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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

What does "digitally interconnected" mean?

Also, out of curiosity, does the legal world still hang on to some obscure version of WordPerfect, or have they made the switch to Word?

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As of 2006 (when I left the legal tech world), the transition to Word was already well underway. Law firms hated it, but like everywhere else it was becoming The Way. And before Word, there were no "obscure" versions of WordPerfect; it was very widely used, in and out of the legal industry.

Everyone loved WordPerfect because of its ability to tune the final output. Formatting requirements for some court filings are very specific. Back in the day, it was like "12 point Courier, double spaced, no more than 50 pages in length" for appellate briefs (that's from memory, may not match the actual situation at the time) and it was important that an electronically transmitted document look alike on every machine, something that's virtually impossible to guarantee with Word.

This was in the day before print-to-PDF drivers were available, and no one was going to buy Adobe Acrobat licenses for every attorney, paralegal, secretary and word processor in the firm. Wordperfect was well-loved for a reason.

Oh yes, I used WordPerfect 5.1 myself. I even had a function key template for my keyboard. By "obscure" version, I meant some version still in use, like WordPerfect Office Professional 2021.

Thanks! Would you consider a new job? ;)

Haha, no. My law firm IT days are long over. Thinking back on it, though, with the strong antipathy many middle-aged and older attorneys had against typing, though, how they got papers written in college and law school. All those guys (and they were mostly guys) knew how to do was talk into a dictation machine; the word processing work was mostly for the womenfolk.

Sadly, true. Although things work differently these days I'd hope.

Oh, certainly. When I left the industry in 2006, attorneys younger than 40 or so were all competent computer users, though for many of them dictation was still a faster way to draft documents. They were good at email and at editing the documents coming out of the Word Processing department in realtime on the screen.

Digitally interconnected .. means a way to connect multiple sections and documents across an entire project environment. Currently with MS Word, the idea is to produce static files siloed in the 4 corners of the page. With script, you no longer write on 'paper' but in a dedicated workspace which opens doors to a wide array of 'context-aware' possibilities.

Oh, like a wiki, or Scrivener, or some other tools, but specialized for legal writing?

Yes, exactly.

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