The Limitations of Open Source

Now I know why law offices don't use open source software.  Pleadings.

The thing about Linux is that it's better than Windows.  From a functional standpoint, there is nothing that Windows can do that Linux can't.  Similarly, in terms of office software, OpenOffice can do about 99% of the things that MS Office can.  In fact, OpenOffice isn't crippled by that stupid new "ribbon" interface the way MS Office 2007 is.

The problem: that remaining 1%.  It happens to include legal pleadings.  Microsoft Word has supported legal pleadings for years.  It'll handle whatever format your local court wants.  For appellate briefs, it'll even handle things like separate Table of Authorities, Table of Contents, and index.  And it'll do it all in whatever legal format you need.

OpenOffice won't.

Somehow I made it through law school running Linux and this wasn't a problem.  I guess it was because I was still running Windows when I did Moot Court, and at all my internships I either used the work computer (running Windows) or I used templates.  But now, for the first time, I hit a brick wall with Linux and OpenOffice.

I blogged about our minor court victory last week.  The judge gave us leave to amend the complaint, so of course that's what we're doing.  I've been tasked with writing the first and second drafts.  But I discovered to my horror that when I opened the document in OpenOffice, it wouldn't save the line numbers on the side of the page.  To be sure, OpenOffice has its own line number function, and if I were starting from scratch I could make it work as a legal pleading.  But I couldn't open the Word document and then save it again with line numbers intact.

I dealt with a similar problem in 2000 and it ended with me abandoning Linux.  At that point, word processors for Linux simply weren't mature enough for everyday use.  There is a program called Wine that lets you run Windows programs in Linux, but 9 years ago it wasn't mature either.  After days of trying to get a Windows program to work in Linux, I gave up and returned to Windows.

Now, 9 years later, the situation has changed.  I downloaded the latest version of Wine and it let me install and run Microsoft Word 2003 with very little trouble.  I still prefer OpenOffice for everyday use--it's much faster (especially the 64 bit version), more stable, and doesn't have that annoying paper clip--but MS Word is necessary for legal pleadings.  Rather than reboot my entire computer into Windows, I can stay in Linux (the faster, more stable, and more feature rich OS) and still use MS Word.  Essentially the best of both worlds.

Even better would be if I could handle legal pleadings directly in OpenOffice.  I'm sure I'll be able to, one day.  In the mean time, Linux is mature enough to let me run my Microsoft program.

J<