4 ms·

I concur. In private practice I have negotiated, drafted, and revised hundreds of industry agreements and a redllined MSWord .doc is what I create and expect f

I concur. In private practice I have negotiated, drafted, and revised hundreds of industry agreements and a redllined MSWord .doc is what I create and expect from other attorneys. There is still a percentage (I personally find as much as 20%) of more seasoned attorneys that use WordPerfect. I can only describe their unreasonableness about it as being brainwashed to believe using anything but WordPerfect would somehow be a negative reflection on the firm/lawyer and that Perfect has some functions Word does not that are specific to the legal field and yet can never actually be named. Long story short, the formatting between the two programs is the worst.

kemitchell 12y ago
I cringe every time I get a WP red-line back, too. In case you're interested, there are actually some legal use cases for WP that make sense. If I'm not mistaken, the Office of the Reporter at the Supreme Court uses WP due to its superior hyphenation, kerning, and other publication-quality print readiness features. The clerks, justices, Reporter, and print staff can all work in the same program from draft to distribution to GPO. Historically, at least, WP HTML export was also much cleaner, lighter, and more machine-readable than Word's. The Supreme Court of Texas has opinions online, for instance. Last I heard (a couple years ago) that HTML was exported from WP.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Word's HTML export still is pretty much the same, even in Word 2013. Yes, you can use Word 2013 to generate HTML that won't render properly in MS's own IE10 by default!
mark212 12y ago
"More seasoned" nice euphemism. I have a colleague who is a WP fiend -- and has an AOL email address. Not that old either.
vibrolax 12y ago
Another WP feature that existed before Microsoft Word itself existed (indeed, before the IBM PC existed) was the ability to create a "Table of Authorities". Word Perfect was very responsive to the needs of legal word processing. Some of you might recall that Word Perfect was created by Satellite Software of Orem, UT circa 1980, and ran on Data General minicomputers.
- kemitchell 12y ago
  I didn't know that! Thanks for sharing.

kemitchell 12y ago

I cringe every time I get a WP red-line back, too. In case you're interested, there are actually some legal use cases for WP that make sense. If I'm not mistaken, the Office of the Reporter at the Supreme Court uses WP due to its superior hyphenation, kerning, and other publication-quality print readiness features. The clerks, justices, Reporter, and print staff can all work in the same program from draft to distribution to GPO. Historically, at least, WP HTML export was also much cleaner, lighter, and more machine-readable than Word's. The Supreme Court of Texas has opinions online, for instance. Last I heard (a couple years ago) that HTML was exported from WP.

yuhong 12y ago
Word's HTML export still is pretty much the same, even in Word 2013. Yes, you can use Word 2013 to generate HTML that won't render properly in MS's own IE10 by default!

mark212 12y ago

"More seasoned" nice euphemism. I have a colleague who is a WP fiend -- and has an AOL email address. Not that old either.

vibrolax 12y ago

Another WP feature that existed before Microsoft Word itself existed (indeed, before the IBM PC existed) was the ability to create a "Table of Authorities". Word Perfect was very responsive to the needs of legal word processing. Some of you might recall that Word Perfect was created by Satellite Software of Orem, UT circa 1980, and ran on Data General minicomputers.

kemitchell 12y ago
I didn't know that! Thanks for sharing.