13 ms·

Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! It's exactly the tool they need. Just recently worked with a lawyer who was negotiating settlem

Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! It's exactly the tool they need. Just recently worked with a lawyer who was negotiating settlement agreement on my behalf. The agreement in MS Word, edits highlighted with a color background, change requests in the body of the email - after 2-3 rounds of corrections reaching the other party nobody is able to keep a track of anything anymore. Seriously? Years of studies, prestigious profession, peoples' careers and lives at the stake, and this is how you work?!

notelonmusk 7y ago
cognitive load
- durnygbur 7y ago
  They same applies to software professionals who just would like "to code". Yet, the leverage of distributed version control proves to be exponential in the end.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    It really doesn't. In software, you need to track versions because you keep everything in multiple files, and you're making changes to multiple files, and you can have regressions with each new version. In a negotiated legal document, you have just the one authoritative version: the offer you've sent to the other party (or the counter-offer they've sent back to you). For lawyers, this takes the form of edits to the document as highlighted by the Track Changes feature. (Prior versions are basically irrelevant except for historical interest.) And even then, the document going back and forth isn't even the executed (aka "production") document, it's just the development version. Once the document is executed, the development versions get deleted because the executed document is the only truth legally and so prior versions absolutely do not matter.
    - durnygbur 7y ago
      One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document, and of the release version as an executed document. In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either, they're just helpful for anyone willing to gain an insight on why the things work the way they do.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - marktani 7y ago
        > In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either That's not true. Many a times I needed to comb through old commits for debugging purposes. Also, with multi-branch development, you often have many non-release branches that are relevant at a specific point in time.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document No, you literally can't. They're separate files. A legal agreement is just one document. It makes a world of difference for version tracking. Also, software has versions. If you have an issue, you can just rollback to a working version. Legal agreements don't have multiple working versions. They just have the one, and you don't get to update it, because if you change it, you have a different agreement that supersedes all old copies, which are now longer worth the paper they're printed or or the bytes that store them. Sure, you could have needlessly more complicated version tracking for legal documents. But Track Changes in Word works fine, because the legal field doesn't need anything more complicated.
        jameshart 7y ago
        A legal agreement is one document, sure. But a large scale legal operation like a sale of a company must consist of thousands of documents that are changing in concert, right? Wouldn't that be a case for a more comprehensive and consistent change control process?
erikig 7y ago
Nothing like receiving "red-lined" documents with revisions in the comments to make you want to scamper back to git-land.
gamblor956 7y ago
In a legal document negotiated between parties you don't want to keep track of every version of the file, just the latest version of the offered terms and counteroffered terms. Changes by you are highlighted in one color. Changes by other parties are highlighted in other colors. If you need a diff between versions Word can generate one for you in seconds. So yes, this is exactly how we work. Because it was designed to fit our workflow.
- rickycook 7y ago
  i’d argue that it’s not “designed to fit our workflow” so much as designed around a subpar, but flexible tool that everyone was using. that don’t make it good; that just makes it ingrained
  - mikeryan 7y ago
    Track changes in Word works pretty well for turns of a contract. What features do you think are provided by "version control" that aren't handled by Track Changes for contracts?
    - sjy 7y ago
      The ability to keep track of many, potentially thousands of individual changes and assign labels to significant versions. Track Changes is basically like Git if every file write triggered an automatic commit with no commit message and anyone could rewrite history at any time. SharePoint major versions are better but they’re not free, standard, portable or popular.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        If you have a legal agreement with many thousands of changes at any point, someone is getting fired for royally fucking up... Legal agreements are basically a war over each party's choice of standardized language followed by battles over customized terms.
duxup 7y ago
Git is awesome. But it's terminology is really confusing. But yeah some layer of abstraction would be handy. I always think of introducing it to my wife when she looses a document or something but god damn the terminology.
- Aloha 7y ago
  I think svn is a better way of thinking when working with documents, the fact that the timeline is contiguous too helps
  - enriquto 7y ago
    you can easily have a contiguous git timeline if you want to
    - Aloha 7y ago
      is a376f1 older or newer than 89fa2b? The lack of continuous versioning is a problem for most document like workflows.
      - eru 7y ago
        The commit message doesn't encode the timeline in neither git nor svn, and no-one complains. So why do you expect the git hash to encode the timeline? Git encodes the timeline in the parent/child relationship of commits (and/or the date stamps). Trying to look for the timeline information in the hashes is going to be futile, that's not where it's supposed to be found. For documents that get send back and forth via email, amongst more than 2 participants, git's DAG is actually a better representation than a linear timeline. (But yes, if you don't like that, you can set up git to reject commits with more than one parent to enforce a linear history.)
- testvox 7y ago
  https://gitless.com/ https://gitless.com/
- srcmap 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 7y ago
Are there any startups building legal tools with nice UX, but git as a back end?
- codingdave 7y ago
  We considered it. We even built some prototypes and showed it to various stakeholders. The response we got back was universal - "We want everything to feel like we are in MS Word."
  - marvindanig 7y ago
    This is so true! Developers often don’t realize how much MS Word can do and what its users think about the rest of the world. B.t.w since it’s about the US Constitution it is customary for me to share a link to its book form on the web: https://bubblin.io/cover/the-united-states-constitution-by-united-states-of-america#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/the-united-states-constitution-by-u...
mr_toad 7y ago
> Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! For a start they’re using Word, which doesn’t work well with version control. And asking most people to stop using MS Office is like asking them to go and live on the Moon, they look at you like you’re some kind of crazy person.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Word documents work well in version control. In case you're not aware, you can store word documents and do a diff between any 2 versions over git/svn on windows, it opens the diff view in Word.
  - zeven7 7y ago
    Wow, this is going to be very helpful for me. I had no idea. Thanks! So if I install git on Windows and do `git diff MyWordDoc.docx` in the command prompt it'll open up Word?
    - testvox 7y ago
      > You can also use the Git attributes functionality to effectively diff binary files. You do this by telling Git how to convert your binary data to a text format that can be compared via the normal diff. First, you’ll use this technique to solve one of the most annoying problems known to humanity: version-controlling Microsoft Word documents. Everyone knows that Word is the most horrific editor around, but oddly, everyone still uses it. ...Now Git knows that if it tries to do a diff between two snapshots, and any of the files end in .docx, it should run those files through the “word” filter, which is defined as the docx2txt program. This effectively makes nice text-based versions of your Word files before attempting to diff them. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes#_diffing_binary_files https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...
    - user5994461 7y ago
      I am using Tortoise. Not sure about the command line.
azernik 7y ago
Most existing tools are written by coders for coders; they have diff engines and UIs built for plain-text source code, not human-readable rich text. Word's "track changes" feature is good enough that an MVP for such a VCS product would need to have a very good UI. (Source: talking about version control with a lawyer in the family.)
- CivBase 7y ago
  I use MS Office regularly and I would describe its interface as adequate for general use and infuriating for reading/writing formal documents. If that's the competition, I can't imagine it would be that expensive to develop an alternative (at least, not compared to what the US government current spends). Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Why are LaTeX, Markdown, or HTML not sufficient formats? What makes plaintext not "human-readable"? I don't think anyone has trouble reading/writing their Facebook and Twitter posts in plaintext. Why can't our government afford to develop a lawmaker-specific format and an editor (or plugin for an existing editor) to make it easy for lawmakers to work with? Why can't our government afford to fund the creation of a VCS solution with a lawmaker-friendly interface and a public server to host the repository on? Why can't all of our legal documents at least be hosted on a public server in their current state? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "because the public doesn't care enough, so it doesn't help anyone get re-elected and, therefore, there is no available funding". I have a hard enough time getting engineers to understand the value of good VCS, much less an average US citizen.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because lawyers can afford it, and don't really feel like expending effort evaluating software alternatives instead of just doing their work. And because of legacy/network effects. And because no one has pitched an alternative right for that audience.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      > Because lawyers can afford it Lawyers can afford free software too.
reaperducer 7y ago
The agreement in MS Word Consider yourself lucky. There are still legions of legal documents in WordPerfect.
Nition 7y ago
Facepunch Studios Ltd (game dev studio) have their legal docs on GitHub: https://github.com/Facepunch/Legal https://github.com/Facepunch/Legal
euske 7y ago
It's off topic but I seriously want Apple to use a VCS for their license agreements. Every once in a while, they update Developer License Agreement or Paid Application Agreement (updated over 100 times so far), and every time they just show a wall of text. I save it as a file and take a diff to the previous version. They must be using a VCS internally but they make us repeat the same effort again and again. It's stupid.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Maybe that's a start? Techies would find it easier to promote the use of proper VCS for legal documents if their products used them for their ToS, and exposed them to users, e.g. in form of diffs. There's even a precedent - Wikipedia uses such interface for all their pages, including their ToS - see https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_Use/en&action=history https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_.... Beyond technical hurdles that could be solved with a set of FLOSS components and plugins to popular CMSes, I don't see any reason not to do this if one runs a honest company.
cjohansson 7y ago
I agree, another problem with Word (and similar products) is it’s bloat in terms of formatting meta-data but also in glyph code-points. I often get strangely coded white-spaces or strangely coded non-ascii characters when using Word et. al. Legal documents should have limited formatting and strict encoded glyphs therefore a UTF-8 + git + markdown solution would be preferable over using Word. You can create easy to use WYSIWYG software that makes it as easy, or easier, than Word given that Word changes it UI layout every few years
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Well your post here has non-ascii characters. But perhaps you wrote it in in Word and copy-pasted it into Internet Explorer. I've seen that approach recommended to avoid data loss. It's not entirely clear what your objection is tho, since you recommend permitting UTF-8 which allows you to represent many many more non-ascii characters than ascii characters.
ma2rten 7y ago
Google Docs would actually be a good fit for this. You can suggest edits, comment, see a version history, ...
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  In Word, too. Without selling your soul the devil: Microsoft merely demands a fee for the product.
cobbzilla 7y ago
US Federal law works just like this but with an awful manual process that is screaming for a VCS: - Laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President. - The actual formal text of the law is printed in the “US Statues at Large”. Think of this like a commit log— it’s written as a series of add/modify/remove operations to the United States Code (USC), which represents the “master” branch of the repo; our current laws. - Sometimes the add/edit/remove operations have implications in many parts of the code. There is a manually-intensive process that actually determines which parts of the USC must be modified and how. This is like code review on a PR. - Periodically, after many laws are passed and many mods to the USC, it is “republished” (tag/release). Why we couldn’t do this with our laws is beyond me. Institutional inertia I suppose.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Exactly parliamentary procedure was using content control well before computers where invented read Citrine or Roberts Rules. But Executive's do get up to "naughty shit!" as a Uk Party Whip said to me once in a bar.
ecf 7y ago
Legal professionals don’t want version control because they don’t want their mistakes to be visible to anyone else.

notelonmusk 7y ago

cognitive load

durnygbur 7y ago
They same applies to software professionals who just would like "to code". Yet, the leverage of distributed version control proves to be exponential in the end.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  It really doesn't. In software, you need to track versions because you keep everything in multiple files, and you're making changes to multiple files, and you can have regressions with each new version. In a negotiated legal document, you have just the one authoritative version: the offer you've sent to the other party (or the counter-offer they've sent back to you). For lawyers, this takes the form of edits to the document as highlighted by the Track Changes feature. (Prior versions are basically irrelevant except for historical interest.) And even then, the document going back and forth isn't even the executed (aka "production") document, it's just the development version. Once the document is executed, the development versions get deleted because the executed document is the only truth legally and so prior versions absolutely do not matter.
  - durnygbur 7y ago
    One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document, and of the release version as an executed document. In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either, they're just helpful for anyone willing to gain an insight on why the things work the way they do.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - marktani 7y ago
      > In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either That's not true. Many a times I needed to comb through old commits for debugging purposes. Also, with multi-branch development, you often have many non-release branches that are relevant at a specific point in time.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document No, you literally can't. They're separate files. A legal agreement is just one document. It makes a world of difference for version tracking. Also, software has versions. If you have an issue, you can just rollback to a working version. Legal agreements don't have multiple working versions. They just have the one, and you don't get to update it, because if you change it, you have a different agreement that supersedes all old copies, which are now longer worth the paper they're printed or or the bytes that store them. Sure, you could have needlessly more complicated version tracking for legal documents. But Track Changes in Word works fine, because the legal field doesn't need anything more complicated.
      - jameshart 7y ago
        A legal agreement is one document, sure. But a large scale legal operation like a sale of a company must consist of thousands of documents that are changing in concert, right? Wouldn't that be a case for a more comprehensive and consistent change control process?

erikig 7y ago

Nothing like receiving "red-lined" documents with revisions in the comments to make you want to scamper back to git-land.

gamblor956 7y ago

In a legal document negotiated between parties you don't want to keep track of every version of the file, just the latest version of the offered terms and counteroffered terms. Changes by you are highlighted in one color. Changes by other parties are highlighted in other colors. If you need a diff between versions Word can generate one for you in seconds. So yes, this is exactly how we work. Because it was designed to fit our workflow.

rickycook 7y ago
i’d argue that it’s not “designed to fit our workflow” so much as designed around a subpar, but flexible tool that everyone was using. that don’t make it good; that just makes it ingrained
- mikeryan 7y ago
  Track changes in Word works pretty well for turns of a contract. What features do you think are provided by "version control" that aren't handled by Track Changes for contracts?
  - sjy 7y ago
    The ability to keep track of many, potentially thousands of individual changes and assign labels to significant versions. Track Changes is basically like Git if every file write triggered an automatic commit with no commit message and anyone could rewrite history at any time. SharePoint major versions are better but they’re not free, standard, portable or popular.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      If you have a legal agreement with many thousands of changes at any point, someone is getting fired for royally fucking up... Legal agreements are basically a war over each party's choice of standardized language followed by battles over customized terms.

duxup 7y ago

Git is awesome. But it's terminology is really confusing. But yeah some layer of abstraction would be handy. I always think of introducing it to my wife when she looses a document or something but god damn the terminology.

Aloha 7y ago
I think svn is a better way of thinking when working with documents, the fact that the timeline is contiguous too helps
- enriquto 7y ago
  you can easily have a contiguous git timeline if you want to
  - Aloha 7y ago
    is a376f1 older or newer than 89fa2b? The lack of continuous versioning is a problem for most document like workflows.
    - eru 7y ago
      The commit message doesn't encode the timeline in neither git nor svn, and no-one complains. So why do you expect the git hash to encode the timeline? Git encodes the timeline in the parent/child relationship of commits (and/or the date stamps). Trying to look for the timeline information in the hashes is going to be futile, that's not where it's supposed to be found. For documents that get send back and forth via email, amongst more than 2 participants, git's DAG is actually a better representation than a linear timeline. (But yes, if you don't like that, you can set up git to reject commits with more than one parent to enforce a linear history.)
testvox 7y ago
https://gitless.com/ https://gitless.com/
srcmap 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 7y ago

Are there any startups building legal tools with nice UX, but git as a back end?

codingdave 7y ago
We considered it. We even built some prototypes and showed it to various stakeholders. The response we got back was universal - "We want everything to feel like we are in MS Word."
- marvindanig 7y ago
  This is so true! Developers often don’t realize how much MS Word can do and what its users think about the rest of the world. B.t.w since it’s about the US Constitution it is customary for me to share a link to its book form on the web: https://bubblin.io/cover/the-united-states-constitution-by-united-states-of-america#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/the-united-states-constitution-by-u...

mr_toad 7y ago

> Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! For a start they’re using Word, which doesn’t work well with version control. And asking most people to stop using MS Office is like asking them to go and live on the Moon, they look at you like you’re some kind of crazy person.

user5994461 7y ago
Word documents work well in version control. In case you're not aware, you can store word documents and do a diff between any 2 versions over git/svn on windows, it opens the diff view in Word.
- zeven7 7y ago
  Wow, this is going to be very helpful for me. I had no idea. Thanks! So if I install git on Windows and do `git diff MyWordDoc.docx` in the command prompt it'll open up Word?
  - testvox 7y ago
    > You can also use the Git attributes functionality to effectively diff binary files. You do this by telling Git how to convert your binary data to a text format that can be compared via the normal diff. First, you’ll use this technique to solve one of the most annoying problems known to humanity: version-controlling Microsoft Word documents. Everyone knows that Word is the most horrific editor around, but oddly, everyone still uses it. ...Now Git knows that if it tries to do a diff between two snapshots, and any of the files end in .docx, it should run those files through the “word” filter, which is defined as the docx2txt program. This effectively makes nice text-based versions of your Word files before attempting to diff them. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes#_diffing_binary_files https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...
  - user5994461 7y ago
    I am using Tortoise. Not sure about the command line.

azernik 7y ago

Most existing tools are written by coders for coders; they have diff engines and UIs built for plain-text source code, not human-readable rich text. Word's "track changes" feature is good enough that an MVP for such a VCS product would need to have a very good UI. (Source: talking about version control with a lawyer in the family.)

CivBase 7y ago
I use MS Office regularly and I would describe its interface as adequate for general use and infuriating for reading/writing formal documents. If that's the competition, I can't imagine it would be that expensive to develop an alternative (at least, not compared to what the US government current spends). Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Why are LaTeX, Markdown, or HTML not sufficient formats? What makes plaintext not "human-readable"? I don't think anyone has trouble reading/writing their Facebook and Twitter posts in plaintext. Why can't our government afford to develop a lawmaker-specific format and an editor (or plugin for an existing editor) to make it easy for lawmakers to work with? Why can't our government afford to fund the creation of a VCS solution with a lawmaker-friendly interface and a public server to host the repository on? Why can't all of our legal documents at least be hosted on a public server in their current state? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "because the public doesn't care enough, so it doesn't help anyone get re-elected and, therefore, there is no available funding". I have a hard enough time getting engineers to understand the value of good VCS, much less an average US citizen.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because lawyers can afford it, and don't really feel like expending effort evaluating software alternatives instead of just doing their work. And because of legacy/network effects. And because no one has pitched an alternative right for that audience.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    > Because lawyers can afford it Lawyers can afford free software too.

reaperducer 7y ago

The agreement in MS Word Consider yourself lucky. There are still legions of legal documents in WordPerfect.

Nition 7y ago

Facepunch Studios Ltd (game dev studio) have their legal docs on GitHub: https://github.com/Facepunch/Legal https://github.com/Facepunch/Legal

euske 7y ago

It's off topic but I seriously want Apple to use a VCS for their license agreements. Every once in a while, they update Developer License Agreement or Paid Application Agreement (updated over 100 times so far), and every time they just show a wall of text. I save it as a file and take a diff to the previous version. They must be using a VCS internally but they make us repeat the same effort again and again. It's stupid.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Maybe that's a start? Techies would find it easier to promote the use of proper VCS for legal documents if their products used them for their ToS, and exposed them to users, e.g. in form of diffs. There's even a precedent - Wikipedia uses such interface for all their pages, including their ToS - see https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_Use/en&action=history https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_.... Beyond technical hurdles that could be solved with a set of FLOSS components and plugins to popular CMSes, I don't see any reason not to do this if one runs a honest company.

cjohansson 7y ago

I agree, another problem with Word (and similar products) is it’s bloat in terms of formatting meta-data but also in glyph code-points. I often get strangely coded white-spaces or strangely coded non-ascii characters when using Word et. al. Legal documents should have limited formatting and strict encoded glyphs therefore a UTF-8 + git + markdown solution would be preferable over using Word. You can create easy to use WYSIWYG software that makes it as easy, or easier, than Word given that Word changes it UI layout every few years

squiggleblaz 7y ago
Well your post here has non-ascii characters. But perhaps you wrote it in in Word and copy-pasted it into Internet Explorer. I've seen that approach recommended to avoid data loss. It's not entirely clear what your objection is tho, since you recommend permitting UTF-8 which allows you to represent many many more non-ascii characters than ascii characters.

ma2rten 7y ago

Google Docs would actually be a good fit for this. You can suggest edits, comment, see a version history, ...

squiggleblaz 7y ago
In Word, too. Without selling your soul the devil: Microsoft merely demands a fee for the product.

cobbzilla 7y ago

US Federal law works just like this but with an awful manual process that is screaming for a VCS: - Laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President. - The actual formal text of the law is printed in the “US Statues at Large”. Think of this like a commit log— it’s written as a series of add/modify/remove operations to the United States Code (USC), which represents the “master” branch of the repo; our current laws. - Sometimes the add/edit/remove operations have implications in many parts of the code. There is a manually-intensive process that actually determines which parts of the USC must be modified and how. This is like code review on a PR. - Periodically, after many laws are passed and many mods to the USC, it is “republished” (tag/release). Why we couldn’t do this with our laws is beyond me. Institutional inertia I suppose.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Exactly parliamentary procedure was using content control well before computers where invented read Citrine or Roberts Rules. But Executive's do get up to "naughty shit!" as a Uk Party Whip said to me once in a bar.

ecf 7y ago

Legal professionals don’t want version control because they don’t want their mistakes to be visible to anyone else.