It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.
Lawyer here: because your engineer's POV is wrong. I don't know what else to say. It comes from a lack of knowledge of how lawyers actually work and therefore what we actually need for our work. It is not identical to what software engineers need or want for theirs.
The drafting process is the area in transactional practice that least needs "disruption". The process is long-settled and fairly universal. Track changes are not "crazy confusing to parse", they're a simple and easy way to know who edited what and when. Version control? Basically meaningless for lawyers. The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing.
What really needs disruption, or at least improvement, are contract management platforms. I've worked with all the major ones and they're all pretty bad and clunky in their own way (IME Ironclad is the least-worst but still leaves much to be desired).
If someone could develop a simple, intuitive system for extracting and recording certain agreement content and making that searchable (and transferable!), as well as storing and searching agreement documents generally, it would be amazing.
I do disagree about "Track Changes" though. That quickly becomes an incomprehensible mess. Better to avoid Track Changes (except in very small/simple agreements where you don't expect more than one or two turns, in which case it can be useful) and send a "clean" and redline version (based on the immediately preceding version) on each turn.
Also, mailbox full of back and forth emails with successive versions of document in attachments is also a version control system. It just needs better tooling.
I think you are talking about versioning executed contracts, in which case I kind of agree with you, though there are some corner cases where it would be helpful to track all the amendments/restatements to a contract over time.
But I do think versioning of drafts is important in all but the most basic negotiations because parties expect redlines with each draft and different parties may expect different redlines (because not all parties are necessarily recipients of all drafts, eg, if there are some discrete points being negotiated amongst a sub-set of the parties).
But as I have said in another comment, that kind of version control is already available to lawyers. And in general, I agree with you - the actual pain points for lawyers (and their clients) are not the ones that software developers tend to focus on when they talk about disrupting the legal sector. There are a lot of solutions in search of problems.
so every lawyer on earth is able to use word 100% of the time without ever losing data, removing a sentence or closing a comment by mistake ?
This is not an actual problem in real-world practice. Change tracking is easy and fairly universally understood. I see this idea from engineers that what lawyers do is try to slide in secret edits and a lawyer’s job is to be ever-vigilant for these secret attacks, but this is not how lawyers actually work.
Only non-lawyers imagine this is some huge issue that lawyers grapple with and for which they cry out for a solution. Again, it really would behoove any would-be saviors of the legal profession to engage with actual practitioners and listen to what their actual problems are, not what you strongly feel they must be.
1) change tracking is easy to use and universally understood 2) timestamps in document names solve the version problem, and 3) that emails traded back and forth work as a document history
does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse.
I definitely think engineers are too quick to throw a "one easy trick!" at a big messy problem like this that obviously has a bunch of social/network elements in addition to technical challenges, but saying that the current situation is functional for most participants doesn't really seem to be accurate.
that is exactly my experience with any shared document > 20 pages in word
As a software engineer, when I imagine myself doing a lawyer's job, I would want a tool like this. But that misses the point. Good UX requires first being attentive to the actual problems expressed by users. Otherwise we end up with the pretense of empathy: projection.
That may be a good idea, but not because they’ll tell you what their problems are. Asking people what their problem is leads to responses like ‘faster horses’ instead of ‘cars’, and this whole Word situation reeks strongly of that.
that's wild. My experience editing word documents is that you have to have a dozen backups to be sure not to loose something due to basic keyboard / mouse manipulation mistake. I wonder what is their secret.
Replying to add that there is a simple reason for this: Virtually every written contract includes an "integration" or "whole agreement" clause that states that the current version is the final version of the contract and that it supersedes any prior oral or written agreements between the parties.
Another lawyer here: This is correct. (To uniquely identify the most recent version, it's extremely helpful to hard-code the date and time into the file name and in a running header. EXAMPLE: "ABC-XYZ-NDA-markup-2022-01-31-1510-CST.docx" (or use UTC if dealing with other countries' time zones).
If multiple parties are mailing word documents back and forth (even with date in title), it becomes crazy.
You think J. Random Lawyer is going to learn, and use, git? ROFLMAO — half the lawyers around don't even know how to use styles in Word, and they think the way to add spacing between paragraphs is to leave a blank line.
The main problem I run into is people using conflicting diff software (eg, you generate a blackline of two Word documents using ChangePro, but you forget to PDF it before it goes to the other side, so they put through some changes on the blackline document in Word tracked changes). These things can be avoided through sane configuration options. Maybe git is an objectively better solution but even if it is there is a huge local maximum problem.
If you were to pick a VCS for non-technical users (e.g. a group who historically just produce word documents), it would probably have to be a non-distributed system like SVN that allows for file locking. Conceptually, central VCS and file locking etc is much easier to understand for non-technical people than distributed VCS and merges in my experience; it's no surprise to me Word offers SVN style locking too for collaboration, which of course is anathema to the way git operates.
Git can for sure solve this problem, I just think its too complex to use for most Word Processor users, especially conflict resolution, and is generally ideologically opposed to providing features to lock shared documents down.
It’s definitely possible. Adobe is a great example of a success story in the space.
Problem is that for plaintext, you need a benevolent billionaire to fund the lobbying.
I'm really starting to hate this. But what can any of us do?
It will be a long road, but it will happen sooner or later. I think we can make it happen sooner.
And they did. Saved several weeks of work on both sides per game.
The users of law are normal people and companies that need to transact with untrusted parties.
Well-paid lawyers clinging to Microsoft Word are a cost centre to most businesses, much of which could likely be automated.
This isn’t necessarily a threat to the legal profession. See the history of accountants and spreadsheet software.
I have forced our lawyers to use better technologies but then we end up with Microsoft word documents from opposing counsel. So back to Word it is.
There's a gravitational pull that is not worth us spending any % of a $1000/hr bill on; this is a scenario where doing anything different where they have to be trained is costlier than keeping the status quo, where that is a MSFT Word license the fraction of the cost of a billable hour.