4 ms·

Did you know that WordPerfect's largest install base is Law Offices? Now you do!

by vxxzy 5y ago

RedShift1 5y ago
This little nugget had better not replaced something important in my memory >:-(
nonamenoslogan 5y ago
I was going to mention this--I'm in County IT and we support it in the Public Defender's office routinely.
Larrikin 5y ago
Is there a reason for that? I grew up in my mom's law office and one of the first programs I have any memory of is me making shapes, dinosaur mouths in my mind, in word perfect by banging letters and new lines on the keyboard, well before I could read. I remember getting older and my mom being annoyed that Wordperfect seemed to be on it's way out and how much more awful Word was
- lproven 5y ago
  Hi. Article author here. I supported WordPerfect for various law practices in the courts around Chancery Lane in London well into the MS Office era. The main reason was not templates; it was the word-count function. MS Word has a very odd implementation of features like headers and footers, footnotes, tables of contents etc. It considers them separate areas of the document, and so when you do a word count, they are not included. For authors who are paid by the book, this isn't very important. For journalists, who aren't paid for headers and footers, only raw ASCII text excluding such things, it's almost good. But for lawyers, who are paid a lot of money -- far more than journos or authors -- for every single word, it matters a lot. WordPerfect counts every damned word, wherever it is, whatever region of the document it's in -- so they get paid for all the words the client received. This could well be a difference of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros/whatever. For that, a single copy of WordPerfect at £150-£250 could well pay for itself by the first document you sent out.
cable2600 5y ago
Because law firm templates were written in Word Perfect macros. I still know law firms that use Word Perfect 5.x and Windows 95. If it isn't broken why fix it? I used to have an academic version of Word Perfect 5.1 that worked like the commercial version only in printing out it would print asterisks on the printout. It was free and good for editing.

Did you know that WordPerfect's largest install base is Law Offices? Now you do!

by vxxzy 5y ago

Did you know that WordPerfect's largest install base is Law Offices? Now you do!

RedShift1 5y ago

This little nugget had better not replaced something important in my memory >:-(

nonamenoslogan 5y ago

I was going to mention this--I'm in County IT and we support it in the Public Defender's office routinely.

Larrikin 5y ago

Is there a reason for that? I grew up in my mom's law office and one of the first programs I have any memory of is me making shapes, dinosaur mouths in my mind, in word perfect by banging letters and new lines on the keyboard, well before I could read. I remember getting older and my mom being annoyed that Wordperfect seemed to be on it's way out and how much more awful Word was

lproven 5y ago
Hi. Article author here. I supported WordPerfect for various law practices in the courts around Chancery Lane in London well into the MS Office era. The main reason was not templates; it was the word-count function. MS Word has a very odd implementation of features like headers and footers, footnotes, tables of contents etc. It considers them separate areas of the document, and so when you do a word count, they are not included. For authors who are paid by the book, this isn't very important. For journalists, who aren't paid for headers and footers, only raw ASCII text excluding such things, it's almost good. But for lawyers, who are paid a lot of money -- far more than journos or authors -- for every single word, it matters a lot. WordPerfect counts every damned word, wherever it is, whatever region of the document it's in -- so they get paid for all the words the client received. This could well be a difference of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros/whatever. For that, a single copy of WordPerfect at £150-£250 could well pay for itself by the first document you sent out.

cable2600 5y ago

Because law firm templates were written in Word Perfect macros. I still know law firms that use Word Perfect 5.x and Windows 95. If it isn't broken why fix it? I used to have an academic version of Word Perfect 5.1 that worked like the commercial version only in printing out it would print asterisks on the printout. It was free and good for editing.