Open Source Legal Practice

I am still a lawyer, even if I don't act like it much any more.  But I have a client right now, a criminal defendant, and it's time to write a motion.  I haven't written a motion in three years; my new laptop is set up for web design, not legal practice.  But this was one of those skills that was beaten into me very effectively, so I know what I need.

Since computers became a Thing, there have been two programs that you could use to write motions: WordPerfect and Microsoft Word.  WordPerfect is a dinosaur and I won't use it out of principle.  Two principles, in fact.  (a) They canceled their Linux support 10 years ago, and that just seems like a betrayal to me, and (b) Nobody - and I mean nobody - uses WordPerfect except crotchety old lawyers who like to cling to old habits.  If you're looking for a robust piece of software that's going to grow and evolve, that's not an ideal client base.

So, that leaves us with Microsoft.  I may hate them for being the Evil Empire, but they are the 1200-lb gorilla in the room, even when it comes to legal briefs.  What's more, they make it easy.  Not only is their interface slick and polished (in spite of that stupid ribbon), but since the 1990's they've had a wizard that will lay out your brief perfectly, according to local court rules.  That is pretty cool.  It gets even better if you need to write an appellate brief; Word will automatically make your table of contents and table of citations for you, with page numbers that update as you type.

So what's a Linux boy to do?  I fired up a new virtual machine with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010.  (I've been using Windows XP and Office 2003 for the last 9 years, but felt it was finally time to get with the times.  I mean, it's not like I have to stare at their ugly mugs every day.)  So I open Word 2010 and look for my old faithful pleading wizard . . . and I can't find it.  This is pretty common with Word 2010; it's that stupid ribbon.  I was an Office power user for 20 years, and then they went and completely mucked up the interface.  Every time I use Office now, I spend half my time Googling "how do you do _______."  So, I figured, it's got to be there, I just need help finding it, right?

Wrong.  The pleading wizard is gone.  They've got instructions on how to recreating your pleading by hand, including the vertical ruler (something about "headers that go all over the page").  Really?  It's 2012, and we have to do this shit by hand now?  That's not called progress, that's called Microsoft being a pain in my ass.  See, this is why I switched to Linux.

Of course, they've got community-contributed pleading paper that you can download straight from Word, you don't even need to go hunting through a website.  But, as with all community-contributed templates, the quality is questionable, and I found myself downloading every one just to figure out which one would be right for me.

You know what's coming next.  "What about Linux?  What about Open Source Software?"  What indeed.

Even though it's been years since I've had to write a brief, I've been keeping an eye on the FOSS world to see when they'd catch up.  Progress has been surprisingly slow.  Legal pleading support was the #1 most requested feature at OpenOffice, but they ignored it.  You could blame it on Sun, or later Oracle, for being large corporations that were much more interested in selling service plans than create features for users who request them.  (Then there's the classic argument: "If you didn't pay for it, you shouldn't complain."  That's true only to the point where I'll stop using their product.  Why would they care?  Because how are you going to dent Microsoft's market share without market penetration?)  Now there's LibreOffice, which is an independent fork of OpenOffice, and even OO itself has been spun off by Oracle, so it's all community-driven, which is much more promising.  But no built-in support for pleadings yet.

What about the other great contender, Google Docs?  People dismiss Google Docs as being too light on features.  It's backed by a huge corporation, so you can only assume that they haven't made their software a real competitor because they don't want to.  I'm not sure that's true, although Microsoft is already working on a web-based version of Office that will take a lot of the wind out of Google's sails.  (Or will it?  I suspect Google is more interested in selling Chrome Notebooks, which would work just fine with Office Online.)  In any case, it's unfair to say that Google Docs is light on features.  Not only are they adding features all the time, but there's already more there than 99% of all Office users would ever need.

Except, of course, legal pleadings.  I've seen some murky talk of writing custom CSS files (which I totally know how to do in a web developer context, but not in a word processor context), but I've never actually seen someone pull it off correctly.  There's certainly been enough noise generated in the Google support forums, but I don't think Google employees even read those.

So, is there an free / open source solution?  Until yesterday, I would have said "no."  Until yesterday.

Yesterday I ran my search again, and got mostly the same blog posts and forum discussions I've been seeing for years, but one new one jumped out at me: http://toometa.com/2006/06/05/openoffice-pleading-template/

I can't figure out much about this mysterious benefactor, other than that his name is Tom, he's currently working for a web startup, and in 2006 his significant other was in a paralegal program.  And he wrote a legal pleading template that works with OpenOffice.

So, that's it.  That's the missing piece.  Not only is my search over, but this is the first successful legal pleading template I've seen for free / open source software.  We have it now.  I can't upload it to the OO.o templates because their site currently doesn't support logins; they're undergoing growing pains in their transition from a corporation to a free non-profit.  But it's here.

Does this transform the industry?  Kind of.  Before I would have said "the technology isn't there."  Now I can say "the technology is there," but there's still the issue of education, and adoption.  I've seen so many people clamoring for something like this over the years, and nobody knew it was there.  Personally, I know my legal practice will be 100% open source from now on.  I guess it has to start somewhere, right?