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Open Source For Lawyers?
An anonymous reader writes "Law Technology News is reporting that FOSS for large law firms and corporate counsel is starting to gain traction. There's a project called FreeEed, for the electronic discovery step in lawsuits, and there's software for the document page numbering process known as Bates stamping — affectionately called 'Bates Master' by the programmers. Are big law firms ready to accept open-source code?"
Just what lawyers need, free software because they don't bill enough to pay for software and the jobs it supplies.
Typical lawyers, want to charge you $$$ (250+ an hour) and yet spend NOTHING on the backend. They do not know the value of other people's time while over-valuing their own.
Lawyers have one of the biggest and oldest free culture ecosystems. They reuse existing arguments made by other lawyers and judges, and if necessary, modify them to fit their case.
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Just imagine how the lawyers will respond when some patent troll or monopolistic company tries to sue their favorite software out of existence.
The "Bates Master" program mentioned in the original post can be found here: http://www.batesmaster.com/ Their tag line? "Open Source - Because the best experience is the one you control."
Much of the legal profession is simply copying and pasting from books and CDs of boilerplate contracts / wills / leases / etc. They then charge $200/hr as if they typed it up themselves. Quite frankly, prior to software, a good place where Open Source would fit is with boilerplate agreements such as this.
No, they don't. That is not the legal profession; that is most likely malpractice and fraud. They charge a rate for their time, but their time is spent taking that form and customizing it to your situation, correcting the boilerplate (most boilerplates are not done incredibly well), analyzing your situation, and maybe researching a little of the relevant law if they don't know something arcane. A mother's will may need to be protected from a future divorce--the boilerplate needs changing. The law may have changed on the enforcability of covenants not to compete--the boilerplate needs changing. The lease you are writing might have an unusual term in it--the boilerplate needs changing. Anyone who uses a boilerplate for an agreement without at least re-reading it and making careful, studious changes where appropriate is not doing their job, except in some unilateral contracts where you have zero bargaining power. Anyone who charges $200/hr for the time it would have taken them to write an agreement from scratch when they did not do that is not being a professional and in all probability is breaking the law of the jurisdiction he is in in a way that can have serious consequences if he is found out.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I am an attorney, and I have made several internal stupid systems to deal with the lack of good free software for management of legal practices. There is one Italian piece of software last time I checked, but otherwise it is basically a bunch of companies that take their pound of flesh. Legal fees are expensive because in a grand sense of irony, lawyers create a parasitic culture that takes advantage of them. Look at West and Lexis. They resell government documents, and charge around 50 dollars per month for minimal access. You have to sign multi year contracts with "cost of living adjustments" of 2-7% depending. I could go on and on. I want to do something for this and if anyone is interested in making something let me know.
Wordperfect was originally written for a DataGeneral minicomputer back in 1979. It was hugely popular on minicomputers and Unix long before there was an Amiga. It was popular in the legal profession even back then.
For many years WordPerfect 5.1 was the most portable word processing document in the world.
Wordperfect fell from popularity many believe mainly because Microsoft engineered Windows beginning with W95 to prevent it from functioning correctly, particularly with printing. Novell sued in 2004, and seven years later the case is still winding through the courts. It's suspected that Novell's new owner Attachmate will accept a quiet settlement and let the WordPerfect lawsuit die. Attachmate is a privately held corporation and no information about the composition of their ownership is available.
Though Novell/Attachmate still own the lawsuit, Novell sold the product on to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect is still available in WordPerfect Office X5 from Corel, who bought the app in 1996. Microsoft invested in Corel in October of 2000. The last native Linux version, 8.1 released in 2004, didn't sell well as Linux adoption at that time was still very low. The last Linux version, 9.0, was released in 2000. Relying on Wine, performance was unsat. Some diehards still use the application. Novell also retained rights and merged the product into their own productivity suite, GroupWise, which is widely regarded as best avoided.
Way back when WordPerfect was good for its day. Since 1995 it's been an application that is uniformly rejected by its main host OS. To this day printing in WordPerfect in Windows is unreliable and quirky. Despite this, it's no longer a cross-platform application. Current versions run only on Windows now. Some think that Microsoft's investment of $135M in 2000 in a nearly-bankrupt Corel in October of 2000 might have influenced this decision somewhat. At that time Corel's founder Michael Cowpland was accused of insider trading and theft in August of 2000, an issue that was later disproved and settled when his trades were proved to be extremely ill-advised. A suspicious person might even think the accusation were an application of extreme leverage, given a decade of hindsight.
Michael Cowpland deserves his own post - an alumni of precursors to Bell Labs, Nortel Networks and others he cofounded Mitel Networks, founded Corel (which originally stood for COwpland REsearch Labs) and bought control of ZIM Labs. He did a lot of cool stuff.
I don't know what this has to do with the fine article though. WordPerfect was always a commercial application and is still. Source code has never been available, or it would have been fixed long ago.
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