Converting attornies from WP to Word

[mrainey]

Hi, I've been reading WOW for a while and want to thank Bob Blacksberg for clarifying so much of Word. Most of his legal expertise was not relevant to me until very recently. I just installed SBS for a small attorney's office and they are contemplating converting from Word Perfect to Word. Besides searching through Woody's archives for all of Bob's Word of Law articles is there a good source for how to plan such a conversion? They probably have 20 years of documents in 6 versions of WP. Where do I find people who have been down this road?

[kelliel]

This is just my opinion.

If they have 20 years of documents in 6 different version of Word Perfect, I would advise them to stay with Word Perfect. Unless they want to hire me for the next 5 years at $100K per year. <img src=/S/wink.gif border=0 alt=wink width=15 height=15>

And most of my above comment was serious.

In my opinion, and I have been through one WP -> Word conversion and one Word 6 -> Word 97 conversion, the prospects of converting 20 years of documents in the next 5 years is not a pretty contemplation.

By the way, what's SBS?

[KB MacKenzie]

You'll find quite a bit of info at <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.microsystems.com>Microsystems</A> website, and particularly the download of their whitepaper <A target="_blank" HREF=ftp://www.microsystems.com/pub/whitepaper.doc>Making the Change from WordPerfect to Word
in a Legal Environment Protecting Your Document Investment</A>.

And, unless there's a compelling reason for migrating, such as a large percentage of the firm's client base is on Word and is pressing for the migration, I agree with Lawrence.

[mrainey]

Thank you for the reference to microsystems. Very helpful. Of course the reason to entertain such a conversion is outside clients document exchange. I suspect that WP and Word will coexist for some time and that most legacy documents will never need to be converted. SBS, by the way, is Small Business Server a packaged offering of WIN2000 Server, Exchange, SQL and ISA optimized for a small business.

[kelliel]

You may want to read the article about WP and Word for the small office found at <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v6-n21>http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/ar...ate.asp?v6-n21</A>.

The specific section is "5. HARD KNOCKS IN THE SMALL LAW OFFICE."