I disagree. It’s a great question to ask. You answered it, although indirectly. The reason lawyers don’t use (La)TeX is that the support forms are not there, and lawyers are not programmers, (generally) do not want to be programmers, and therefore will not be programmers. According to your response, for a majority of lawyers to contemplate any presentation format, it must have the necessary support forms, and they must be updated with sufficient regularity and timeliness.

Additionally, the fact that lawyers aren’t programmers also means that there must be a GUI which abstracts the formatting concerns from the lawyers. Even those lawyers I know who used to be programmers, and used to work with HTML and LaTeX will not want to spend the time to do LaTeX by hand when they have a looming court deadline. (This is not to say that I don’t think (La)TeX has GUIs, but rather my experience with them has been less than stellar. IIRC, the best one I’ve used was vaguely similar to Word Perfect 5.1 with reveal codes permanently enabled and impaired editing capabilities, but with much better support for output formatting. (For those unfamiliar with WP51, no WYSIWYG; that was introduced in 6.0.) What frustrated me most about it was that the developers thought of it as good (due to technical accuracy), rather than ‘needs much polish’. Admittedly, that was years ago.)

Incidentally, I find most statements that ‘Questions like “why not [technology x] are the wrong ones to ask’ are not correct; they are given by people who are astounded at how bad technology x is for the purpose. The correct answer is usually, “many reasons. Let me list just a few; however, there are more reasons than I have time to mention.”

I have, however, encountered a few cases where the question was, in fact, incorrect. These are situations when any direct answer to the question will be misleading.

Although switching from Word to OO.o wouldn’t be trivial, it would be no more trivial than the move from WordPerfect to Word.

It was not as easy a task converting a firms WordPerfect-formatted documents to Word-formatted documents as Microsoft would have had the partners believe. All the secretaries had to be retrained. It was a big, hidden cost that nobody anticipated to be as big a deal as it was.

Moving to OO.o from Word would probably actually be an easier task than the move from WordPerfect to Word was. Not only is OO.o better at “doing” Word formats than Word was at “doing” WordPerfect formats – we also have the experience of a major document system changeover behind us, to learn from.

You can rest assured that should any of the problems the legal “industry” suffered with, with Word, ever crop up with OO.o (not likely, but in the interest of fairness…) that the OO.o community would have a fix in place MUCH faster than the wait we had to suffer with, with the Word bugs.

To use the excuse that “all the software we use integrates with Word” is disingenuous. Before switching to Word, all the software you used integrated with WordPerfect. It’s an invalid argument on the face of it.

Regardless, I am an Uninterested Party as I no longer suffer the wrath of the partners – I’ve moved on to the real world, where people actually make products that are of use to other people. I am posting simply to support and promote the use of OO.o in business, because it’s the right thing to do.

AIUI, version control systems work most efficiently with plain text. I’ve not so far had cause to use it, but doesn’t Latex take plain text files, which include the formatting instructions and process them into the finished documents as pdf? The facilities available to Latex should easily cope with legal documents and it is, of course, free software. And being plain text, the source files can never have anything embarrassing hidden away inside.

My company has significant experience in the legal IT field (in the UK) as developers, retailers and in support. The OP’s arguments are IMHO fully substantiated.

I should add that I am an OOo evangelist, and have persuaded many of our non-legal clients to try it – we have a small roll-out going on at this very moment.

But!

- All lawyers in any practice with more than 3/4 partners will be using a document management system (DMS)

- We once were developing our own DMS which worked in the context of a billing system with macro generator and WordPerfect. But only a few % of lawyers in the UK now use WP, so that system went bye-bye ten years ago.

- All DMS that I know of are MS Word-based

- A DMS will tie in billing, time recording, document archiving, and search, as well as document generation and filing, and critically, overall case management

- In the UK (I expect similar things are true of other markets) lawyers make extensive daily use of ‘precedents’. These are essentially pre-drafted form templates to deal with all the routine documentation generation surrounding legal practice. These ‘precedents’ are generally tied quite tightly into the DMS – and all the ones I know of are now supplied only as MS Word templates.

So, I can see no reason at all why OOo cannot be the basis of a full DMS for lawyers BUT all of the above requirements would have to be comprehensively fulfilled before any legal practice I know of would even bother looking at it. Moreover all the precedents would need to be available in OOo template form (as stated above, formatting is often crucial) and moreover updated every time there is a significant change in Law that means the document draft text must be altered – in other words, multiple times each year.

And that would require a solid investment from somebody. I hope that happens but I am not holding my breath.

(And thanks for the pointer on secretaries/word processors; I’m not actually doing anything formatting sensitive myself right now but it is something good to keep in mind if/when I am.)