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 adopt…
> 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 o…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
Zoom’s native linux client is better than its Windows and macOS clients.
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 f…
Why not use WSL? You get all the benefits of a Windows machine (printing and whatever pre-installed software will just work) and a Linux environment.
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’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…
Zoom’s native linux client is better than its Windows and macOS clients.
It does lack several features, like the ability to rearrange the gallery view (which I believe is possible on non-Linux)
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…
People have no excuse nowadays.. MS Word? Setup QEMU and boot the VM whenever you need MS Word And look for alternatives You stuck with an OS that spy on your because you made yourself depending on their software -- I think there is a huge open market for open cloud based office suite Microsoft is stuck with their local software, we gotta be quick
So now IT have to manage and support 2 operating systems and the complexities that go along with that
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…
> 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.
I'm curious to know how you and the parent comment came about to know about HN, what an IDE is, Debian. My friends working in non tech fields wouldn't even know that something other than Windows exists.
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 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 curious to know how you and the parent comment came about to know about HN, what an IDE is, Debian. My friends working in non tech fields wouldn't even know that something other than Windows exists.
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 thought the key was to make a load of cash and/or help people with their lawyery needs
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?