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Is this inherent to the way law works, or did practices develop this way to route around the messiness of simultaneous changes without git?

rayiner 7y ago
It’s inherent to the way writing prose works. Documents are sequential, not modular. You can’t have 10 people all working on a novel at the same time. Maybe there are a few logical sections you can split up, but even then everything needs to be in the same voice so someone needs to massage the pieces during integration. Automatic merging provides little benefit over copying and pasting a couple of individual sections together. There are also very few documents being written. (The ratio of documents read to documents written is probably 100:1 between cases, discovery documents, etc.) You’re never editing dozens of files at the same time. Maybe 3-4, and often just one.
- mkyujung 7y ago
  Right now I’m working on a 100 page due diligence report. Even if I’m doing a simple task like proofreading, I have to mark up my changes by hand and wait for the document to become available to access because an associate is making edits to a single page of the report. To make things worse, once we finish our draft, we’ll send this document to our clients, the investment bankers, and the auditors to review and send us 3 different versions of markups. Meanwhile we’ll be continuously updating the document ourselves. Often it becomes unclear who has edited what and when, and its exacerbated by the fact that many lawyers still prefer to mark-up documents with pen and paper and have them updated later by their secretary (while in the meantime the document will have gone through another round of markups from other lawyers in the team). I don’t know if an automatic merge is the right solution either, but I can absolutely see the value in software that helps manage this mess. I realise it might be different in litigation, because in this case we’re not trying to draft a coherent legal argument but tick off a series of regulatory checkboxes that are semi-independent from each other.
- james_in_the_uk 7y ago
  Perhaps it's a contentious vs non-contentious thing but in the latter (my world) we edit drafts collaboratively all the time.

rayiner 7y ago

It’s inherent to the way writing prose works. Documents are sequential, not modular. You can’t have 10 people all working on a novel at the same time. Maybe there are a few logical sections you can split up, but even then everything needs to be in the same voice so someone needs to massage the pieces during integration. Automatic merging provides little benefit over copying and pasting a couple of individual sections together. There are also very few documents being written. (The ratio of documents read to documents written is probably 100:1 between cases, discovery documents, etc.) You’re never editing dozens of files at the same time. Maybe 3-4, and often just one.

mkyujung 7y ago
Right now I’m working on a 100 page due diligence report. Even if I’m doing a simple task like proofreading, I have to mark up my changes by hand and wait for the document to become available to access because an associate is making edits to a single page of the report. To make things worse, once we finish our draft, we’ll send this document to our clients, the investment bankers, and the auditors to review and send us 3 different versions of markups. Meanwhile we’ll be continuously updating the document ourselves. Often it becomes unclear who has edited what and when, and its exacerbated by the fact that many lawyers still prefer to mark-up documents with pen and paper and have them updated later by their secretary (while in the meantime the document will have gone through another round of markups from other lawyers in the team). I don’t know if an automatic merge is the right solution either, but I can absolutely see the value in software that helps manage this mess. I realise it might be different in litigation, because in this case we’re not trying to draft a coherent legal argument but tick off a series of regulatory checkboxes that are semi-independent from each other.
james_in_the_uk 7y ago
Perhaps it's a contentious vs non-contentious thing but in the latter (my world) we edit drafts collaboratively all the time.