Comments on: By Request: Any Open Source Apps to Create Legal Pleadings and Documents?

By: Malcolm Pearson

Malcolm Pearson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:24:38 +0000

Hi Dennis
Open source has gotten easier and easier over the years, especially now with flavours like Ubuntu coming through (which I use). I’m no lawyer, so I don’t need legal templates, so Open Office 3 works 100% for me. I think that if Sun wanted to boost the spread of Open Office, they would bring out a version for legal firms – I that would be a start. The thing that stops the growth, are the vendors, as they all develop for the MS environment, so people keep following. Also secretaries, prefer to use what they are used to, and you can understand that, they don’t pay the bills, and would not get an incentive to use anything else. You are right about Saas, I’m just not convinced people want to have their docs “somewhere out there”. And in South Africa, we still have connectivity issues, so not being able to produce a doc, as we are offline, would drive everyone to serious drink! So good growth in Saas, but at present people are “shy” and it is a little expensive – I think.
Cheers
Malcolm

By: Roberta Frazier

Roberta Frazier — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:27:26 +0000

OpenOffice has some templates for creating legal pleadings, and it’s not too difficult to create your own templates.

By: Terence Lee

Terence Lee — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:36:29 +0000

What about Google Apps? We use Google Apps to create some internal documents that we don’t have automated in our system. Has anyone tried that for drafting contracts? Also, Exari is I believe one of the few document assembly engines based on open standards such as Java and XML and is also available as a service.