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The Paperless Law Office

The Paperless Law Office

I am a sole practitioner and have set up my office to be "paperless," or at least come as close as I believe is possible. This means that I generate virtually no paper that stays in my office. Obviously, I need to generate paper at times when filing documents (depending on the court) or sending documents to expert witnesses and other counsel.

WORD PROCESSING

I use Microsoft Word, not because I think it is the best alternative, but because it is nearly ubiquitous. I have always liked WordPerfect. But I found that too often when sending documents to other attorneys and clients via e-mail, there were problems opening the WordPerfect documents and/or when the recipient converted it into Word, the formatting (and some characters, like quotation marks) often changed, which caused frustration and confusion -- both to the recipient and to me (along with embarrassment).

Incidentally, if this version of Word that I use (Word 2002) is dumped or no longer supported by Microsoft, I will switch to OpenOffice, the open-source word processing and spreadsheet application. I am impressed by how easy it is to use and customize, and its ability to convert both Word and WordPerfect products.

So why not switch now if it is so good, Mr. Smarty-Pants? Good question. However, since I have paid my money for Word, I might as well keep using it. I assume that Microsoft will soon abandon it when they introduce Office 12 and try to get people to pay for their new product, which uses XML, which is supposed to make conversion easier. I may end up switching just because the size of the two programs (OpenOffice 2.0 is about half the size of Word). This means that OpenOffice will work more efficiently and open quicker (Geez, it takes forever for Word to load).