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 t

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.