A tangential question...but does anyone know what software is used to generate legal documents that look like the PDF linked in the article? I’ve played with LaTeX templates a bit, but I seriously doubt law firms are futzing around with LaTeX for documents as complex as this. They must have some software that produces this formatting.
So it was likely made in Word and exported to PDF. (One can anyway guess from the "look" of the paragraphs that they're not using anything like Knuth–Plass line-breaking, which rules out things like *TeX and InDesign.)
Yep it's Word exported to pdf. Source: Am attorney, do this all the time. You write it up in Word, save as pdf. Then upload it to the court website, which (in federal court, at least) puts the case number in blue text at the top for the officially-filed version.
The 1-28 pleading numbers on the side are annoying. They're specific to courts in California and a few other jurisdictions, and the rules of court require them. But many other courts don't have them, and they only help to cite specific lines within pages; eg "Complaint 5:4-9" means "Complaint at page 5, at lines 4 to 9". It's occasionally useful for court filings like this, but more useful for court/deposition transcripts of testimony to show precisely where a witness said something.
Related: I tried building an RNN to generate legal pleadings back around 2018/19 and gathered a bunch of docs like this from courts across the country as training data. Processing text with those pleading numbers was a pain, so I built a CNN to classify whether a document had pleading numbers or not, which affected downstream processing. Probably the wrong approach in a bunch of ways, but I was just learning.
In my sample size of one, an attorney I talked to said that Microsoft Word was the most important software he and his colleagues used. So my guess is they're just really good with Word.
Word has pretty good revision tracking and support for footnotes which are probably the main things lawyers use more than most average people do. And remember that lawyers communicate a lot with clients, etc. too so there would be a lot of friction associated with a non-standard tool.
When I worked on an expert witness report for a big law firm we just used Word.
Lots of lawyers use WordPerfect. Version 5.1. There's plenty of evidence online if you don't believe me, I wouldn't believe me if this was the first time I heard it.
