Basically all of these things are teething problems. The early adopters have problems, the problems get solved, then they're solved for everybody.
What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine and proprietary systems increasingly moving your documents to The Cloud, often without telling you or making it obvious that it's happening.
That could drive early adoption by law firms that don't want to be the first to get burned by that.
> Basically all of these things are teething problems. The early adopters have problems, the problems get solved, then they're solved for everybody
It's not just teething problems.
Using OpenOffice and Linux means that you're opting out of the substantial ecosystem of legal-specific Word add-ins - document templates for court filings, semantic analysis for contracts, metadata scrubbing, etc. Most of these tools are only available for Windows although some of them support Macs. A small practice can get away with using Linux but a large firm would be foolish to do so.
Those are the teething problems. Somebody has to convert the templates or make it so LibreOffice supports them. The early adopters have to deal with that, but then it's done.
A lot of that also isn't as hard as you would think. Semantic analysis is looking at text. That isn't likely to be Word-specific and the author could plausibly add support for plain text files in an afternoon, if it isn't already present.
“What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine”
Not really. If I take a file to Kinkos to get copied, it’s still privileged.
Contrary to the thinking of many technophiles, for almost every “How is the law going to deal with X technology?” there are useful analogies that were figured out decades ago.
> Not really. If I take a file to Kinkos to get copied, it’s still privileged.
What happens if you take a file to Kinkos to get copied and don't notice that the service agreement allows them to keep a copy of it and sell the contents to third parties or use it for advertising?
Then the other side gets to argue that everybody knows or should have known that The Cloud works like that, and accuse you of doing it intentionally because you wanted the cost savings or convenience of the product with those terms.
Also, "jurisdictions vary" can be quite a relevant caveat for all the people in the jurisdictions that vary.
Maybe so. But your client will still be pissed that, from their perspective, your carelessness put them at risk. In my practice, it would be a disaster for this question to even arise.
I'm a regulatory lawyer working in telecom and commercial space policy, though I'm not sure it's my practice area that's primarily driving my thinking here. (Though it may also be true that, since I am not primarily a litigator, I have different confidentiality concerns in mind that some other lawyers. My firm and I do take these issues very very very seriously--perhaps in ways that would be impractical for a different firm in a different area of practice.)
Although I'm certainly aware of the proliferation of outsourced doc review and e-discovery, I would hope that the firms using these services are reviewing their agreements with these providers to make absolutely sure that they do not include language like GP posited: that they may "keep a copy of it and sell the contents to third parties or use it for advertising." Whatever the implications may be for attorney-client privilege, this also creates a risk of actual disclosure to hostile third parties, which would be a huge issue if you were working on anything commercially sensitive.
I'd also note that, depending on one's practice, you might also find yourself adverse to national governments. That creates a whole new risk profile with respect to could-hosted document management services, etc.
I worked for one of the online legal databases for several years. They had a Windows desktop app in addition to the website for accessing content.
I managed to get the desktop app working in Linux after messing with Wine and permissions (it had some cache files written to a relative directory and what not) and after telling management about it they figured the potential market for such a thing would be small enough that they could just send any support requests about it directly to me for setup help, and likewise tell the sales reps to forward inquiries to me if Linux came up on a sale or demo install.
In the decade I worked there I got exactly one call from a Linux admin at a law firm asking for the docs on using the desktop app.
What's going to be interesting is how attorney client privilege interacts with the third party doctrine and proprietary systems increasingly moving your documents to The Cloud, often without telling you or making it obvious that it's happening.
That could drive early adoption by law firms that don't want to be the first to get burned by that.