My 2 cents (and from the perspective of someone who has not used Word in ages and who tends to largely prefer typing commands to clicking icons). > 1) Everyone

My 2 cents (and from the perspective of someone who has not used Word in ages and who tends to largely prefer typing commands to clicking icons). > 1) Everyone uses it. You get documents from co-counsel, and you can flip on track changes and send some comments. Track changes is better than version control (for legal documents). Word shows you what you just deleted, so you can be sure you haven't changed the meaning without intending to. And co-counsel doesn't use git so sending diffs around is of limited utility. Not everyone. I do not, like many others. First, it's expensive; second, it's not 100% available. It came very late to the www world. Moreover, it might be a good tool for legal writing, but it is horrid for code typesetting or for maintaining a bibliography. Finally, it handles very badly very large documents. On the versioning side, one thing I loved about Latex was the ability to comment and uncomment entire sections of the documents, which is AFAIK absent in Word. > 2) Typesetting is built-in. Yes, this is one thing that's terrible about Word and great about LaTeX. Separation of content and presentation is good. Except when it's not. Word is, for the most part, WYSIWYG. That means I can tweak my hyphenation or kerning as I go, and when I print to PDF 5 minutes before the brief is due to the printer (as in dead trees), I can be pretty sure what it'll look like. LaTeX lets you control that too, but the "production" step is often longer. Why would you make manual tweaks to the typesetting? This sounds like a nightmare when you have to maintain many of these manual typesetting hacks. I remember I spend a lot of time skimming long documents to check that a new line didn't break the document a few pages later. > 3) Speaking of formatting: legal documents, and often other business documents, aren't just mechanical. For something like an appellate brief in an important case, thousands of people might read it (and its enshrined immutable in the public record for posterity). The content is the most important thing, but they also have to look nice. Markdown, as far as I can tell, gives you very little control over typesetting. To my knowledge PDFs generated by markdown are pretty decent. Maybe they are a bit boring and they all look alike, but I can't say they are ugly. But, again, this only is a personal opinion. My personal idea is that Word is a bad software on which people who can't really use computers created suboptimal processes. Of course, we (the developers community) can't really expect that one is capable of writing his own css to have a nice typesetting or to mentally parse formatting tags to image what the output might be.