TeX and Microsoft Word are two fundamentally different pieces of software. I don't know if you can convert from Word to TeX since that doesn't make conceptual sense. TeX is a layout and typesetting software. You give it the content and specify the logical structure with a markup language called LaTeX. It takes that and figures out that best way for it to look.

This is all true, but it doesn't make conversion impossible. It just makes it different. Conversion means reducing style added by the WYSIWYG word processor, like Word, replacing it with simple notation that can then be converted back to LaTeX.

HTML makes a nice intermediate format, because in order to convert to HTML the WYSIWYG program will have to turn its stupid typographical decisions back into the (somewhat more) abstracted language of HTML. So "Save As" HTML will turn the Word document into something that can be worked with.

A wonderful free software program called Pandoc, written in the language Haskell by a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley named John MacFarlane, translates all sorts of markup languages into one another. The best markup language is the least: markdown. Markdown looks like typing email. But Pandoc can turn it into wonderful LaTeX. Or make it from HTML. So the actual simplest way to convert from Word is to save as HTML, tell pandoc to make the HTML into markdown, thus removing everything but the most minimal indications of style, edit the markdown so that any style that hasn't been translated right, or that you want to add, can be added in the way simplest for the typist, and then straight to beautiful typeset pages in PDF via LaTeX, which one can in turn learn from and edit to fine tune the document. The easiest way to learn LaTeX in order to use it is to convert some of your existing documents first, via the route I've described, and then fix them, change them, rearrange them, editing the LaTeX that pandoc gave you to start from.

All this stuff really works. SFLC uses only free software to do absolutely everything that lawyers do, and many things that most lawyers wouldn't have a prayer of being able to do no matter how much they spent on "tech." We are about half LaTeX and half OpenOffice users, and we communicate documents back and forth in markdown, which is also the language of our wiki. We make Supreme Court briefs, District Court litigation paper, web publications, business correspondence, and all other forms of document workflow from the simplest typing and the most powerful and tasteful rendering, whether on paper or on the Web. You can have a law practice that interoperates with everyone about everything using only the world's best software we all make and share. Works everywhere, costs nothing, never spies on you or invades your privacy. Or you can spend the rest of your life using crap. (Of course, if you pawn your license, someone else will impose technology on you, and it will probably be shit. But they'll be doing that to the rest of your life, too, so what else would you expect?)

No, that's yet another confusion between typing and rendering. The Chicago Manual says you don't need to add the extra space preparing manuscripts: if the renderer gives you French spacing (as your browser is doing with this wiki text right now, for example), that's not a style violation anymore. But good English typesetting won't change just yet, for another generation at least. So use a good renderer, like TeX, and let it take care of making your documents look good. Or use the Web, and let the browsers do almost as bad a job as Microsoft Word itself. That's why a generation ago, before Steve Jobs was evil or a genius, when he was designing the NeXT box, he wanted to use video PostScript to render everything on all displays. One of his many ideas about how to achieve digital beauty, and one of which (unlike so many of the others) I can heartily approve. But, for reasons that would be too long a story, it wasn't meant to be.