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!"

Comments

At my firm...

[RaboKrabekian]

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.