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Use of Open Source Software in Legal Firms?
jhenkins asks: "This is a question to all of the legal beagles out there, especially practicing lawyers and advocates. Normally there are quite a number of restrictions posed on law professionals with regards to file formats by courts etc, but I would like to know whether there are some success stories out there. It would be very interesting to get some opinions in this field, because where I come from (South Africa) this is an almost *total* M$ stronghold. The only area where I saw a really big score for Open Source is the adoption of things like Kolab for groupware and scheduling. So, do you use Open Source software in your line of work? If you do, please let me know what you use and for which purpose (things like document management, knowledge bases, word processing et al). Thanks!"
Not true anymore. Many firms have transitioned from Word Perfect to MS Word for one simple reason: their clients use Word.
I am not a lawyer, but I am a project manager the technology department as a major NYC law firm.
We're basically a Microsoft and Novell shop, and we've been trying desperately to move away from Novell. We're not in any danger of moving from Microsoft, but we have started to take a serious look at using Linux or *BSD for some of out lighter load web and file servers.
The impetus for this was Microsoft licensing. We're happy in general with Microsoft products, but law firms need a wide variety of applications, most of which we've bought third party. The problem here is that so many require or strongly recommend being on their own server (or atleast virtual server). The cost of licenses for every separate server adds up very quickly.
So we're looking at FOSS as an alternative to some of the machines that don't absolutely require Windows.
The major stumbling block is accountability. We're not prepared to start signing enterprise agreements with Red Hat unless we're going to make a major shift, and that's not happening any time soon. right now Microsoft and our software vendors can be held accountable for their software (we've been very proactive with our boxes, and have not had any significant security, virus, or spyware problems). We're concerned about who can be held accountable for FOSS solutions.
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the funky font
You couldn't import Times New Roman and whatever else into TeX? A quick Google Search shows a method for MikTeX at least.
Isn't there an open source program out there that can create files in Word format?
It's easy for a Free program to output RTF, which is in essence a character-based encoding of a Microsoft Word document. If you write RTF and name it .doc, the recipient's copy of Microsoft Word will open it, and the recipient won't know the difference.
And as for reading .doc files, OpenOffice.org can read damaged ones better than even Microsoft Word can.
The fed courts also make many of their forms available in WordPerfect format. I have never seen a downloadable form in MS Word!
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