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 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 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 that in moments when it counts. Like it or not, Word is the standard, and anyone using software that is not the standard is carrying a burden.
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.
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 curious to know how you and the parent comment came about to know about HN, what an IDE is, Debian.
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.
Keep in mind there are thousands of lawyers out there whose job is to write software patents or litigate for big tech companies. I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers not working in tech who know about tech stuff just out of curiosity, but the ones who are in tech definitely know much more than surface-level things.
Retired lawyer (from the 80s and 90s). Second career as a sysadmin now with the lofty title "enterprise architect", which in my case is more like "a senior guy who can do all kinds of stuff".
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).
With regards to the scanning issue, you could scan to FTP; new Brother workgroup MFC printers can even scan to SFTP and I'm sure other manufacturers are the same. (Note that smaller, cheaper $150 Brother lasers cannot scan to FTP/SFTP; that feature seems to be reserved for printers in the $400+ range.)
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'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'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.
Not a lawyer. Zoom client on Linux works and is IMO more reliable (e.g. doesn't BSOD me) than windows, about the same reliability on Mac.
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.
Agreed, if a Windows machine is BSOD'ing then it's almost always a hardware issue: usually RAM or the video card.
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.
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.
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 drivers. Almost never is it a sign of something fundamentally wrong with the operating system itself.
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
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 adoption by law firms that don't want to be the first to get burned by that.
> 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 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.
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.
“What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine”
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.
> Not really. If I take a file to Kinkos to get copied, it’s still privileged.
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?
Then the other side gets to argue that everybody knows or should have known that The Cloud works like that, and accuse you of doing it intentionally because you wanted the cost savings or convenience of the product with those terms.
Also, "jurisdictions vary" can be quite a relevant caveat for all the people in the jurisdictions that vary.
Maybe so. But your client will still be pissed that, from their perspective, your carelessness put them at risk. In my practice, it would be a disaster for this question to even arise.
I'm a regulatory lawyer working in telecom and commercial space policy, though I'm not sure it's my practice area that's primarily driving my thinking here. (Though it may also be true that, since I am not primarily a litigator, I have different confidentiality concerns in mind that some other lawyers. My firm and I do take these issues very very very seriously--perhaps in ways that would be impractical for a different firm in a different area of practice.)
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.
I worked for one of the online legal databases for several years. They had a Windows desktop app in addition to the website for accessing content.
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.
He says it has worked for him so far--with only minor issues.
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.)
> He says it has worked for him so far--with only minor issues.
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 mostly use Google Docs these days and, in general, I'm a fan of how it's focused on the 90-95% use case. But every now and then I run into something it just can't do or that it does relatively poorly. (Revision tracking from multiple people in particular, complex section breaks of various kinds, doubtless other things.)
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.
> 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.
I stumble on bugs in Word Online with far, far fewer participants (e.g. 2).
> 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
>Most peoples’ goal at work is to do their job, not run Linux as their host OS.
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?
> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point?
"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?"
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.
> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point?
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.
There is something to be said about writing a considered response rather than a postcard-type reply to an email. The practice has (out of court, at least) and that has affected the quality of the work.
Short version, IIRC: Microsoft made MS-DOS, but their application software offerings for MS-DOS (Word, Works) were not compelling enough; other vendors had that market (WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony) pretty much sewn up. Then came Microsoft Windows. Other companies did not want to spend huge amounts of resources porting their applications to what was essentially a niche Microsoft add-on on top of MS-DOS. Microsoft, on the other hand, had every reason to bet big on their own product, and they invested massively in porting their own software to Windows. Then, when Windows became popular, all other application software vendors were way behind in producing reasonable graphical Windows versions of their software, except Microsoft, who gained a massive user base of the Windows versions of their programs, since they were much better in the Windows environment than everything else. Microsoft used this advantage to stay on top of the PC market for years, and arguably still do.
> back in the 80s, law firms were in love with WordPerfect for some reason. When did the switch occur from WP to Word, and why?
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 would strongly disagree with you on the "works well" part.
(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.
PopOS! Gnome & Wayland. Native Zoom works very well. Never crashes. And finally has virtual backgrounds.
Only issue is Firefox windows are invisible when screen sharing, so I use Chromium for those sessions if I need to show a browser.
I also would think that Libre Office just wouldn’t cut it with all the track changes. It’s a bit of a shame that the industry is so cemented to Word, git is 1000 times superior than track changes IMO. But I understand that git has a bit of a technical hurdle that a lot of lawyers might struggle with.
I am not a lawyer, and don’t work in law. I was just observing how that industry is cemented to Word. I personally hardly ever use word, and have no need for a Linux replacement for Word. My work is all plain text mostly in sublime or vim.
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 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.
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.
Or the change in paper size when you send a document that has been set up for letter paper and the person receiving it has A4 as the default, not to mention different styles and German quotation marks.
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?
> 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.
Similar work profile, but: MS office is a huge pain to work with. 30 pages, 3 authors, comments, revi sions, deleted images, and it often crashs.
And track changes doesn't work on tables (!)
Mind: LibreOffice is properly worse, but that doesn't change that MS office is abyssmall.
I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses and have the same issue: Word and Excel are defaults. Funders expect them and other organizations use them. Proposals typically have complicated formatting patterns other needs.
I wonder if it would be legal to offer Windows Machines as a Service. So that you connect via Remote Desktop and pay by usage ... might violate MS' TOS though.
Pretty sure you can edit most office documents in google docs via the browser without issue. Only additional step would be uploading them to Google Drive.
> Pretty sure you can edit most office documents in google docs via the browser without issue.
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.
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?
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.
Installing drivers is a problem solved long long ago
> 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
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.
Is Word the biggest mistake of computing ever? I get it, in 1980 when you are trying to get adoption of your obscure machine, it helps to emulate what is de vogue in the real world.
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.
I'm with you, but today most sr. attorneys & judges still print out all emails/documents to then redline. the legal field will need another 10-20 years before the foundation is present to even discuss removing Word.
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 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?
Git (VCS in general) seems like this absurd accidental secret of our profession.
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.
Attorneys don’t use Git, but they do use version control software. Examples are NetDocs, iManage, and even GDrive/Box/Dropbox (which are also document management systems). It largely depends on the firm.
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.
> attorneys do not typically need to revert and once a document is executed, prior drafts aren’t really that important.
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.
There's a plethora of opportunity for version control for almost every other domain. The technology is already there. The key to winning the market is in process change and sales/distribution.
If your product would be made better by version control, Fossil works really well as a white label VCS mechanism. It is BSD licensed, and the repository is just a sqlite db. While it has basic UI, ticketing, and collaboration tools no one says you have to use it. I have seen it used where a fully custom UI with proprietary diff tools was provided instead of the default setup.
i've used fusion 360 professionally and version control was terrible, and i bet it still is. it was a huge pain using it on a professional project although it holds a lot of promise. the teams working on it were just cranking out more bullshit features like ipad support and 3d printing instead of fixing key issues like version control, part reuse workflows, constraints causing crashes, and general performance issues with large (realistic) product assemblies.
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.
I was and I am still involved with a data science project with daily intake of about 100GB. I contemplated learning and using python and in the end just used C++ with the GNU scientific library. I can easily handle these datasets. I'm not convinced that would have been possible with python.
I have written several 500 page documents in libreoffice both as sole author and as one of two or three primary contributors. It works quite well because it is easy to define styles and virtually never apply direct formatting. There would no doubt need to be a plugin to force this behavior in a large group. Multiple Indices and Tables of Contents were also well supported. More advanced tooling can still be used since it is an xml based file format (like MS office at this point I believe). For example I could write a complex regex to create different rules for applying an index without too much fuss. On most or all of those docs I was collaborating with others (editors etc) using track changes. It worked fine for us. But that was always under a dozen people in the group. There are various simple odt to git solutions available.
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.
> It works quite well because it is easy to define styles and virtually never apply direct formatting.
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.
Styles? Not exactly. Unless the people you're sharing the document with have the same defined styles, your "normal" won't look like theirs, nor will their "body" look like yours, never mind headings, where H1 can look like H2 which looks nothing like what you've got.
I am wondering: did you do such a thing before in real life? Like a joint grant proposal with a few people and like 20-40 pages? How did the git work flow work in practice?
Come on, let's be realistic, what's the chance of that happening? The network effects are enormous, that's like saying "just don't use javascript lmao".
Even in tech companies most of the non-technical staff works with MS Office.
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.