I was asked recently about how I get on using LibreOffice for document-related legal work, and I promised to write down some thoughts.

The short answer is that I use a mix of LibreOffice and other FOSS tools, and I’m very positive about what I do and how I do it, with no particular concerns.

(I’ve written more broadly about how I use Free software for legal work; this blogpost is more specific.)

Usual disclaimer

This is about my experience. Yours might be different.

You might not want to, or be able to, use, or try, LibreOffice (or vim, or git, or whatever). And that’s fine. I’m not trying to convert or persuade anyone.

Documents using LibreOffice Writer

I do a lot of work which entails producing and amending, documents, and exchanging documents with others. This includes contracts, policies and procedures, and collaborative report writing. Occasionally, it means filling in other people’s forms. I use LibreOffice’s Writer for this.

I use Writer pretty much every day, and have done for several years, with a wide range of clients and counterparties, including large law firms, small companies, and government departments, and I have no concerns, or significant gripes.

I have made templates for my most common types of document, and I have styles set up to make formatting easy and consistent. (I don’t know why people produce documents without styles, but that’s just a personal gripe.)

I have exchanged complex documents, usually with lots of tracked changes and comments, with many, many recipients, and I have had no problems with tracked changes, or people not being able to open documents or see what I have done.

I’ve had a document recently where automatic numbering had gone wrong, and one where formatting was been messed up, but these were both documents which started life 5+ years ago, and I have not been able to identify whether this was a LibreOffice Writer issue, or a Word (or whatever tool others involved have been using) issue, or something else. In both cases, I fixed them rapidly and got on with things. I don’t know what Word is like recently, but when I last used it a few years ago, I found automatic numbering and formatting were mostly fine but occasionally a pain back then too, so perhaps this is just par for the course.

I found Writer’s recent change to dark mode / theming a bit of a pain, but I seem to have resolved it now.

For version control and documents, I don’t do anything fancy. I have a script which appends a date and timestamp to the beginning of the file’s name, and this works well. I get a directory of drafts, with clear naming / sequencing. I’ve experimented with git and documents, and while it sort of works to a point, it is not the right approach for me at the moment.

Factors which might aid my positive experience:

• I don’t depend on any third party plug-ins or integrations. I imagine that someone whose work depends on that kind of thing, then Writer might not be a good fit.
• I don’t do litigation, or anything which requires court filings.

Text work using vim

I do a lot of advisory work, where I produce reports, advice notes, and briefing notes. I don’t tend to use LibreOffice for this, preferring instead to use vim, writing in Markdown.

For instance, this is how I prepared the new terms of service for mastodon.social / mastodon.online, and, on a friendly basis outside work, a draft vendor agreement for postmarketOS.

This means none of the cruft of a document filetype, and it means that I can use git for version control in a way that actually works (unlike with documents).

It also makes it easy to produce diffs.

But it doesn’t work well for things like cross-referencing; it is not the right tool for the job.

If the output needs to be a nicely-formatted PDF, I use pandoc and typst to convert the Markdown using a template. This makes producing a formatted document very easy, while letting me focus on the content.

Some clients send and receive plain text / .md files (and, yes, you, who likes LaTeX files :)) and share .diffs, others prefer documents. Both are fine with me and I go with whichever works better for each client or each situation.

Presentations

I do not use Impress, the presentation tool, other than for viewing presentations which are sent to me.

Instead, I use reveal.js for presentations, writing in markdown and presenting in my browser. I really like reveal.js.

I can easily upload my presentations for people to view, and I can convert them to .pdf for distribution.

I’ve not had to work on a collaborative presentation in the last 5+ years; I imagine that I’d have to use Impress, or a client’s hosted tool of choice, if someone wanted that.

Spreadsheets

I use the spreadsheet tool, Calc, when I need a spreadsheet, which is not very often. It is mostly basic accountancy. For my limited uses, Calc has been absolutely fine, and I’m certainly not qualified to comment on it in any detail.

Hosted tools

I’ll use hosted tools if a client wants

Some clients want me to use their choice of hosted tools - Microsoft, Google Docs, Cryptpad, Nextcloud, etherpad, and so on.

That’s fine; if a client wants to use them, and gives me access, I use them.

All the ones that I’ve tried so far work fine in Firefox.

I’m also happy to make PRs to, or commit directly into, a client’s git repositories.

I’m not currently hosting any such tools myself

Over the past few years, I’ve hosted instances of Collabora (via Nextcloud), Cryptpad, and etherpad.

All have had their pros and cons, and perhaps that’s something for a different blogpost.

Most recently, I hosted etherpad, but right now, I’m not hosting any of these. I just don’t use them enough.