I would like to know if there is anything ion a word document that gets lost when opening it in Libreoffice. I work in a legal office where we have very specific formatting guidelines and watermarks. This is crucial for my decision to use Libre Office when I am working from home.
LibreOffice is very close to Word in terms of compatibility. A lot of work is being done to keep compatibility at a high level.
Ultimately, though, you won’t find out if it works for your files until you open and view them in LibreOffice. This should be checked in the same way in the reverse case, when you open edited files in LibreOffice then in Word.
It is best to work with copies of your files to establish security.
However, the compatibility has nothing to do with the subject, but most likely with special formatting.
See also:
How to open files from MS-Office 2007 or 2010 (.DOCX, .XLSX,…)?
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Expect to meet issues if your documents have a sophisticated structure and layout, mainly in paragraph numbering, cross-referencing and page layout.
Generally speaking, I’d say M$ Word is not well fitted for highly specialised documents like legal ones where there is a strict framework. This is because Word offers very few automation tools like styles which are ubiquitous in Writer. Word knows only of paragraph styles which it calls "style sheet*. All the rest is done through ad hoc features encoded in the document contents.
And this is where difficulties arise. .docx is a proprietary format not openly available. Developers have guessed how the most common features are encoded and these can be translated more or less satisfactorily. More advanced features, like paragraph/chapter numbering, are a real pain.
Generally, Word formatting and layout is translated as single-occurrence direct formatting in Writer. By this, I mean that changing the formatting at one location won’t change the formatting of similar contexts (which is fairly automated in Writer). This also contributes to degrading the document structure (e.g. nearly every page is assigned its own single-usage page style, character styles are duplicated ad nauseam, …).
This approximate translation goes even worse when you save back to .doc(x), again for the same reason that .docx format is not public. The more you open/edit/save in alien format (vs. native .ods), the more degradation you get in your document.
So, the morale of the story is: always work in application native format. If you want to work on a professional document (and the more if you edit it in a “professional” way with styles reflecting your constraints), work in a single application and only export in alien format at the final stage of delivery. In other words, with Writer, work exclusively in .odt and when ready to deliver, export to .docx and have a check pass on it with Word to fix the discrepancies.