27 ms·

A bit of a tangent, but would something like source control (git, hg) be useful to lawyers? If they are cutting and pasting from older documents all the time, i

• smalter 16y ago
  i think within most big law firms, there may be an enormous team which reviews documents, but when it comes to drafting documents, even at the biggest firms those teams are relatively small. i helped draft a section of a 2000 page document and the whole document just consisted of separate word documents with subjects like "chapter 1 rev2 final 9-3-2009.doc" which are passed around via email. but since the teams are relatively small, there aren't that many versions floating around so that can do a passable, if sometimes irritating, job. there are some types of version control already out there which lawyers use, e.g., hummingbird dm. it's pretty lame and annoying to use which is why many lawyers i know just do what i describe above for version control. so bottom line: yes, it'd be useful, but it would have to be very easy to use otherwise people would just use marginally more annoying but in some ways much easier to use (don't have to learn how to do something new) methods.
• btilly 16y ago
  My immediate thought as a non-lawyer is that source control works better with plain text than it does with binary data in proprietary formats. Unfortunately lawyers have to deal with a lot of real world data from random IT systems, much of which will come as images, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc. So the idea of source control is probably useful. The current state of the art? Maybe less so.