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Lawyers Can Leave Windows for Linux OS – Ubuntu (SEOLawFirm.com)

[Posted January 13, 2011 by jake]

SEOLawFirm.com provides a perspective on switching to Linux that is a little different than those we often see. After a largely accurate, if a bit simplified, "crash course" on open source, the article shows law firms how they can save money by switching from Windows to Ubuntu—and how to use web services to replace some tools like Quicken and case management applications. "You work with the law on a daily basis. There is a good chance you did not write the law, but by the labors and efforts of others in the past, you now have the law to work with. What if you had the ability to change the law depending on the case you were working on? Does your client need additional rights? Give it to them. Does your client need a second chance? Write a process doing just that. Then contribute those changes to the legal community and other lawyers can then build upon those laws and do the same. [...] It would probably be chaotic if laws were open source, but when it comes to software, open source contributions allow technology to rapidly evolve."
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Lawyers Can Leave Windows for Linux OS – Ubuntu (SEOLawFirm.com)

Posted Jan 14, 2011 9:21 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

I was slightly disappointed to see that this is a lawyer specialised in software development. I fear we are still some way away from a time when people with no connections to development as a job or a hobby will be writing this sort of article or recommending Linux distributions.

Lawyers Can Leave Windows for Linux OS – Ubuntu (SEOLawFirm.com)

Posted Jan 14, 2011 10:44 UTC (Fri) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link]

This piece is not written by a lawyer. Instead, it's an online marketing firm specialised on lawyers as clients.

Also, they recommend switching to on-line hosting services for both client management and accounting. The thought of putting my most sensitive data in the cloud makes me shudder at the sercurity and privacy implications.
Moreover, this recommendation implies that the switch is only possible because the local machine's OS has become irrelevant in the face of web services.

My experience of switching a lawyer to Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 11:59 UTC (Fri) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link] (18 responses)

My dad is a lawyer, albeit not in the US, but in Europe, but I think it would still somewhat be applicable.

I tried to switch him to Linux - mainly because I administer his computer and Linux is what I know (I have used Linux on desktop exclusively since GTK-1, I genuinely don't know what how to deal with Windows). This was around 2006 and these are his needs and the obstacles I faced:

1) A word processor: This is the most important part of his business. I switched him easily to OpenOffice in terms of him learning the new environment. However, the problem arose when he needed to email his documents to his clients or colleagues. There were always compatibility issues when saving documents for Microsoft Word. First of all, OpenOffice could never properly deal with headers on pages - I set up his default template to use a header only on the first page (with a letterhead), but whenever he exported the document to MS format, the header would appear on all pages. This was a major pain in the ass (and the last time I checked, the bug was still not fixed). Other compatibility issues weren't that big of a problem, but still annoying to both him and me.

2) Software for accessing laws and precedents: Several companies in our country offer this software, but it's always Windows only. There was an option to run it through Wine, but he would then lose the support (and this piece of software is essential to be working and up-to-date), so I didn't pursue it.

3) Organization of documents: He doesn't use a particular piece of software for this, but rather sorts his documents in different directories. Works for him. This is actually where Linux was miles ahead of Windows. GNOME's Nautilus is actually very easy to manipulate, and at the time the concept of desktop search was growing. With Beagle & deskbar applet, his documentation manipulation got VERY easy.

4) E-mail was not a big deal. Best email clients are cross-platform anyway.

5) Every once in a while he would receive things which absolutely required Windows. E.g. some forensic images which could be opened only with a certain program, or documents with custom made encryption which require a windows software to decrypt, or even USB sticks that need a Windows machine to open them. At the time, a spare Windows machine was used for this, and now, a virtualized Windows would be utilized.

Mainly because of the special software he needed and shortcomings of OpenOffice, we decided to abandon the whole Linux migration process. He is now running Windows 7 and is very happy with it.

I think his next computer will likely be a Mac. OS X runs MS Office happily (and Apple's own office suite seems very nice too), and with virtualization, we will be able to deal with problematic software.

My experience of switching a lawyer to Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 12:38 UTC (Fri) by Wummel (guest, #7591) [Link]

You can also try virtualization on Linux. VirtualBox runs well on my box.
That would save you all the Wine stuff. Doesn't solve the OpenOffice problem though (if you don't install MS Office in the virtual machine that is).

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 13:28 UTC (Fri) by morhippo (guest, #334) [Link] (13 responses)

I am a lawyer myself and even if I only do basic text editing, openoffice cannot be used professionally if any document has to be shared with others in word format - the main gripe for me are not page headers, but loss of all dynamic references to sections when saving as DOC file.
("as defined in Section 17 below" becomes "as defined in Section Undefined Reference"). This is a loss of critical information in a contract and mistakes here could cause professional liability. Oh and kids - none of your clients will install a new office suite, if you ask them to, either they can't for security reasons or they are not willing to spend the time. You would lose every client by requesting them to install new software just to read our ODF documents.

I have notified this bug before OpenOffice 1.0 was published, there has been some progress, but instead of fixing basic functionality completely that would allow seriously considering just replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice, we get GL based effects in OpenOffice Impress, Antialiasing and other things not really essential for getting serious work done by lawyers. A bit disappointing...

I am not using linux only for my private stuff - virtualisation is not the answer, it's much easier to just use Windows or maybe MacOsX directly on the hardware instead of on top of linux, which would then only add a layer of complexity without any gains.

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 15:24 UTC (Fri) by pspinler (subscriber, #2922) [Link] (8 responses)

For the most part I sympathize with this post. I do have one quibble, though, with this:

> virtualisation is not the answer, it's much easier to just use Windows or
> maybe MacOsX directly on the hardware instead of on top of linux, which
> would then only add a layer of complexity without any gains.

With this, I disagree. Virtualization gives one very important advantage, it can snapshot and roll back machines, and/or quickly or cleanly spin up a new image in the case of massive corruption. For non-gamers and other non-performance sensitive people, I now seriously consider this setup: a full screen virtual machine that gets regen'd periodically, connecting to a samba exported home directory for documents residing on the underlaying linux system.

-- Pat

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:26 UTC (Fri) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link] (7 responses)

Pat, what would be the purpose of that?

The point of migrating from Windows to Linux is, for most people, twofold: to reduce cost of software (not a huge issue for an average lawyer though) and to provide a more stable and secure system and in my opinion, an easier and more productive work environment.

If a person is using Office in a virtual machine, that person will likely end up using the virtual machine to also browse the web and work with email. E.g. just think of the steps needed to email a document in such a setup. Person would need to save it to a shared folder, then switch back to the host machine and send it from there. Or say that you want to use a desktop search tool, such as Beagle, to access your documents...

If one's daily routine is inside a guest, then one is going to feel all the downsides of the guest operating system.

Snapshots are great, but in a real world scenario, a lawyer wants to have all her documents backed up and a spare machine in case something is wrong with the main one (be it malware or failed power supply). Virtualization can only save you if the hardware is still functioning.

The best solution is probably to keep a server or a network storage of some sort dedicated to serving files (e.g. Apple's Time Machine is a nice example of this).

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:41 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

or use Crossover (http://codeweavers.com)

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:48 UTC (Fri) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876) [Link]

"If a person is using Office in a virtual machine, that person will likely end up using the virtual machine to also browse the web and work with email."

Not so much anymore with Unity (and functional equivalents). I sometimes have Visual Studio on my desktop to test/compile stuff, but I never had the urge to open another Windows program.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 22:43 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

While my setup may not be that good a match, I would make a couple of points...

Running MS Office under Wine might be a good choice, it's apparently noticeably faster than under Windows :-)

I use VirtualBox to run Windows, and the home directories are shared with linux - ie ~/Documents and "My Documents" are the same directory on the host hard disk.

Both Firefox and Thunderbird are configured to have the same local storage in linux and windows, so it doesn't matter which they're fired up under (and I think they can be fired up under both at the same time - that's certainly true of firefox), you see all your mail, bookmarks etc in either.

And I use linux as the host os because I use xdm so both my wife and I can share the same pc at the same time :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jun 2, 2011 14:48 UTC (Thu) by Jan_Zerebecki (guest, #70319) [Link]

"(and I think they can be fired up under both at the same time - that's certainly true of firefox)"

That might corrupt your profile. It should warn you (it normally uses a lock file to detect this situation), because some parts of the profile are modified in a way that is not safe to do in a concurrent way.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 4:23 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

One possible advantageous setup might be to have a virtual machine per client, generated on demand, and only containing things for client interaction. You wouldn't be tempted to browse the web or read email in the virtual machine because you'd need to install software to do it, and the native software is already there. This would also provide a bit of useful technological isolation between clients.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 12:37 UTC (Mon) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link] (1 responses)

It's an interesting concept, I do it for my own stuff (I'm a freelance programmer, so I usually keep a clean environment for each one of my bigger projects).

However, lawyers usually have a huge number of clients, and they need to archive everything well, so think in terms of a decade of cases and different clients. I'm not sure how that would scale to dozens or even hundreds of clients.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 20:29 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That's why I'm thinking they'd be generated on demand. Aside from the client you're currently billing, and clients you've done work for earlier that day, the virtual machine would consist only of a configuration file specifying how to assemble the filesystem that would be seen if you booted that client's VM, and the document directories in the VM would come from a client-specific directory on the file server, and everything else is a read-only map of sections of the native, local filesystem. This has the additional benefit that, inside the VM, you actually can't write a document that isn't going to the location that's archived for the client. So you can't accidentally put a document you're writing on the desktop and fail to get it archived as related to the particular client it was for.

In any case, done properly, there shouldn't be any resource whose usage scales with the number of VMs that have ever been set up in a way that is not significantly smaller than the usage required anyway for the client's documents. And an individual lawyer isn't going to do work for a huge number of clients at the same time, so the "working set" scaling isn't too big a deal.

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 22:53 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> I have notified this bug before OpenOffice 1.0 was published, there has been some progress, but instead of fixing basic functionality completely that would allow seriously considering just replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice, we get GL based effects in OpenOffice Impress, Antialiasing and other things not really essential for getting serious work done by lawyers.

That is, sadly in some ways, a key feature of much FLOSS software - it is the developers and not the users who determine the roadmap, as those users are generally not paying the developers. Of course, in cases in which developers and users are the same people, or the developers hired directly by users this works well.

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 15, 2011 4:49 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

the main gripe for me are not page headers, but loss of all dynamic references to sections when saving as DOC file. ("as defined in Section 17 below" becomes "as defined in Section Undefined Reference"). This is a loss of critical information in a contract and mistakes here could cause professional liability.

I'm surprised, because in my experience cross-references to sections do work just fine when writing .doc from OpenOffice.org. What does not work so well is tables of contents: I have yet to figure out how to generate a table that does not have slightly off page numbers towards the end of the document, when viewed with Word.

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 15, 2011 18:02 UTC (Sat) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link] (1 responses)

If you are in any sort of small business, your word processor is the least of your worries. Despite all of the noise about word processors, they really are the most trivial part of any software ecosystem. The more interesting and far more relevant applications are those that embed any sort of domain specific knowledge. Vertical apps are where the real small business problem is.

My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux

Posted Jan 16, 2011 17:03 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> If you are in any sort of small business, your word processor is the least of your worries.

That's simply wrong. I've worked with small law offices in the past. The word processor is their tool to communicate with other lawyers and the government -- the very essence of their business. It inspires fierce loyalties and deep knowledge of bugs and workarounds. No other tool even comes close.

Excel handles any domain-specific stuff since the amount of data is typically tiny and, for better or for worse, everyone understands how to use a spreadsheet as a database.

My experience of switching a lawyer to Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:37 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

Be careful, the Mac Office version usually limps way behind the Windows one.

My experience of switching a lawyer to Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:45 UTC (Fri) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876) [Link]

I never had any problems, except for dreadful Visual Basic for Applications code. Apart from the fact that VBA is not that popular anymore, it is apparently supported in Office 2011 for the Mac. Though, I haven't tried yet.

Anyway, Microsoft Office for the Mac has always works great for documents I receive, whether it's OOXML or older formats.

My experience of switching a lawyer to Linux

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:41 UTC (Fri) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876) [Link]

For what it is worth: before switching to OS X on the desktop, I used CrossOver Office to run Microsoft Office on Linux. At that time (Office 2000) this worked very well for me. I can imagine, that this is stell the best route for Microsoft Office compatibility if you do not want to run Windows in a virtual machine.

LaTeX

Posted Jan 16, 2011 18:00 UTC (Sun) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

Some friend of mine is a lawyer, and he switched to Linux too. Because he realized that the most important software for him was LaTeX. So there was nothing holding him back from using whatever operating system he liked the best.

You can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting courtroom-documents, complete with case-references.

LaTeX

Posted Oct 17, 2011 6:54 UTC (Mon) by Fran (guest, #80836) [Link]

Grateful if you anyone could post a link to LaTex templates to pleadings and decent letter headed correspondence. Am using LyX but little in the way of templates


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