Posted by DeepLogin 12 hours ago
I set up a small law office with GMail for their domain, for this reason, and have a script ready to run a Postfix server if Google fails.
Our file management software works, and has all the features we need, but goddamn it's so slow and it's made me want to punch my screen so many times. And it's full of bizzare choices.
Pressing enter when editing filenames doesn't accept the filename, it just adds a new line as the filename. Copying text from the file preview works, but somehow it switches every "g" to a "q" (it seems to run OCR on a text document and then just display that???) etc
They exited secondaries in 2024 after blowback from using everyone’s data. But I could see them trying again soon.
That’s what the lawyer is for. Most simple things, especially where the law and your case are clear, can be handled by someone without a lawyer. It’s the other stuff where you need the lawyer.
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.
> Harvey defines Customer Data as documents uploaded to the Service by Harvey Customers. Content includes both the queries Customers input to the Service and the corresponding outputs from Harvey. In most cases, we talk about these terms together, as Customer Data and Content.
Doesn't include thinking/reasoning blocks though.
Nonetheless, I'd imagine that Amazon'ing law is unlikely given how much experience lawyers have with drafting contracts, but who knows.
I suspected it wasn't as broad.
I wonder how much value you can get from just the middle layer and maybe reverse engineer the input/outputs based on success/failure from user interactions.
Also if you give your lawyer a document, that's privileged. If you upload it to Harvey, who knows?
Just like emailing your lawyer on Office365 doesn’t get rid of client attorney either.
Maybe. In my experience working with legal tech, a) lawyers are not as resistant to the ToS click through reflex as you might think, b) data privacy is often 1 step too abstract for people without subject matter expertise to usefully reason about, so marketing phrases like “enterprise-grade encryption” or whatever are more influential than one would hope, and c) these things are often considered more technical problems than legal problems, so reliability, data preservation and lack of downtime during migration, server-level security, and more traditional concerns like that likely take center stage.
I have no idea if that’s what normally happens here, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
> equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.
Yeah, and even though these firms could probably tear any given startup to shreds in court, Harvey is probably pretty happy to make that “tomorrow me’s problem,” as most American tech startups are right now.
That said, as someone who is used to Linux and FOSS in my personal life but forced to use a typical corporate tech stack at work, I feel the tech I use at work is a hindrance more than anything and I would be more productive with the kind of stack the author describes.
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.
This is one of the advantages of running free software. The data formats are open, so all of the data should be able to be imported any other system.
Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.
Intuit is killing me. I am genuinely looking for another solution that won’t break my CPAs brain.
Also the desktop vs online stuff is so annoying since they don’t have 1:1 feature parity.
I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.
You are.
That was from a well known, respected, and long-time American Open Source 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.
Even if. it's not just the citation graph. No headnotes. No restatements. They're about 100 light years away from being close to usable, even if the citator was complete and comparable.
It's a certainty that your clients and colleagues will be using Word to work with you and the rest of the legal system, and some files will use docx.
It would be pretty bizarre to turn down work or make things harder for people outside your firm because you refuse to use Microsoft Word.
You could use another tool that handles .docx but if it's not directly compatible with Word you're almost guaranteed to run into compatibility issues or maybe serious errors. If you don't even touch Word at all, then the first person to run into them would might be your client. Do you not just immediately decide that it's not worth saving $100/yr to eliminate that kind of risk? If not then you have to say something like
"Actually, it's more important that software be free and open source than that thing you pay me to do for you, that costs about two minutes of billable hours, and which every other lawyer uses?"
Obviously there should be lawyers trying to use open source software, but I can't believe a real person would never run into compatibility issues. Richard stallman as a lawyer explaining that he can't open files sent in formats that do not respect user freedom is such a good bit
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.
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.
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.
they ask how you've managed to avoid this problem so far, and it turns out that you've been battling it nonstop for years
How do you justify that as a lawyer on the basis of "user freedom"?
Honestly your best defense is probably true ignorance or bad decision making that led you to choose something that, to non-developers, really only works as a way to save $100/yr or do some crazy new thing that didn't work. But that's still pretty bad.
Even if you're some crazy unix hacker wizard who for some reason works as a lawyer, how does never using Word help your client?
Wordcraft is now a decent Word clone and is leaps and bounds over OpenOffice.
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.
When you convert to pdf, it typically produces identical content streams to Word.
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.
Have always loved that text shortcuts work across iOs and MacOs (yay, for integrated walled gardens).
Wanted the same thing for Linux and it seems like espanso + rsync(or git) for syncing the shortcuts across devices is the way to go.
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.
Are you actually able to get anything done at speed and scale with all of this FOSS and the finagling and wiring etc. it takes to maintain?
Does it make you a more effective and successful lawyer?
Does it increase/decrease the amount of time you have with friends and family?
It seems like this is a bit of a hobby, a bit of a marketing statement given the law area, and requires a very technically savvy lawyer to operate this system.
Pi-Hole seems redundant here. What is it doing that Unbound cannot itself do?
It's not clear what 'work' those orbs would be doing because a lot of 'work' exists because of current frictions due to bad tools or some arbitrage around a lack of trust or expertise. For example with contract redlines, if I just tell my AI what is important to me, and you tell yours, they can collaborate on a shared agreement that is essentially guaranteed to be fair (modulo trusting the AI). No emailing word documents back and forth, no ambiguity of obligations, no hiding misleading terms, etc.
If you leak your client's confidence, you'd be liable for serious damages.