A: No, absolutely not. But, you probably ought to have it, anyway.
Need is a strong word, and there are plenty of viable alternatives to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice, the free and open-source office suite, is well-suited to legal work (indeed, I used its predecessor, OpenOffice.org, in my litigation practice for years). So is Apple’s iWork suite. Google Docs has come a long way, and while I would still like to see some improvements, most lawyers will be able to get their work done in Google Docs quite happily.
Still, you should probably have a copy of Microsoft Office if you are going to share documents with people who use it. LibreOffice does an excellent job editing documents created in LibreOffice. The same is true for iWork and Google Docs. What they do not always do excellently is edit documents created in Microsoft Office. This is especially true for legal documents, which often contain a lot of ad-hoc formatting (using spaces for indentation or tabs for alignment, for example). Even simple things like signature blocks rarely come through as intended.
When you receive a document created with Microsoft Word, you should be prepared to open it in Microsoft Word, so you can see it as intended. Likewise, if you are going to share an editable document with someone, you should share it in a format they will be able to use. With my clients, I often use Google Docs, since all of them have Google accounts. But with other lawyers, I always default to Word.
So the answer is no, you do not need Microsoft Office. But you should have it, anyway.
Sam Glover has been writing about law practice technology, management, marketing, and other stuff on Lawyerist since 2007. He consults on appeals and motion practice in his solo practice. When he isn't blogging or lawyering, Sam drinks espresso and plays with fountain pens.
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I’m very disappointed that you didn’t even mention WordPerfect. I understand that it is not as cheap as LibreOffice, as you do have to pay for it, but it is vastly superior to LibreOffice. It also has many advantages over Word in the area of formatting. I still agree with your main point though. If you have to share the document with someone that only has access to Word, you will have to use Word yourself. Hopefully Microsoft’s recent missteps in dealing with licensing of Office will prompt more businesses to abandon that awful word processor.
I’ve been stuck using WordPerfect for the last 3.5 years because that’s what my employer prefers. I despise everything about it, aside from the fact that it defaults to “paste without formatting” when I hit CTRL+V. Even that nice feature is not enough for me to ever consider using it after I leave this place.
It’s hard to understand how you could “despise everything about it” when a majority of the functionality of all word processors is about the same. What word processor would you use if you had the choice?
WordPerfect is terrible, though, so I can understand it being left off.