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.
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.