Involving Clients in Your Decisions

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 215-219

Involving Clients in

Your Decisions

To introduce this chapter, let’s take a look at what many

believe is the biggest sea change in the history of legal technol-

ogy. Throughout the 1990s, some estimated that more than 80

percent of law firms used WordPerfect for word processing. In

fact, WordPerfect dominated the legal market. As we entered

the twenty-first century, however, the tables turned—and in a

dramatic way. Over the next few years, Microsoft Word caught

up with and passed WordPerfect in market share, and Word

now holds a greater share of the legal market than WordPerfect

ever experienced. It is instructive to think about the reasons

for that change.

Lawyers (in rare, but quite feisty pockets) continue to

debate the relative merits of both products. Corel certainly

made some missteps with WordPerfect, and its initial move to

Windows was something of a disaster. Further, Microsoft cer-

tainly benefited from the dominance of Windows and bundling

arrangements with manufacturers of new PCs. The biggest

factor in the change, however, had little to do with technology

markets. It had everything to do with the demands of the cli-

ents, who were moving to Word in droves. As statistics showed

that the vast majority of businesses (i.e., clients and potential

clients of law firms) used Microsoft Word, and lawyers and

their clients began to exchange electronic documents by email,

the writing was on the wall for WordPerfect. In retrospect,

what first appeared to be an unexpected sea change in technol-

ogy now seems quite predictable and expected.

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