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Running a Law Firm on Linux

decoded.legal

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Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#231

Post by james_in_the_uk »

hcurtiss wrote: post #212
massysett wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#232

Post by james_in_the_uk »

upofadown wrote: post #154
wvenable wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#233

Post by james_in_the_uk »

pseingatl wrote: post #215
jamesmishra wrote: post #43

Law firms often charge by the hour, right? If my law firm switches to Linux, would they bill me more hours if they run into technical issues?

OH YES THEY WOULD. 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).

At the type of firms charging those rates, fixing Word's many formatting glitches is usually done by non-fee earning staff.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#234

Post by james_in_the_uk »

beermonster wrote: post #115

has anyone here used decoded.legal? They do appear from time to time in articles on theregister. Would be tempted to try their services at some point.

I am a fellow lawyer and I have known Neil for a long time now. He is very highly qualified and impressive in action. I think you'd be in safe hands.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#235

Post by wvenable »

pseingatl wrote: post #227
wvenable wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dictation is not an obscure thing in law offices.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#236

Post by hitpointdrew »

earthscienceman wrote: post #127
terminalcommand wrote: post #13

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 chan…

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.

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?

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#237

Post by jimmygrapes »

Shicholas wrote: post #103
terminalcommand wrote: post #13

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 chan…

if only lawyers used git, sigh. fighting word is almost like fighting the system itself - some courts require filing in .doc!

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.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#238

Post by 3836293648 »

luma wrote: post #226
rjzzleep wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

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…

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

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#239

Post by tiahura »

pseingatl wrote: post #216
tiahura wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Running a Law Firm on Linux

#240

Post by themadturk »

traceroute66 wrote: post #117
upofadown wrote: post #113

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.
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