[I am a US lawyer]
It's definitely not categorically malpractice to not use Word. Depends entirely on the situation. If a court demands docx and you file an rtf, or you refuse to read a client's redlines because they're in Word, sure, that could be malpractice.
The only proprietary software that I think _might_ be malpractice not to use is a legal research service with a capable citator, like Westlaw or LexisNexis. If you rely on a case that was overruled, you can't defend a malpractice suit by saying, "I didn't want to pay for the software."
I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
This must have been intended as hyperbole. It is true, in some legal practice areas, non-use of Word has been highly impractical or even impossible for a long time, mainly because in the mainstream legal profession generally Word quickly established a chokehold by the late 1990s.
Some courts expect Word format. I haven't been close to litigation in ages so I don't know how common a thing this is, but here's an example of an apparent "Word only" federal court: https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/attorney-inf... . So sure, in a hypothetical where a lawyer stubbornly refused to use Word in the context of a filing in that court, you can imagine consequences arising to the level of malpractice, but I don't think that's what they had in mind.
A more familiar issue to me (and I'm guessing what that speaker was thinking of) is that if you're negotiating an agreement with some other party, and they are using Word (as they most likely will be), it is going to be highly inconvenient at best to insist on using some alternative tool.
Red Hat's in house legal team is, er, was not a law firm of course, but ages ago Red Hat attempted to have as many 'back-office' staff use RHEL as possible, with few exceptions related to what was necessary for regulatory purposes. This extended to Red Hat's legal team, which attempted valiantly for a while to use OpenOffice (as was, and I suppose more specifically the RHEL packaging of the go-oo fork in those days) for all document-related purposes, including negotiating agreements with outside parties who were using Word. This proved to be impractical for at least the subset of the legal team that did that sort of work as their daily bread and butter, and eventually they got access to Word on Windows on VMware. Later on, it became possible for Red Hat lawyers to use OS X and Windows with Word, so the issue went away.
I'm surprised that courts do not mostly/exclusively want PDF.
Also, IIRC one of Wordperfect's last strongholds was in the legal sector, as they had so much invested in Wordperfect templates and (I'm told) its citation management fucntionality was good.
Upvoting because it's an interesting statement, and also probably wrong?
As a techy person with a law degree that doesn't really practice any more, the "silos" of what each lawyer thinks is and isn't a "must have" is interesting, as well as the huge differences in rates and types of tech adoption; a huge factor here is probably administrative assistants who do a lot of heavy lifting.
Only if an edge case could cause you to miss things (such as libreoffice missing redlines?). Seems unlikely IMO.
Not a lawyer but have hired many lawyers and had to interact with them: I agree this is correct.
That’s recently changed.
Wordcraft is now a decent Word clone and is leaps and bounds over OpenOffice.
its pre release no one doing real work is going to risk their income on an alpha test
I haven’t used many of these vibe coded clones, but the ones I have used have all been significantly lacking in depth compared to what they are ripping off. I’m sure wordcraft works fine for typing a high school 5 paragraph essay (although, I don’t think high school students still do that). I would be shocked if it can handle revision history, complex redline edits, legal brief formatting, etc.
It handles complex redlines, legal brief formatting, etc.
When you convert to pdf, it typically produces identical content streams to Word.
I just tried it out of curiosity. It doesn't exist in their web suite, when I tried to run it using their launcher it failed to install and crashed the installer.
I can't directly refute your claims, but I can say that a program that won't install can't do any of those things for me.
I don't care if my lawyer doesn't use word. I do care if they use a buggy, vibe coded that is still in Alpha. Word processing is a solved problem. Free (beer or speech) word processing is a solved problem. Word compatible free word processing is a solved problem. Don't put my case in jeopardy because you want to use untested, alpha software.
All your points are laughably trivial features. We don't "Word" for that bullshit.
Which parts of your bullshit do you use word for?
What's the point of saving $25 bucks or whatever a Word license is to use a vibe coded application?
It's not even $25, it more like $10 / seat.
Because Wordcraft is faster and more stable than Word. Word rarely crashes, but it does freeze. Wordcraft is freezing about 1/2 as often as Word. For the daily grinding out docs, it's way more viable than Openoffice.
But mostly, because having a workflow entirely dependent on a single vendor seems like something to avoid if possible.
The last formatting bug I encountered was last week. Claude identified, patched, and pushed in 10 minutes.
It doesn't do VBA. However, porting VBA to WC macros is trivial for llms.
25 bucks is 25 bucks. I also feel that losing your license because you tried to save 25 bucks on MS Word seems unlikely (not legal advice).
Why become hostage to a multibillion conglomerate for "editing text"? It's asinine what people are using Word for. If engineering types need special syntax handling I get it, but lawyers.. accountants.. my god man, plain text is fine with some semi-fancy markup a la markdown renderers these days. Some tables, some red lines, some fonts.. It's trivial. It was not in the 80s but it is now.