WordPerfect Law Office 2000- Apr/May '00

WordPerfect Law Office 2000

Several years ago, Corel Corp. realized it was beginning to lose the legal word processing war to Microsoft and decided to counterattack with its WordPerfect Suite 7 Legal Edition. A year or so later, WordPerfect Suite 8 Legal Edition appeared. Both contained the standard WordPerfect Suite core components and several well-chosen legal applications, including Amicus Attorney, HotDocs, a table of authorities generator, as well as enhanced document comparison.

WordPerfect Law Office 2000 -- Corel's long-awaited successor -- has just started shipping. Although it's similar to its predecessors in many ways, there are some decided differences, including an increase in price.

What's in the box?

Law Office 2000 ships on four disks: disk 1 includes WordPerfect 9.0, as well as the latest versions of Quattro Pro, Corel Presentations, Paradox, CorelCENTRAL and Trellix 2 (for designing and publishing documents on the Web); disk 2 contains fonts and clip art; and disk 4 includes Dragon System's NaturallySpeaking 4.0 Standard Edition.

It's disk 3 that makes this suite legal-specific, however. It includes Amicus Attorney IV, HotDocs 5.1, WestCiteLink 2.2, DEAL PROOF SE (a powerful agreement proofing tool), and several other somewhat less significant legal-specific enhancements.

The Amicus Attorney Organizer Edition included with this suite is the standalone version. Amicus' inviting interface was first developed for the Mac and has been further enhanced for Windows in this version. Amicus also provides two guides in PDF: a "Getting Started" booklet and full-length, 500-page user guide.

Although this version doesn't offer any dramatic improvements over the previous Legal Suite, it is compatible with WordPerfect 9.0. What it does offer, however, is a fabulous bargain -- a single license of HotDocs 5.1, purchased directly from Capsoft, is $215.

Using WestCiteLink 2.2 is definitely easier than having to mark every cite in a brief manually, although it's by no means a panacea for the difficult and tedious job of creating a Table of Authorities. While WestCiteLink can find many cites in a brief, it also misses many cites and jump cites, and frequently marks text that isn't a legal cite at all. You'll need to run CiteLink and use the standard WordPerfect Table of Authorities feature to create your TOA.

DEAL PROOF SE automatically finds errors and inconsistencies within your documents. We ran it against a long, complex agreement, and it did a good job of finding undefined terms, non-conforming phrases and open issues. Essentially, DEAL PROOF is a high-tech substitute for a proofreader.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard 4.0 provides an excellent introduction to speech-recognition software. It includes a flexible VXI Parrott microphone, fast setup, the ability to browse the Web with Internet Explorer 4.0 and 5.0, and a large vocabulary of 250,000 words (more than 160,000 active).

There are several other features unique to the new WordPerfect Law Office Suite, most of which seem to be aimed squarely at the solo practitioner:

SaveGet: Like QuickWords, this feature enables users to easily insert boilerplate text in documents. Unlike QuickWords, SaveGet "folders" are networkable. This version also offers integration with Amicus Attorney via WordPerfect's Client-Matters.

Save Files as Group: File groups let you save two or more open documents using one file name, in effect, offering very rudimentary document-management capabilities. We feel that if you're the least bit interested in organizing your documents on a network, however, you should be looking at a real document-management solution.

Pleading Expert Designer and Filler: These two features, when combined, enable a user to create all sorts of handsome looking pleadings and are really quite impressive. They'd be even more so if they were network-enabled.

Pleading Expert Designer specifies pleading formatting. When you've created your pleading style, you can use Pleading Expert Filler to create a case for a pleading document by selecting a pleading style and answering prompts for attorney names, cases, firm names and parties involved. Unfortunately, all this data is saved locally.

Black's Law Dictionary: The WordPerfect Law Office 2000 Spell Checker includes the lexicon from Black's Law Dictionary for legal terms, abbreviations and common cases.

Enhanced Document Comparison: This version offers the same document comparison capabilities as in Legal Suite 8, making it almost as functional as CompareRite -- and a lot easier to use since it part of the program.

Corel makes it easy to access all these legal-specific features via a legal toolbar. Even though it's slightly more expensive, Law Office 2000 is still a fabulous bargain. If you were to purchase the NaturallySpeaking Standard Edition, Amicus Attorney Organizer Edition, HotDocs and the WordPerfect Professional upgrade separately, you'd pay approximately $650, yet the cost of the upgrade is only $249.

Corel Corp.
(800) 772-6735
www.corel.com

Windows 95/98/NT

$479 (new user); $249 (upgrade)

Reviewed by David Greenwald, consultant, LexTech, Brooklyn, N.Y.

April/May '00 Issue

PROS
Includes the latest versions of HotDocs, Amicus Attorney, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, WestCiteLink, plus DEAL PROOF SE; offers tremendous value; includes WPWin 9.0, which appears to be much more stable than its predecessors; enables users to print directly from WPWin 9.0 to Adobe PDF format, without having to spend $200 or more for Adobe Acrobat.

CONS
Integration between Amicus, HotDocs and the Corel Address Book isn't as good as in previous versions. Pleading Expert Designer and Filler would benefit tremendously from being networkable.

VERDICT
Without a doubt, this is the best software value on the market for law firms committed to WordPerfect. It's a must-have upgrade, even if you're only using one or two of its legal add-ons.