I agree. Windows is the biggest malware ever created. It blocks customization, installs dozens of unwanted software and blocks its detractors and certainly, it does not contribute anything other than its gui to what is really related to the operating system.
Oh, it gets so much worse. I just finished working on something that interfaces with a microsoft product. It sends superfluous amounts of http requests for the same request for information. And if you send back a http message to it saying 'too many requests' (429) or 'Service not available' (503), its reaction is to FLOOD that server with anywhere from 5~15 of the exact same requests all withing 0.5~1 seconds of each other. Its response to a server saying "Hey, we're getting too many requests" is to flood it with more requests. So imagine if 100 people are running this product across your company and 1 person managed to accidentally slow down or flood your company's data API server for just a bit. The 100 people using the product will receive a 429 or 503 status code and then their machines will start flooding that server with requests. 15x100=1500 requests all within a 15 seconds or so. That's text book definition of a DDOS attack.
And this is how its suppose to work *by design*. MS knows this, has been aware of this, and their devs simply say "It's a feature" and never said why.
Sure, but the legal world is as ignorant of everything linked to a computer as programmers are of the legal world. We are like two civilizations that never met. No developer imagines our needs just as no judge, congressman, lawyer, etc., knows what a developer could do.
What? But the
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are nothing but lawyers. The various open source licenses were made by lawyers. A lot of IP/trademark law requires a lawyer to talk to and understand programming and technology.
Also to be fair, no developer imagines ANYONE ELSE's needs. For any project, there are SMEs (subject matter experts). People that are usually not programmers but an expert that direct programmers on what their work and needs are. Unless we are the SME (rare, but known to happen), we don't try to assume we know what anyone's else's needs are. That's our job. Again, understanding and logical deduction. Just like, as a lawyer, you don't assume the legal needs of your clients nor an architect assumes the needs of the people that want a house built.
While judicial files, hearings and all documentation is digitized there is not a single app or software that comes close to being useful. Courts and lawyers continue to print thousands of sheets due to their inability to organize them on their computers and their inability to protect privacy.
The few dedicated softwares failed because each country, estate, jurisdiction and forum are ordered with different criteria and users have different priorities. They didn't t fail because of the code, they fail because it requires very specific databases.
So, I have heard of dedicated software for this type of stuff. The few small chances I have to talk to a lawyer in the past they usually already have software that does filing and organization for and it usually does an adequate enough job where they're not looking for something else. And that's kinda been the problem with a lot of the people that proposes software like this. The project I'm working on with my sister is doing something similar for veternarians. My previous job is doing something like this for account managers in companies. A lot of times, a lot of these don't pan out not because they're not good ideas, but the core concept of the execution is flawed or, again, there isn't visibilty to get off the ground. Case in point, the CEO of my last company is a sales person. He saw this gap where salesforce is for sales reps and accounting, but there was this gap for account managers, the people between sales reps and accounting. He was given the green light from his other sales and account manager friends and even CEO's that if this product was made, they'll definitely sign on because it was much better than what they have with salesforce. Then the rumor spread of a recession due to the pandemic. Companies started laying off people because there's a rumor of a recession (which causes a recession). A lot of them backed out and they're having trouble finding new customers. A lot of them just stuck with salesforce.
The boeing engineer one was actually a way to automate bids and legal contracts for gig work with a focus on being local. As in, it'll know where you are and search for other people who can fill the need locally (within a 10~100 mile radius). I actually figured out, mathematically and programmically (in javascript), how to find the area within a x mile radius on a globe for this (the most math I've had to do as a programmer. And even then, it wasn't precise as earth is technically an oblong, not a true sphere). I had to leave that position because, upon advice from the VC's he was meeting, he wanted to inject blockchain into it as well as, he wouldn't listen to my warnings about why doing X or Y idea would be horrible for the functionality of the app. To him, it was all just abstraction that a programmer can figure out rather than a design flaw.
All that is to also to point out that whether or not an app/product/platform is successful as very little to do with how good it is, but rather, visibility AND THEN adaptability. And getting people to move or change their ways, including bad habits, is like squeezing water from a stone. Which, I'm willing to bet, you're well aware of. (The getting people to move or change their ways part.)
With all that said, with my limited personal experience with what you're describing, it sounds very limited in scope and might be incredibly useful for the area of law that you're or the country/county/state/province/etc. you're in, but might not be as useful for someone else in a different country/county/state/province/etc. Not that it won't be helpful, just not *as* helpful. Usefulness isn't a binary on/off, but a gradient. The further you get away from the originator's position, the less helpful it can be. And unless something is near 100% useful and better than the hack solution/process they already have (or sometimes, even if it is 110% better), they won't switch because "what if" and the devil they know is better than the one they don't and just general laziness. And that's the point/problem. Much like windows being the norm because, even though everyone hates it and it's literally malware sometimes, it's "good enough" and people don't want to adopt something new. It takes A LOT of effort to convince someone to switch to something new, let alone pay for it. I mean, it took me years, close to a decade just to convince my wife to just to *try* linux even though she was complaining about windows 7 AND 10 almost every single day. Now that she's tried it, she dreads ever having to boot up the windows partition. I've been trying to convince my sister the same thing for more than a decade and she still hasn't touched it even though her hatred for the thing is enough to sear a hole through the sun itself. As far as I know, I'm the only one in my extended family that uses linux as a day-to-day OS and they ALL hate windows.
The other part is that, for the amount of adaptability you might want to have in it, it's going to need to be really big, data structure-wise. (not size of data structure, the data structure itself will need to be huge and probably complex).
Pertaining to your idea though, here's what I told my sister. If you feel passionate enough about it, go for it. But you can't go into it thinking "I'm gonna make a billion dollars and be the next Bill Gates.". Go into it because *you* want it and *you* feel its useful and *you* would use it everyday. You're building this for you first and foremost and, if it happens to have enough wiggle room in some of the decision and design aspect to be appealing to someone else, then you can make some concessions for other people. Because then, even if it never takes off, it'll make *your* life easier/better and your job more enjoyable. And, in the end, that's what programming is really for. Automation through logical task reduction to make tasks easier/better.
For your idea, if you want to do some of the inital leg work yourself, reading up on database schemas on relational databases. Particularly data normalization, foreign key relations and the one-to-many and many-to-many relations between tables. Depending on the abstractness, I would also look into noSQL DB's like mongodb. Since, most likely, you won't need consistency in your tables (the word "consistency" means different things in database than it does in plain English) as much, a non-structured enforced database like noSQLs and mongodb might be a better fit than relational databases. But the cost is just that, it's not structured and, hence, can be hard to guarantee a query will have completeness in its results.
