We use Carta for work and that is my fear with them.

https://www.harvey.ai/legal/harvey-privacy-center

Does Harvey train AI models on Customer Data and Content

We understand and appreciate that Customers trust Harvey with highly confidential information. Harvey does not use Customer Data or Content to train AI models, or to improve our products and services. We also do not access Customer Data or Content except (i) to provide or support the Harvey Service or (ii) to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.

This is funny, but the amlaw100 law firms signing up to enterprise saas have probably thought about their data protection terms, edit: equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.

Just like how openAI and Anthropic have suddenly started consulting firms, right after obtaining everyone’s IP and secret documents.

Neil is very active in the Fediverse on a variety of tech and non tech topics (Airsoft) and appalling jokes.

I like the idea, but for 'normal' users - oh, yaml.

I see there's third party GUI tools but that adds more hassle for the non-technical.

Would be great if there was an inbuilt interface in espanso.

[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.

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.

No, but my impression from this website is that he's a technology lawyer who enjoys maintaining his own stack, which strikes me as nothing but a plus.

I also want my lawyer to focus on lawyering, not dealing with Microsoft contracts, trying to keep confidential data out of copilot, dealing with proprietary formats, etc.

At the end of the day, every firm needs some form of IT. Above a certain scale you are hiring IT help to manage it anyway, might as well use free software where you can over MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.

Reading the blog post, he isn't doing anything that unusual just using some open source applications that other people can use just as easily.

I personally would find my lawyer working on projects and blogging about stuff related to his legal domain to be a good thing. This is no different than a constitutional lawyer writing a blog about some constitutional matter going on in current events.

Businesses don't always want to have their profit sapped by overeager SaaS allegedly allowing said firm to focus on the business. Like all operating decisions, it is a cost/benefit tradeoff.

Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.

I mean, the first sentence of TFA reads "..a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law". Seems well suited to deploying 'pretty unique IT' with minimal effort.

I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.

> Am I alone in my reaction

You are.

Gnu cash?

That's a weird comment. It's a small business with a static website that mainly runs over email/phone/signal. I'm not sure (speaking as a devops person with decades of experience) what a devops person would even do there; does a freelance artist need devops? Or a cat cafe?

You then ask how many employees they have, suggesting it's a one person company...I mean, it's right there on the website. It's Neil and Sandra, a husband and wife team. https://decoded.legal/diversity/ . They've been running successfully for five years, suggesting your concerns are unfounded.

This is common with solo practitioners. Sometimes you have to take weeks, months off, or suspend your practice. The answer would be referrals/your network, but obviously, in bad circumstances you can't always offer a soft landing to your clients.

She is comfortable typing in MS Word and she uses a browser (assumed). Start her using a Wiki with Markdown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software

The browser gives viewing, screenshotting, and PDF downloading/viewing for free.

It's not so gentle, but lawyers in the US have told me that their malpractice insurance requires them to have practice management software - calendar, document management, case management, customer management, billing and accounting.

Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).

Give her Claude and show her how to ask Claude how to do things. My wife uses it to write mini scripts now for all the annoying repetitive tasks she has. Zero programming background.