My four-part WordPerfect Lawyer feature is concluded by this post. It included links to great sources of WordPerfect help, with hours of reading material, and lots of free downloadable macros. I probably didn’t discuss WP templates enough, so do not forget these powerful tools.

Is WordPerfect a viable option for the future for lawyers? Well, for the short term at least, my answer is still “yes.” WP 12 is a stable, powerful and inexpensive product that has focused on compatibility with the Microsoft world. If WordPerfect ceased operations tomorrow, WP 12 would still be viable for years. Some have already pronounced WordPerfect dead. David Coursey last November wrote a short obituary: “WordPerfect Killed Itself.” My prior statement that "MS Word did it" is a oversimplification. The company failed to respond properly to switch from DOS to Windows and the purchase of the company by Novell never seemed to be a good fit. You can glean a fairly good history of WP from the numerous comments to David Coursey’s post.

If WP does die, it will be sorely missed. Take a look at David Leffler’s lyrics to “Show Me the Codes” (sung to the tune of "Send in the Clowns") courtesy of Carolyn Elefant’s My Shingle. But what is a difficult situation for WP may be good news for us if it continues to focus on the legal marketplace. Certainly many lawyers will employ its “publish to PDF” feature for preparing their electronic filings.   

I’m hoping WordPerfect still has legs. My encouragement of current WP users to upgrade to WP 12 is good advice for you and your purchase brightens the future of WP. For those who have already drank the Kool-Aid and switched, improvements to Word have now closed the feature gap and it is hard to argue they should go back.

We still have more WordPerfect resources to cover. San Francisco-based microCounsel has a pretty nifty collection of WordPerfect resources, including a great set of links (scroll down to near the bottom,) articles and some free downloadables.

Those of you who are attending ABA TECHSHOW should not miss the WordPerfect Revival Meeting on Friday April 1, 2005. Here’s how we describe it: “Rise up, WordPerfect believers, for this afternoon’s tent meeting led by Brother Ross [Kodner.] You’ll witness testifying, sanctifying and deifying what many believe is the One True Word Processor for Lawyers. Meet the other faithful and gather strength and sustenance for evangelizing the power of the Revealed Code.” Ross sells legal macro libraries (large PDF Slide show) for Word and WordPerfect. (But we know his heart is still with WP.)

I hope this assemblage of WordPerfect information has been useful to you. Feel free to direct others to this blog or use the Permalinks to direct them to this series. Thanks to Doug Loudenback and the other WordPerfect “true believers” for the expertise they freely share online and in person.