Running a Law Firm on Linux
decoded.legal
decoded.legal
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 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.
My friends working in non tech fields wouldn't even know that something other than Windows exists.
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.
Definitely some if and or else, in the contracts, ... For loops are unusual though, are they not. And while true loops too
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.
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).
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'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.
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.
The Windows client has never BSODed on me. Sounds like a problem at your end.
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.
30 plus years of Windows tech has taught me not to trust it with anything important.
Blaming the operating system hasn't brought you to a solution, perhaps the issue lies elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Also, "jurisdictions vary" can be quite a relevant caveat for all the people in the jurisdictions that vary.
See generally FRE 502(b).
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.
> LibreOffice Initial release: 25 January 2011; 10 years ago
don't think it's getting solved mated
> OpenOffice.org Initial release May 2002; 19 years ago
Which itself originated as StarOffice [1]:
> StarOffice Initial release 1985; 36 years ago
Example: The OP cares about "redlines" because lawyers use that all the time and most others don't.
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.
> 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 actually! They said LibreOffice has served them perfectly well.
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.)
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 stumble on bugs in Word Online with far, far fewer participants (e.g. 2).
Confluence holds up very well.
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
And what may the alternatives be, keeping the requirements of GP in mind?
Sadly I don't think we are there yet....
I said this ^
Using QEMU solves the problem of not being able to run dependency X, blocking you from having choice ;)
Most of what many many attorneys do involves Word. 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
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?
[0] https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-importance-of-measuring-...
Why do you want to make it sound like they didn't make that choice?
If you don't want to run as your host OS, you don't
Nobody forces you anything, it's the opposite, GIVE PEOPLE CHOICE
"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?"
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.
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 still miss WordPerfect for that reason.
I don't know how many times I've had to reformat (or even completely redo) Word documents because the formatting got messed up.
In WordPerfect, it would just be <alt>-<F3>, find the offending formatting code and fix it. Et Voila!
(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.
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 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.
Fixed pagination is not guaranteed, even in Word. Especially when you consider features like change tracking. If you want fixed pages, export to PDF.
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.
Makes sense that this would be important (e.g., when comparing contract versions).
Mind: LibreOffice is properly worse, but that doesn't change that MS office is abyssmall.
Something which I am led to believe is not a character trait typically attributable to our learned friends.
I don’t really use MS Word but could Office 365 be used for this, requiring just a browser?
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.
The key is to not be depending on their format, and be open and ABLE to move away from dependency X whenever you want
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good in theory, in practice, everyone keeps doing like everyone else.
Is the new BASIC in what schools are concerned.
There are plenty of domains where it gets used.
However I bet plenty more people are doing data analysis in Excel than Python.
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.
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.
Even in tech companies most of the non-technical staff works with MS Office.
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.
Microsoft is even implementing (yet another) new UI right now:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/7/22565676/microsoft-new-off...
Merci.
Edit: Document Scanner not Scan.
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.
Every device can open PDFs and see it exactly as it should be.
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.
Edit: Fixed grammatical errors.
In fact, I haven't created a broken PDF on any operating system in 15 years. Font embedding in PDFs is a solved problem.
The documents are always converted to PDF first.
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.
You get all the benefits of a Windows machine (printing and whatever pre-installed software will just work) and a Linux environment.
More and more, it is becoming exactly that with Chrome OS.
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.
Do people even use wine for anything that's not gaming? Also nowadays Steam Proton takes care of that.
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"..
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.
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.
Found the post i saw. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9cxwhy/i_am_a_lawyer...
1. Libreoffice is still not comparable to Word 6 (circa 93).
2. Outlook - With several dozen lines of VBA, and a little customization, Outlook becomes a full blown case management system.
3. Acrobat Pro.
4. Fujitsu SnapScan - Scanner that every (smart) small firm uses. Not Twain. Linux drivers exist, but functionality isn’t there.
These are just some of the roadblocks. Maybe someday MS will release a Office for Linux.
Agree with the rest.
I mostly think Lawyers don't really care about technology (except good research tools) and billing tools.
And it can't be, because Microsoft does not allow that to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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 do this to sync my text files between my PC and phone, works great)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/ptdug1/feeling_goo...
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 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.
Workplace collaborative editing is superior, you are right. At the same time, it lacks a lot of thing in other way.
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.
Many people believe this violates the macOS license. Do you have a different read on it? https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1014.pdf
Note the parens. It's on Apple-branded hardware, so IANAL, but that's more likely to be kosher.
"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 $500/hr lawyer for debugging a Word table (how can I center text in a table?) or an autonumbered nested list.
Not to mention trying to figure out why a whole section doesn't appear in the ToC because "Update Table of Contents" only changed page numbers (Styles weren't used for that section).
I don't know about other chromium browsers, but you can do it on wayland compositor by enabling "WebRTC PipeWire support" flag on edge chromium.
Two words: Tracked Changes
Everyone knows how Word tracked changes works. Especially lawyers and their clients.
Beyond the above. Formatting. Firms will have have substancial know-how in Word formatting. Sure the contract is about the words, but when you present it to the client, it is all nicely formatted in a standardised format.
Emailing word processing files around strikes me as very last century.
Heck, a lot of lawyers actually dictate their work instead of typing themselves.
Unless and until you get the hang of dictating, your documents will be twice as long. And who is going to do this typing? Someone in Bangalore? Good luck with that.
Dictation is not an obscure thing in law offices.
> I'm struggling with a couple of bits on my mobile device, but my goal is to move away from my iPhone once I've resolved them. I'm close.
I wonder if they are going to switch to GNU/Linux phones.
I've updated the post with a response and a link to some of the investigation I've done so far but, honestly, probably not - I can't make it work for my needs.
it is far more Word compliant than Libreoffice. Compatibility with MS Office is its #1 goal. It costs 80$.
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)
Use whatever works to get the job done.
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.
I would like to read a line or two explaining how this law-firm contributes to the F/LOSS community.
I "pay" (i.e. make a financial donation) to any software development where I would have purchased commercial equivalent. It makes sense.
I didn’t spot the DE but I might have missed it because I largely skimmed the article.