and MS cloud products, you’re boxed into MS cloud. Use Linux through and through you’re boxed into dealing with subtle LibreOffice bugs when handling documents. Which box fits you most comfortably is a matter of opinion rather than fact.
Installing drivers is a problem solved long long ago
> updates that broke functionality
that's a windows thing, shall i mention the recent windows 10 updates (they still are unable to fix the mess they created) totally breaking printing functionality?
Also you miss the point, nobody said "get stuck with linux and use nothing else"
LibreOffice? i never mentioned that
I mentioned the use of QEMU to boot what ever OS if you need run dependency X, Y or Z
When it comes to git I blame the lack of simple visual interface. All the GUIs I have seen are either horribly designed and unintuitive (often because they just duplicate git's syntax), or are unnecessarily complex and could do with a basic/advanced split UI.
For most document versioning and redlining needs, only the basic concepts are needed and correspond to common concepts: new document (init), save document (eh... commit? push?), save as (branch), open for editing (clone?), open for read-only (fetch?), and compare to other document (diff). Tracking and merging changes should be separate from those overall document actions, but are similarly congruent with git concepts. Again, the problem is presentation.
I want to jump on the hate bandwagon for MS Word, but in all honesty as long as you stay clear of "the cloud" and deal with documents locally and/or via email, it does all of these things quite well visually. It's fairly intuitive in its track changes interface. Virtually all of the complaints about numbering and formatting and pagination are due to user error -- which admittedly is often because of UI obscurity. The main thing missing is better and more visible built-in version control, but MS had SharePoint already queued up for that purpose so it makes business sense to try vendor lock in and upsell on that.
My only real pain points with Word are the severely limited reference manager, dismal attempts at a templating engine, and the crippled mail merge functionality. All of these can be scripted away or fixed with shady extensions, at the cost of IT freaking out about "dangerous macros".
Word 365 on the other hand... burn it in the fires of the hells from which it spawned.
Is Word the biggest mistake of computing ever? I get it, in 1980 when you are trying to get adoption of your obscure machine, it helps to emulate what is de vogue in the real world.
But now it's 2021, and there is zero reason anymore for anyone to "layout a letter" or similar nonsense like that. Computers are everywhere and the key to efficient processes, but we are stuck using them to make facsimiles of the World circa 1980.
I'm with you, but today most sr. attorneys & judges still print out all emails/documents to then redline. the legal field will need another 10-20 years before the foundation is present to even discuss removing Word.
if you are editing a 500 page document you should use other software for writing, perhaps use latex, and put the document in git. but i get that there are lots of lawyers who don’t want to learn any new tools. for all the other stuff you mentioned you have solutions for linux that work and conferencing software has clients these days for linux. you can use diff or visual diff tools for comparisons.
Frequently, you're dealing with passing documents between parties in different organizations, and it is not uncommon for these parties to have an adversarial relationship. You are engaging in a collaborative activity where you need to quickly be able to understand and respond to document updates and changes.
In those situations, you really cannot tell a lawyer at another firm "Here's the process you need to setup to view and edit documents. I use latex to write documents. Please track your changes in a shared repo." You'd be wasting time and getting people furious.
As the person you're responding to said:
> The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client.
> But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge.
If you're just writing documents within your organization, you can do whatever you want. But once you go outside the organization, you really need to stick to what the industry has agreed on.
It's not that lawyers aren't interested in new technology. There are a lot of great developments in legal tech. But can you imagine how your client would react if they found out the lawyer they're paying $400 an hour was spending hours trying to figure out what latex was and how to edit it effectively so they could start to modify a document while they're on a deadline?
Git (VCS in general) seems like this absurd accidental secret of our profession.
I use Fusion360 occasionally for hobby stuff, and its version 'control' is a joke, it's unfathomable to me how (especially since they're fellow engineers, technical people!) people can use and collaborate with it to build serious stuff.
I think there's a lot of money to be made and a potential huge turning point in end user software for figuring out 'git for non-technical users'. People will argue it's not even good for SEs (I happen to like it) UI sucks etc. but that's not the point, it's fine, GUIs exist, that'd be an easy problem if everything was stored in plaintext. The key will be in figuring out how you make it attractive to people building software for such users, that they want to use your VCS mechanism, that it's easy to do so and doesn't require plaintext diff-sane on disk format (if they wanted/were willing to do that they would already and git would be fine).
Perhaps some kind of CRDT (or similar) based collaboration/storage/version control service, with APIs such that you can have whatever proprietary format you want on top of it, but under the hood it handles sync, multi-user, merges, reversions, rebases, cherry-picks, diffs, etc.
Attorneys don’t use Git, but they do use version control software. Examples are NetDocs, iManage, and even GDrive/Box/Dropbox (which are also document management systems). It largely depends on the firm.
There are some differences between what they need and what software engineers need.
Lawyers will sometimes use version control as layers in a release system, almost like development/staging/production (where production is the final executed copy). So version 1 will be the form, and version 2 will be the draft, etc.
Other times they will use it in a similar manner to engineers. But the top version is the working copy, and once they are satisfied with that draft they will version up.
Engineers use git to track changes and revert changes, but attorneys do not typically need to revert and once a document is executed, prior drafts aren’t really that important.
So there are fundamental differences between how lawyers and engineers look at version control.
It would be pretty nifty if attorneys/clients could collaborate using a version control system, but it’s hard enough to get attorneys to try any tool let alone a group of attorneys, so it would be a real stroke of luck to wedge yourself in here successfully.
Background: made a document management system for a law firm.
> attorneys do not typically need to revert and once a document is executed, prior drafts aren’t really that important.
this isn't 100% true. lawyers very much care about changes in legal codes over time. its incredibly time consuming to do historical legal research given how legal code changes are recorded. strike paragraph 5, insert 'foo' in section 5.3.1. etc.
There's a plethora of opportunity for version control for almost every other domain. The technology is already there. The key to winning the market is in process change and sales/distribution.
If your product would be made better by version control, Fossil works really well as a white label VCS mechanism. It is BSD licensed, and the repository is just a sqlite db. While it has basic UI, ticketing, and collaboration tools no one says you have to use it. I have seen it used where a fully custom UI with proprietary diff tools was provided instead of the default setup.
i've used fusion 360 professionally and version control was terrible, and i bet it still is. it was a huge pain using it on a professional project although it holds a lot of promise. the teams working on it were just cranking out more bullshit features like ipad support and 3d printing instead of fixing key issues like version control, part reuse workflows, constraints causing crashes, and general performance issues with large (realistic) product assemblies.
subversion with turtoiseSVN worked well for me and was perfect in that it was version control for newbies. until I was forced to use git because it was the hot new thing. no real reason for me to use git, but there you go.
I was and I am still involved with a data science project with daily intake of about 100GB. I contemplated learning and using python and in the end just used C++ with the GNU scientific library. I can easily handle these datasets. I'm not convinced that would have been possible with python.
I have written several 500 page documents in libreoffice both as sole author and as one of two or three primary contributors. It works quite well because it is easy to define styles and virtually never apply direct formatting. There would no doubt need to be a plugin to force this behavior in a large group. Multiple Indices and Tables of Contents were also well supported. More advanced tooling can still be used since it is an xml based file format (like MS office at this point I believe). For example I could write a complex regex to create different rules for applying an index without too much fuss. On most or all of those docs I was collaborating with others (editors etc) using track changes. It worked fine for us. But that was always under a dozen people in the group. There are various simple odt to git solutions available.
Now I am not necessarily advocating this path, but we were philosophically opinionated on this point in our groups, so we were happy to do it.
Latex is not excellent for authoring, although I understand it can be a necessary evil for documents with a lot of formulas or other difficult to format constructs. There is a lot to be said for the simplicity of a WYSIWYG editor when writing, so you can focus cleanly on the content you are trying to write.
> It works quite well because it is easy to define styles and virtually never apply direct formatting.
This is one of the biggest mistakes people make in using Microsoft Office. It has an outstanding style/formatting system in, yet people will still manually mark up headers and whatnot, and then get frustrated when piled-up syntax changes have unexpected results.
Define the styles and apply the styles and it works GREAT. Especially in a large document when you want to change the style later on.
Styles? Not exactly. Unless the people you're sharing the document with have the same defined styles, your "normal" won't look like theirs, nor will their "body" look like yours, never mind headings, where H1 can look like H2 which looks nothing like what you've got.
I am wondering: did you do such a thing before in real life? Like a joint grant proposal with a few people and like 20-40 pages? How did the git work flow work in practice?
Come on, let's be realistic, what's the chance of that happening? The network effects are enormous, that's like saying "just don't use javascript lmao".
Even in tech companies most of the non-technical staff works with MS Office.
French/Iranian lawyer here. Moved to Linux 5 years ago (from OS X) because Apple kept changing my workflow and suppressing functionality.
Libre office proved to be better than Mac Word (better support for Persian and so called complex languages) and than windows word (could open old word documents that word itself couldn’t open any more!).
Regarding ScanSnap, I replaced it with a Brother multifunctional printer that scans to an sftp folder which is watched by ocrmypdf. I get to one touch scan a document without logging in a computer. When I need the document it’s there for me as an OCRed and cleaned PDF. Super convenient.
Replaced Word with latex. Our contracts are generated with latex and smart: they check themselves up for coherency when the pdf is built.
Overall no driver problem but you need to check before buying peripherals that they will be compatible with Linux.
Updating the system is as easy as it could be. Installing software is a breeze with ‘yay’. Arch Linux is very well documented and when encountering a hurdle chances are that the solution is already in the wiki.
On the server side, CentOS proved super stable and a welcomed improvement over OSX server which terribly lacked documentation.
Running such a setup would seem to require a professional level of competence in systems administration. Do you find it challenging to maintain that alongside your legal expertise?
It is an investment in time and knowledge. But you know that your investment will not be wiped out because it doesn’t fit any more in Apple’s or Microsoft’s business plan. My workflow has become very stable since my switch to linux and opensource. Sure the software has quirks but you can always find workarounds. When I used Windows, I remember that I needed more clicks to do the same thing with every new version as Microsoft buried functionality in successive layers of UI. All in all I would say that I’m much more productive when working on a case, at the expense of spending some of my free time learning sysadmin, emacs, latex, etc. But it’s fun and I love it. You definitely need to have a level of interest in tech to go all linux in your firm.
Not a lawyer, but once you've acquired that knowledge, you have it forever. It's not like LaTeX changes very often (unlike, for example, Microsoft Word)
LaTeX is great for typesetting documents; easy to work with autonumbering, even nested and subnested lists. There's even a Koma-script package for legal documents (jura). But Word does a better job of redlining. And it is the standard, though there are a few offices that still use Wordperfect for the "Reveal Codes" feature. If your output is paper or a paper substitute like pdf, you can use any word processor. But if you need to collaborate, you need a 100% compatible Word processor. On Linux, it's Softmaker Gmbh's Textmaker. 100% compatible and a lot cheaper than Word. Odd that no one has mentioned it.
Microsoft Word is also quite stable, certainly in terms of functionality and especially backwards compatibility. They know how much money they make just from the immense inertia of being in the lead for 30+ years, and they don't kill off that golden goose.
You might try Mellel, which has baked-in right-left language support. (You'd probably have to buy it from France though). I haven't tested its collaboration feature, but if you want to switch from L-R to R-L, Mellel is your friend.
Another lawyer here. I've been successfully running Ubuntu for my practice for the past five years. Currently on 21.10. Crossover Office takes care of the Word problem but I mostly use LibreOffice. Word is useful for appellate briefs and Table of Authorities. For Crossover, I need to be in X11, not Wayland. Otherwise, it's entirely boring and seamless. Brother ADS-1700W scanner works with Document Scanner. Thunderbird 91 is great for encrypted email. It's really not an inconvenience to use Ubuntu in an office.
The last time I had a problem with LibreOffice reformatting an important Word document, the issue were the fonts. In my case, installing the "wine-*-fonts-system" (times new roman, tahoma, wingdings) packages was enough to make LibreOffice format that document correctly; another option would have been to copy the original fonts from a Windows install.
A long time ago I was using linux and created my resume in Libreoffice and sent it to various job postings as a Word doc. Never had any luck.
Then years later I learned that what looked perfect (my resume) in Libreoffice looked pretty terrible when opened with official MS Word. I always wondered if that impacted my application. A guy that couldn't bother to format his resume appropriately.
>I learned long ago to never send an editable format to anyone who's not going to edit it.
I'd go further and say not to send an editable format to someone (read: recruiters) who is going to edit it. Too many times, I've gone to an interview and the interviewer's copy of my resume has been modified (not just names/contact info, but skills and experience) by a recruiter.
Which is why I always bring hard copies of my resume to an interview.
Of course, clients never know the facts as well as the lawyers.
And lawyers never make mistakes for clients to edit.
Yesterday I saw a document which claimed that a security agent had made available a $20 million dollar facility.
The term they wanted--and would have corrected, was "Lender."
There are a few programs that let you edit pdf's: Flexipdf is one of them. Otherwise, you get a paper copy with edits, or worse, an email with references to lines, which you can't correct because then the pagination changes.
It's still much easier to create a cross-platform PDF that works on any device, than writing a document in LibreOffice and expect it to be 100% interoperable with Word, and viceversa.
In fact, I haven't created a broken PDF on any operating system in 15 years. Font embedding in PDFs is a solved problem.
I stopped sending word documents to our clients when one client silently changed a section of a document without telling me (he disabled tracking changes for that part of the document). The document was then rejected by the clerk because of that. As I was there I convinced the clerk to let me make manual amendments to the document with my good old pen and made it go through. I had to let the client know about the change to make sure he would accept it. I was surprised that he blamed me for the situation… Switched to pdf. Stopped the hypocrisy.
I've used GNU/Linux in large, Windows/Mac dependent companies for 25 years. You need to convince the IT-department, and you need to survive the first week learning how to connect to whatever system is in place, but after that, it's free of incidents to the point of being boring.
My advice for convincing the IT-department is to pick something that is known to be very secure and stable. I use Debian Stable.
My advice for the first week is to initially use the web interfaces for printers, e-mail etc. Move onto native solutions at your own pace.
When somebody tells you how GNU/Linux isn't good enough, 99 times out of a 100, it is someone who has limited actual hands-on experience, or someone who is a bit insecure and territorial about the Windows/Mac systems that he does know. Ask them how they know, and tell them you will look into the specific issues they mention. Return later and show them what you have found.
Word documents cause problems in Windows/Mac contexts too, constantly, so don't fret if you run into trouble. In addition to Libreoffice, a very quick way to deal with small inconsistencies in layout is to use pandoc with a template word-file. Basically, export a new word-file from your old one, using the template to strip the inconsistencies away.
Aim to learn Bash and regexp, at least to some degree. It can save you a ton of time.
GNU/Linux has fantastic tools for working with pdfs, comparing files of various kinds, quickly find information in a large file system and many other things. They evolve all the time. Make it a habit to check how others handle the same task you handle. Perhaps they have found a new and even better way?
Gradually start using Emacs Org-mode. There is nothing that compares.
Because that also gives you all the problems of having a Windows machine at the bottom (so to speak): bloat, intrusive updates, bugs, viruses etc. And the IT-department will constantly be on your ass with some new configuration and program that they have decided is what you need :). If you want to combine Windows tools with GNU/Linux, having the latter at the bottom is a way better solution imo.
I guess it depends on the firm and what they do, but MS Word, with "track changes" and exchanging red-lined passages of text in a contract seems really common. I don't see that working well across law firms, without using MS Word.
I was thinking about Windows/macOS being the standard choice for most folks. Nowadays, people that mainly use the browser for their work/life stuff could just use some Linux distro like Ubuntu.
The standard choice for standard people should probably become an easy to use Linux distro.
Unfortunately, Chrome OS prioritizes simplicity over functionality, so most of the non-technical users I talk to complain that it's not enough to replace windows.
Something like Ubuntu with a really good wine interface would be much more valuable to the average user.
I thought most non programmers usually use: email, chat, some ERP, some CMS, spreadhseets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets, some word processing software and maybe some project management tool like Jira (it seems to starting to be adopted outside of IT).
It seems that every company has some data in ERP and few various other databases, but then there are hundreds of various Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. I think there are decent Word replacements (but can they really work in a browser when the documents have more than dew pages?), but Im not convinced that Excel has anything good enough (I tried few). Google sheets probably is the best alternative due to its multi-user features, but I dont think it is a good daily driver: too laggy with big files, also problematic when one file collects data from other files.
Maybe I am a bit skewed, but it seems most work is more Excel heavy: lists, lists, lists of everything.
On a side note MS could make Excel so much better in few areas.
Also "downloading something from ERP to Excel, reworking it and uploading back" is something that seems to happen in most companies that I know (as long as they have an ERP, or even financial software).
There is a lot of money for some better Acess replacement though. Lots of companies need small databases, but it is hard to build them for non programmers. That's why "excel as a database"..
Where I work (US Department of Defense), we depend on PowerPoint more than anything. We recently got O365 which includes the PowerPoint web application, but the web application is still very weak compared to the desktop application. Anything beyond editing some text on a slide, or creating a very simple (mostly text) slide, in the web application is just horrible if not impossible. This is really a shame, because the ability for multiple people to open a PowerPoint file in O365 and do simultaneous editing is an amazing leap forward. Version control has always been a problem for us as we endlessly email PowerPoint files back and forth, or store them on SharePoint or simple file servers.
I've mostly used LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that) on my personal machine at home, but I wouldn't dare depend on it to handle the complex PowerPoint files that we pass around at work.
Edited to add: I guess we equally depend on fillable PDFs (often digitally signed with our smart cards). For that, I gave up on trying to find a good native solution in Linux after Adobe stopped making Acrobat Reader available in 2013.
Browser is the new X-Windows/telnet thin client, the OS is meaningless.
Problem is that those kind of people will also buy a hardware XYZ at the shopping mall and the experience won't be like on Windows/macOS when they plug it at home.
I remember reading something like that a few years back on Reddit.
I always was a bit confused why would office tasks require a windows installation with office on it until i saw how unnecessarily tightly some tasks and tools are coupled with microsoft stack.
IIRC, UNIX started at Bell Labs as a legal document processing system. However, this was just an excuse for Ritchie to work on a game he liked on Multics
Wasn't it Ken Thompson who did the game thing? I mean, I know they worked it all out together but I thought it was Ken who wanted to do the Space Travel game...
That's what I was thinking as well. There's also an interview somewhere on YouTube with Ken Thompson talking about this game and he goes off on a bit of a tangent talking about it. Really fun to hear him talk about it.
Yeah, seems they had a lot of fun with it and at the same time they were making history. It's a great story! I've always been quite fascinated by computer history, Unix history in particular.
This is a late reply, but I'd check out Unix: A History and Memoir by Brian Kernighan. It came out late 2019 and it was his recount of what Bell Labs and Unix was like in the early days. So much neat history there - I highly recommend that book.
This is nice but I have suggestions and questions.
Case management. I use "cliniccases" which does most of the work but it is geared towards law clinics and does not have "billing". That can be improved but that's something.
What do you use for crm ? Is that self hosted too ?
There are softwares like cryptpad that solves collaborative editing problem for those used to google docs.
I use mailinabox for my emails and that has been quite great.
Libreoffice all the way. It has improved immensely. The import export to docx is becoming better and better.
I use a network shared drive to host all clients data, working papers and such. I have been thinking of " nextcloud" but I do not see the benefit.
> I have been thinking of "nextcloud" but I do not see the benefit.
Nextcloud does a lot and supports "apps" for things like Google Docs-style editors in the browser. You can even do encrypted messaging, voice, and video chat with it. More here: https://apps.nextcloud.com/
If all you need is network storage, it's definitely overkill.
I would love to do this at the small firm I work for. The biggest problem is the attorneys and staff not willing to learn new systems or methods. It is not a software capability or compatibility problem.
I remember working as a Systems Analyst for city government. It was always super hard to predict who would and wouldn't like change. for the most part it didn't matter what the change was, they either had an affinity for it or not.
Our 70-odd year old archivist learned how to use the new OCR software and was ingesting tax documents faster than with the old system in under a week. The 30 year old finance guys would dig their heels in. The mayor always followed instructions, the city manager had no clue how computers actually worked but had no clue they had no clue. You just never know.
I guess I might have to try using Libreoffice again.
Then again, I haven't made a "document" on anything but Google Docs for a pretty long time. If I'm writing for my website, I'm usually physically writing or using Docs so I can have it on my phone to fiddle with when I get a random minute. After that I'll transfer to markdown directly on my server.
Does anyone know a reasonable way to edit text files from a server on mobile? I'm looking for the lowest friction possible, but I don't mind editing raw text files (in fact I prefer it).
I find the Markor app (open source) great for editing text files, you can also customize it quite a bit. Then for uploading possibly syncthing would work.
(I do this to sync my text files between my PC and phone, works great)
Interesting to see the blogger is using what seems to be an HP tablet with debian. [EDIT: No, it's a surface pro 6, thanks for the correction!] I switched from a mac to an HP Elite X2 G4 running linux and while it took some setup most things work pretty fine and am happy it's a bit easier to open up and repair compared to other tablets.
Most of my concerns before switching have been less around software development but the administrivia - screen recording, surfing/organizing files, etc. - I keep a spreadsheet around such workflows here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3... .
I kept an old macbook around to help with the transition but the last time I needed it was for screenrecording (OBS has some wayland issues causing slow framerates) and browser testing.
I think one thing important to not overlook is the value of HTML templating systems. I was exploring using Hugo for creating legal documents, and each paper and form can easily be populated using frontmatter. HTML is a lot more friendly for making legal documents than Word IMO, and can be exported to PDF all the same.
Silly but honest question: why hasn't google docs taken over the legal world?
I find g suite's collaborative editing waaay better than sending around docx/xlsx files with dates in the filenames.. and don't even get me started with that office365 thing.
Google can and will cancel your account for a host of reasons and there is no recourse, no customer service and when that happens, you're out of luck. You don't have control over your documents and the Bar mandates that you do. Of course, you can back everything up, but then why use Google in the first place.
AFAIK, MS Office has had multi-user coauthoring for a while, even between their (free) online apps and the desktop apps. I know I've used it in Word for sure, not sure about Excel or PowerPoint. It's actually pretty good, though I still wish MS would launch a Linux native version of Office (the web Word is good enough for reading and making small changes but not really for daily driving).
Google Docs do not have the 1:1 feature parity as Word and LibreOffice. Law Firms are particular with their documents and templates. It have to be consistent across word processors which Google Docs lack. Google Docs is a ultra-lite version of Word/LibreOffice.
Workplace collaborative editing is superior, you are right. At the same time, it lacks a lot of thing in other way.
I can understand not wanting sensitive documents in the cloud. It's also way too easy to share Google docs (good for collaboration, bad for confidentiality).
I'm more surprised something like LibreOffice or Emacs Org-Mode hasn't taken over. You'd think lawyers would want to truly 'own' the software they use for sensitive documents and not rely on a company who may or may not have spyware in the software.
Perhaps because of confidentiality? Lawyers would best understand the pros and cons of Google's Terms and conditions, and are probably the only one who read it.
The scenario from the post is acceptable only because it is running on a Mac Mini running Linux. If it were running on any non-Apple hardware it would not be permissible -- even if he bought an Mac Mini and never used to attempt to "buy a seat", because the Apple license states:
"The grants set forth in this License do not permit you to, and you agree not to, install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so."
Nothing like paying a $500/hr lawyer for debugging a Word table (how can I center text in a table?) or an autonumbered nested list.
Not to mention trying to figure out why a whole section doesn't appear in the ToC because "Update Table of Contents" only changed page numbers (Styles weren't used for that section).
I see you haven't been in the market for legal services recently.
Yes, Magic Circle and Silver Circle firms have IT departments and secretarial services. Barristers have nothing like that. Thirty lawyer London firms charge London rates (when they can) and don't have that secretarial back-up. Baker & McKenzie even has an office (a subsidiary) to do such work. But--this encourages the £500./hr lawyer to not learn this arcana. He moves to a firm without the backup and then guess who is charging the client for tinkering with tables (can't you just scale a table in Word? No.) or trying to add a section and subsections to a document with auto-numbering in
place; he doesn't know how to do this so futzes around and finally decides to manually add the section; looks fine on the screen until he prints--to pdf, why not?--but the new manually entered section isn't in the so carefully prepared Table of Contents, updating the table only changes the page numbers, the section isn't showing and it's not in the index either, and counsel for the seller is screaming something about a closing and the paralegal who is supposed to know these things hasn't learned auto-numbering ("learned" isn't really accurate here, "seen in practice" is the best you can hope for) and decides to fix things by making everything manual (not too hard--just convert to text and then past back) and so yes, very much yes, the £500./lawyer at the 30-member firm is definitely charging for this under the general heading of "Revising" for which there is a numerical code when the accountants send out the bill. Were the bill broken down to include "futzing with Word" then the client would refuse to pay, but the client never can get down to that level of granularity. Maybe at a three hour deposition in a dispute over fees--where if you lose, you pay for three sets of attorneys (your new, Word-savvy attorney, your old non-Word savvy attorney, and your old attorney's attorney--now its £1500/hour, by the way), but the judge will not question the non-Word savvy lawyer because he too has had to futz with Word and that is part of the legal practice that Mr. Client agreed to pay £500/hour for. And that paralegal is a fee earner, haven't you looked at a legal bill lately? Next case.
> Screensharing can be a bit iffy, but I don't need to do this often, thankfully. And, if I switch from Wayland to X11, even if just for that session, I expect it will work better.
I don't know about other chromium browsers, but you can do it on wayland compositor by enabling "WebRTC PipeWire support" flag on edge chromium.
Why would law firms want to exchange documents in a dense, opaque format like Microsoft Word anyway? Legal documents are mostly about the actual words, not all the word processing stuff that Word is about. You would think that the legal world would of come up with their own application specific format by now.
You've never worked with a law firm have you (either as a client or internally).
Two words: Tracked Changes
Everyone knows how Word tracked changes works. Especially lawyers and their clients.
Beyond the above. Formatting. Firms will have have substancial know-how in Word formatting. Sure the contract is about the words, but when you present it to the client, it is all nicely formatted in a standardised format.
It’s not just clients and nice formatting. Courts can be very specific in what they will accept. If court rules say an appellate brief can be no more than 50 pages, it damn well not be presented with more than 50 pages, and lawyers will want to use every available word they can get into that 50 pages.
Lawyers also have clients! Its sounds facetious even saying it but it’s also not that surprising to discover that an industry heavily reliant of word processing uses the market leading word processor.
But that is my point. They don't do much of any word processing from the era of Microsoft Word. They just process some text. What does Word give them that, say, a Wiki would not do faster and easier?
Emailing word processing files around strikes me as very last century.
Wiki is marked up text. So it would be translated into a document guaranteed to meet those guidelines with no extra effort. That is exactly what a wiki is for.
A template in Microsft Word already has the formatting without extra effort. Word is pretty cheap, especially for a successful law firm. Why would anyone switch?
Not really. Most lawyers never use Styles. This means ToC's are a disaster. Autonumbering not required extra effort? Try to add an item to a parent list when there are no empty lines and you are in a sub-sublist. (i.e., you're at (i) and you need to add a 4 to your 1,2,3,4 and skip the intermediate a, b, c. Good luck.
Honestly, how bad would git be for handling that? I've worked on regulations for a governing body before using git, and it was fantastic for tracking proposed changes. You just submitted a PR.
This a weird argument; It's like asking why graphic designers use Photoshop instead of coming up with their own image manipulation application. Word is literally the top-tier application for developing documents and lawyers are using it for exactly what it's designed for.
If graphic designers were collaboratively editing images where change management was critical and every pixel had to be manually inserted to generate a very specific meaning I suspect that they would come up with their own format and associated applications.
Probably not, actually. Why? They are not developers, they're artists. They will learn and use the tools available to them. If even a fraction of the effort that developers put into improving their own tools actually went into improving others', then we wouldn't be stuck with such terrible software out here in the real world. But I understood why it is more rewarding and engaging to focus inwards.
Lawyers writing documents is much less like factory composing data than you seem to think. They very much treat it like writing and editing any other kind of written composition.
Heck, a lot of lawyers actually dictate their work instead of typing themselves.
It actually reminds me of plumbing more than anything else, especially appellate briefs.
Unless and until you get the hang of dictating, your documents will be twice as long. And who is going to do this typing? Someone in Bangalore? Good luck with that.
Big law offices used to have after-hours typing pools that transcribed dictation into documents. Now they have hardware and software to do the transcription as well as staff to look it over.
If you're using Linux, you don't have to wait for Microsoft to put out Office for Linux. There is already a 100% compatible native Linux suite made by Softmaker in Germany and called Textmaker (the Word program) and Softmaker Office for the suite. (Not affiliated with the company, just a user).
Styles? Not exactly. Unless the people you're sharing the document with have the same defined styles, your "normal" won't look like theirs, nor will their "body" look like yours, never mind headings, where H1 can look like H2 which looks nothing like what you've got.
I think the online version of Microsoft Office is not as feature-complete as the offline one. That, and performance is surely worse on large documents.
No, thank you. I prefer emulated Windows native apps over web apps, and that's despite virtualisation and seamless app delivery being a giant pain in the ass for as long as I can remember. Web apps have worse latency and feature sets even if they didn't have a worse resource consumption.
I'm curious as to what scanner /needs/ MacOS. I have yet to meet a scanner that VueScan doesn't support. I'm a mild free software zealot, VueScan is such a gem that I was more than happy to pay for it. (this comment not sponsored, really!)
> I wonder if they are going to switch to GNU/Linux phones.
I've updated the post with a response and a link to some of the investigation I've done so far but, honestly, probably not - I can't make it work for my needs.
it is far more Word compliant than Libreoffice. Compatibility with MS Office is its #1 goal. It costs 80$.
I have found it to be far far more better than Libreoffice honestly. I have actually installed it in a backoffice (using Fedora) and nobody has ever had compatibility issues with MS Office till today (the other side does not even realise it)
Whenever I read an article like this („I am a CEO, I run my company on Emacs / Linux / Xyz“) I am reminded of Peter Drucker‘s book „The Effective Executive“. He distills five (?) behaviours, one of them: „Effective executives start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.“
But that doesn't seem to be as useful or relevant advice in this case, because all of these tools (or operating systems) can perform the baseline of the job (creating and sharing documents, etc.)
One might have initially lower resistance than others, but another might have better long-term results and be more efficient.
As an executive, why would you focus on making your factory be more efficient when your executive team's workflow was also inefficient?
In a law firm, the workflow essentially is the factory floor for the product being manufactured.
It may be a difficult question to answer, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be asked.
For some value of "works". I would never entrust a document longer than 20 pages to Word for editing, because I've had bad experiences. I'd much sooner deal with LaTeX, even though it is missing an easy way to do many things.
The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client.
But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track changes/comments. I even stumble upon bugs in MS Word while working on such documents.
You also need a reliable compare tool to generate redlines.
Video conferencing is also important. You may access zoom/teams through web but it won't be as convenient as the desktop client.
For an independent lawyer / small-mid sized office, linux may work. But for large companies the tooling may not be there.
For example is there an easy way to clean metadata off of documents in Libreoffice, are there any compare tools, drafting assistants etc.?
And if you're doing any litigation, the e-signature systems (dongles) also need to work reliably.