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).
Running a Law Firm on Linux
201–210 of 263 posts
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It might even be damaged RAM
Or an unreliable power supply or EM interference, if it's affecting multiple machines.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#203Also 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 chan…
> 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 This is addressed in the article ac…
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.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Back in the day the $400/hr lawyer was making copies.
Today, he's trying to fix autonumbering and styles issues with Word.
Both are horribly wasteful.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#206French/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…
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.
Merci.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A wiki is hard to mail around and archive offline.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#208Libreoffice subtly reformatting the documents sent to me by my divorce lawyer was not the most fun thing let me tell you.
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.
These days you need an ATS-compatible machine-readable cv because no human being is going to see it.
Text works perfectly fine.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#209Whenever 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.“ Use whatever works to get the job done.
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.
Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a scientist I'm really tempted to ask: 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…
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.