Running a Law Firm on Linux

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.

Isn't Data Science a large percentage of Python usage?

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.

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?

Word works. Get on with the work.

Do people use browsers for their work stuff?

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"..