I remember having a discussion in the early 2000s about WordPerfect still staying around for various legal use-cases and medical transcriptions. I would have thought these folks would have moved on and something would have been able to fill itβs niche.
Back in the day, my then-law firm was upgrading from DOS to Windows. There were some lawyers who said that of course we should upgrade from WordPerfect for DOS to the Windows version because, after all, WordPerfect was the industry standard for law firms. But the techies among us successfully argued that we shouldn't give a [hoot] what other law firms were using β what mattered was what our clients were using, which our surveys showed was uniformly Microsoft Word for Windows. That proved prescient.
There was a technical reason that WP was used by law firms. When submitting briefs to a court, total word count in a brief is extremely important. WordPerfect counts words in footnotes as part of the document, MSWord did not. This led to one case where the lawyers were being considered for sanctions by submitting a document over the word count limit due to using Microsoft Word.
