Businesses don't always want to have their profit sapped by overeager SaaS allegedly allowing said firm to focus on the business. Like all operating decisions, it is a cost/benefit tradeoff.

Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.

+1, too many SaaS’ sapping profit.

Intuit is killing me. I am genuinely looking for another solution that won’t break my CPAs brain.

Also the desktop vs online stuff is so annoying since they don’t have 1:1 feature parity.

GnuCash? Ledger or another plain-text tool?

I mean, the first sentence of TFA reads "..a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law". Seems well suited to deploying 'pretty unique IT' with minimal effort.

I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.

> Am I alone in my reaction

You are.

I personally would find my lawyer working on projects and blogging about stuff related to his legal domain to be a good thing. This is no different than a constitutional lawyer writing a blog about some constitutional matter going on in current events.

I also want my lawyer to focus on lawing, not dealing with Microsoft contracts, trying to keep confidential data out of copilot, dealing with proprietary formats, etc.

At the end of the day, every firm needs some form of IT. Above a certain scale you are hiring IT help to manage it anyway, might as well use free software as MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.

No, but my impression from this website is that he's a technology lawyer who enjoys maintaining his own stack, which strikes me as nothing but a plus.

As long as billable hours don't go towards sysadminning stuff, then what's the problem?

Couldn't agree more! Reminds me of Shibboleet - https://xkcd.com/806/

Reading the blog post, he isn't doing anything that unusual just using some open source applications that other people can use just as easily.

I doubt this blog post is intended for the benefit of his clients.

That said, as someone who is used to Linux and FOSS in my personal life but forced to use a typical corporate tech stack at work, I feel the tech I use at work is a hindrance more than anything and I would be more productive with the kind of stack the author describes.

>I doubt this blog post is intended for the benefit of his clients.

Well it is to their benefit to know this is what's going on, to that other poster's point.

> What do I do if something happens to you and another lawyer or paralegal has to step in?

This is one of the advantages of running free software. The data formats are open, so all of the data should be able to be imported any other system.

This is one of the advantages of using MS Office. The other lawyer can just use their own copy or subscribe online and not bother with replicating a custom environment.

Not alone, but like, I know a guy who runs a tech consulting firm and he is delighted that his lawyer, who is a former lawyer, has technology opinions.

A lot of clients won't care but for certain clients this signals that their lawyer understands their values.