Law Technology

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

By Dennis Kennedy

As part of blawgiversary week at DennisKennedy.Blog, I've invited readers to send me their questions and I'll try to answer each of them with a "By Request" post.

Not surprisingly, real life has intruded on my plan, so I'm running behind. However, keep sending your questions in and I'll see how many I can answer this week.

Here's the next question:

By Request: Any Open Source apps I can use on Ubuntu to create legal pleadings and documents?"

As longtime readers know, I'm a big fan of Open Source applications and the whole Open Source concept. However, I don't use any flavor of Linux, Ubuntu or otherwise, so I don't have an answer based on my own experience., although I have two suggestions for you.

If you are looking for Open Source software, I generally suggest checking Sourceforge to see what specific applications might be available. In this case, however, I'd suggest starting with something much simpler - Open Office. OpenOffice is an Open Source competitor to Microsoft Office. It's available in a Linux version. I'd check into its capabilities and see if can do what you want it to do. Check some of the OpenOffice resources and forums to see if there are other suggestions. I just did a quick search and found some interesting comments on the topic here.

I'm also thinking that your question also shows some of the reasons Software as a Service (SaaS), or hosted applications, has become such an intriguing alternative. In SaaS, you are able to access the functionality of full-featured applications over the web using only a browser. On Ubuntu, you'd need only run a browser (such as Firefox) and find a hosted service that provides the functionality you need. For example, if you wanted to use document assembly to automate your forms and document creation, you could sign up for a doc assembly service like that from Exari and you be able to do what you want to do in a platform-independent environment.

Those would be my best two ideas. I invite readers to leave comments with other thoughts and recommendations.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tags: legal technology ubuntu open source legal

Full post as published by DennisKennedy.blog on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).