Law Technology Today reports….
Over the last couple of months, the legal profession in the United States has experienced seismic shifts in the wake of COVID-19 with the introduction of basic technology that has greatly enhanced access to the legal system and the way lawyers practice law. As lawyers are integrating new technologies into their practices to better provide remote legal services to their clients, they should also look at introducing another type of technology that has been widely used across other industries for decades: open source software (OSS).
In this article, we will explore what OSS is, how it’s been used in other industries, how it can improve lawyers’ daily practices and improve access to justice, and what efforts are already underway to introduce OSS more broadly into the legal profession. We will also provide insights from leaders in the legal open source movement, including John Tredennick, Lourdes Fuentes Slater, and Mary Mack.
What is Open Source Software (OSS)?
Most everyone has heard of OSS by now, but the bigger issue is that few people can define it, let alone grasp its ubiquity. According to Lourdes Fuentes Slater, CEO of Karta Legal, LLC: “We all work on OSS every day.” Windows, for example, is built on an OSS structure. John Tredennick, the Chair and Executive Director of Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, agrees, saying: “Indeed, the harder question is to find cases where open source is NOT used.” Linux, he explains, was the very first open source project, initially started as a Windows alternative. Now, more than 80 percent of the world’s web servers run on open source software. Other notable examples of OSS are WordPress, Mozilla Firefox, and Open Office.
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How Lawyers Can Improve Their Practices and Access to Justice With Open Source Software (OSS)
