OpenOffice for the Law Student: a quick review

[Brunellus]

(This originally appeared as a post on my blog, here.)

OpenOffice.org is not ready for my desktop. There, I said it. Flame me, O my Free Software-using comrades.

I've managed a semester and a half so far without having to resort to proprietary software. I use Firefox for all my browsing--even for WestLaw and LexisNexis. I use vim and LaTeX to prepare my outlines. My ASUS eee PC runs Xandros. My home computer runs Ubuntu.

And, yes, up until now, I have used OpenOffice.org for my word-processing needs. OpenOffice Writer is a decent word processor--at least as good for most users as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. OpenOffice Writer has served me well thus far in Legal Writing class: several drafts each of two memoranda, pleadings, and a motion. But the upcoming appellate brief spells the end of its usefulness.

Appellate briefs need Tables of Authorities. For the non-lawyers out there, a ToA is a kind of sectioned bibliography for lawyers: it indexes all the various citations used in a document by type of authority (constitutions, statutes, regulations, case law, secondary authorities, etc.).

MS Word and WordPerfect have table-of-authority builders built right into the program. Essentially, the ToA builder goes through the whole document, looking for anything that might look like it's a citation. Once it finds a possible citation, it stops: the user can then mark the citation and add it to an index. In the end, you end up with something that looks like this:

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 273 U.S. 177, 93 F.2d 14
(1953)...................1, 2

There, you see Brown, its full citation in Blue Book format, and the pages where it's cited.

Now, OpenOffice and LaTeX should be able to do a simple trick like this--and do it better. But they're structurally different programs. Instead of treating the document like one long stream of text, they use a "structured document" model.

Theoretically, the structured document should be better: you define the logical parts of your document and let the program deal with all the fiddly character-by-character design issues. To make this work, you need to have a separate bibliographic database, and then insert tagged references into the document as you go. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. In OpenOffice, as in TeX, it's the bibliographic package (bibtex or some such) that generates the formatted citation. And, wouldn't you know it--there aren't any style files out there for legal citations.

Sure, TeXheads, tell me about jurabib or biblatex. But all the style files kicking around are mathematics, sciences, or engineering. I'm lucky if I find a regular humanities style file--never mind actually find anything useful for us lawyers.

And I really don't have the time or the inclination these days to break down and really learn any of the bibliographic systems in *nix to make them work for lawyers.

So this is what I'm reduced to. I'm going to have to crawl back to Microsoft Office for an appellate brief. Luckily, Word 97 runs very well in WINE.

Still, I feel a bit annoyed at having to go back to Microsoft for this. What do I have to do to get decent ToA support out there in OO.o or TeX? Where do I post the bounty?

* * *

POSTSCRIPT: I suppose I should be happy that OO.o is such a capable piece of software for general use. After all, how many lawyers are there that use Free Software, anyway? But as things stand, I'm more than a little annoyed that I'm going to have to go crawling back to Microsoft.

Maybe I'll e-mail the Software Freedom Law Center and ask how they do it in-house over there. *sigh*

[Daveski]

Our legal dept at work swears that most firms use Workshare Professional (used to be called DeltaView): http://www.workshare.com/products/wsprofessional/

Is there a functional equivelant for OOo? Have you seen this Brunellus?

[Brunellus]

Our legal dept at work swears that most firms use Workshare Professional (used to be called DeltaView): http://www.workshare.com/products/wsprofessional/

Is there a functional equivelant for OOo? Have you seen this Brunellus?

The document comparison functions are taken care off natively in OOo. There is a "Compare Documents" tool built-in.

I was alwas amused at work when people needed DeltaView--the output was essentially the output of

diff

.

What I'm looking for really is a way/means to get my citations and indexing right, which is a real pain. I'm trying to get in touch with the guys at the Software Freedom Law Center to see what they do. If anybody knows how to do it, they will, and maybe I can get some of their "best practices" out there in general circulation.

[Atomic Dog]

My issue with OpenOffice is the slight differences when a document is opened in Word. I can't take the risk. If I am writing a document to print on paper then I use OpenOffice.

[Brunellus]

the difference in document conversion are certainly an issue. OOo (as well as Abiword and Kwrite) make up for this, though: the direct export to PDF has been extremely helpful.

Again, put positively, OOo seems to be well-suited for most users. I would say that for certain users--academic users outside the legal field-- it's probably much better out of the box than MS Word. But as a law student, I still find it somewhat lacking.

What I have not yet found is whether the shortcoming is inherent to the software or my inability to use it .

[quinnten83]

I hate to sound this naive, but have you tried contacting the OO.o devs?

[50words]

I am an attorney, and I use OOo for everything. I also teach appellate writing at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Word's ToA wizard is garbage, and my students who try to use it inevitably go back to doing it by hand--or just take a reduced grade on formatting. You have to check the ToA by hand in the end, anyway, because the wizard will always miss quotations that split pages, for example. You also have to go through the ToA and edit all the citations, as inline citations are not what should be showing up in your ToA.

It takes almost no additional time to do the page numbers yourself.

Exactly how many appellate briefs are you writing, anyway? Most law students only write two or, at most, three, during three years of law school. I hardly think saving perhaps 10-15 minutes (at the most) on the job is doing much for your study time.

While it would be nice to see a ToA wizard in OOo, that hardly makes it inadequate for legal work.

[jonathonblake]

You have to check the ToA by hand in the end,

This question really belongs on the OOo forum. There is a way to create a ToA within OOo, but I don't remember how/what was done. My guess is that it was a specific extension, in combination with specific styles.

xan

jonathon

[fjf]

I am no lawyer, but I write papers (biomedicine) and the lack of a reference manager-type of software that is easy to install and use is a real problem in my field. I know there are linux alternatives, but I was not able to even make them run. Maybe I am not geeky enough

[hyper_ch]

I've used OOo in my final two years at law school... wrote my master thesis with it... formatting the whole thing (well, while writing alread assigning proper formating blocks for paragraphs, citations, ...) took me about 3h. Some of my buddies formatted their thesis 2 or 3 days because in M$O the footnotes were sometimes on the wrong page, the formatting was not consistent through their thesis' and other things like that...

The only thing I missed was not to have the cite-while-you-write capability from EndNote... however you can use EndNote with OOo...