7 ms·

I have found it impractical to get lawyers to use anything other than Microsoft Word even when there are clear benefits (like online collaboration and shared ve

I have found it impractical to get lawyers to use anything other than Microsoft Word even when there are clear benefits (like online collaboration and shared version history). The reason they give is that they don't want a shared history (need to be able to clean document history for sending to external stakeholders) and that they know the other side will be using Microsoft Word anyways. So it's an equilibrium because they know the other side will use Microsoft word so then they have to use Microsoft Word. I have forced our lawyers to use better technologies but then we end up with Microsoft word documents from opposing counsel. So back to Word it is. There's a gravitational pull that is not worth us spending any % of a $1000/hr bill on; this is a scenario where doing anything different where they have to be trained is costlier than keeping the status quo, where that is a MSFT Word license the fraction of the cost of a billable hour.

hkhanna 5y ago
I have felt this exact pain. I think I know the path to overcoming Microsoft Word in the legal world. It will be a long road, but it will happen sooner or later. I think we can make it happen sooner.
lemax 5y ago
The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Just to get a contract through with a few changes, we go through Word diffs, manual review, and these crazy confusing to parse tracked changes. And then when everything is said and done, the lawyers produce a "final PDF" and we have to run another comparison in Acrobat. It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.
- NoboruWataya 5y ago
  I think it's a matter of perspective. I don't think lawyers would typically view Word or ChangePro as being difficult to use - certainly, trying to get them to learn git would be a significantly greater effort. Outside of tech circles, I think that is true of clients as well. The main problem I run into is people using conflicting diff software (eg, you generate a blackline of two Word documents using ChangePro, but you forget to PDF it before it goes to the other side, so they put through some changes on the blackline document in Word tracked changes). These things can be avoided through sane configuration options. Maybe git is an objectively better solution but even if it is there is a huge local maximum problem.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  >The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Lawyer here: because your engineer's POV is wrong. I don't know what else to say. It comes from a lack of knowledge of how lawyers actually work and therefore what we actually need for our work. It is not identical to what software engineers need or want for theirs. The drafting process is the area in transactional practice that least needs "disruption". The process is long-settled and fairly universal. Track changes are not "crazy confusing to parse", they're a simple and easy way to know who edited what and when. Version control? Basically meaningless for lawyers. The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing. What really needs disruption, or at least improvement, are contract management platforms. I've worked with all the major ones and they're all pretty bad and clunky in their own way (IME Ironclad is the least-worst but still leaves much to be desired). If someone could develop a simple, intuitive system for extracting and recording certain agreement content and making that searchable (and transferable!), as well as storing and searching agreement documents generally, it would be amazing.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing. so every lawyer on earth is able to use word 100% of the time without ever losing data, removing a sentence or closing a comment by mistake ?
    - LiquidSky 5y ago
      A glib response to a glib question: frankly, yes. 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.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  All you need is the political clout to get a court system or some big agency with quasi-judicial functions or a big city to adopt. It’s definitely possible. Adobe is a great example of a success story in the space. Problem is that for plaintext, you need a benevolent billionaire to fund the lobbying.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    > Problem is that for [most useful things], you need a benevolent billionaire to fund the lobbying. I'm really starting to hate this. But what can any of us do?
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Why does the editor matter, really? The lawyers can use Word if that's what they are best at. It seems orthogonal to the issue of managing digital signatures. The service can just as easily send an email with a hash/digest of the document version, the /s/ lines for all the signatories, and the document itself attached, as the "fully executed document"
- giobox 5y ago
  The problem with git for general text work is that it is distributed VCS... even software engineers struggle from time to time with the concept that changes can happen in isolation on separate copies then merge back to the "master copy" in a conflicting way that must be solved. If you were to pick a VCS for non-technical users (e.g. a group who historically just produce word documents), it would probably have to be a non-distributed system like SVN that allows for file locking. Conceptually, central VCS and file locking etc is much easier to understand for non-technical people than distributed VCS and merges in my experience; it's no surprise to me Word offers SVN style locking too for collaboration, which of course is anathema to the way git operates. Git can for sure solve this problem, I just think its too complex to use for most Word Processor users, especially conflict resolution, and is generally ideologically opposed to providing features to lock shared documents down.
charlieyu1 5y ago
I think conversion between docx and plaintext is a possible solution, contracts aren’t known for fancy formatting
- sjy 5y ago
  Outline numbering, cross-references and tables are all common features of contracts which are difficult to capture in plain text.
  - iav 5y ago
    Also legal entity diagrams, picture appendices, and often math formulas with Unicode
misterpurple45 5y ago
Lawyers aren’t the users here. The users of law are normal people and companies that need to transact with untrusted parties. Well-paid lawyers clinging to Microsoft Word are a cost centre to most businesses, much of which could likely be automated. This isn’t necessarily a threat to the legal profession. See the history of accountants and spreadsheet software.
grogenaut 5y ago
I got one set of lawyers to stop using word once. Large game platform holder would send us EULAs in word format with all sorts of nice legal placeholders. Then they had us plug those into the eula tool they developed for the the platform, which only accepted like 5 total html tags and no unicode or smart characters. We had an engineer spend about 2 weeks writing software to convert them and hand checking the eulas. Finally I had a chance to talk with legal on another matter and asked "could you just send this to us in plain text?" they responded, "oh hell we have one of our paralegals spend like 1-2 weeks each game making them really nicely formatted so they look good, does none of that work" me: "no", them "what formatting works", me: about 15 minutes explaining basic html in word parlance. Them "got it, we'll make it look good in Notepad.exe and send those from now on as .txt attachments to emails. And they did. Saved several weeks of work on both sides per game.

hkhanna 5y ago

I have felt this exact pain. I think I know the path to overcoming Microsoft Word in the legal world. It will be a long road, but it will happen sooner or later. I think we can make it happen sooner.

lemax 5y ago

The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Just to get a contract through with a few changes, we go through Word diffs, manual review, and these crazy confusing to parse tracked changes. And then when everything is said and done, the lawyers produce a "final PDF" and we have to run another comparison in Acrobat. It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.

NoboruWataya 5y ago
I think it's a matter of perspective. I don't think lawyers would typically view Word or ChangePro as being difficult to use - certainly, trying to get them to learn git would be a significantly greater effort. Outside of tech circles, I think that is true of clients as well. The main problem I run into is people using conflicting diff software (eg, you generate a blackline of two Word documents using ChangePro, but you forget to PDF it before it goes to the other side, so they put through some changes on the blackline document in Word tracked changes). These things can be avoided through sane configuration options. Maybe git is an objectively better solution but even if it is there is a huge local maximum problem.
LiquidSky 5y ago
>The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Lawyer here: because your engineer's POV is wrong. I don't know what else to say. It comes from a lack of knowledge of how lawyers actually work and therefore what we actually need for our work. It is not identical to what software engineers need or want for theirs. The drafting process is the area in transactional practice that least needs "disruption". The process is long-settled and fairly universal. Track changes are not "crazy confusing to parse", they're a simple and easy way to know who edited what and when. Version control? Basically meaningless for lawyers. The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing. What really needs disruption, or at least improvement, are contract management platforms. I've worked with all the major ones and they're all pretty bad and clunky in their own way (IME Ironclad is the least-worst but still leaves much to be desired). If someone could develop a simple, intuitive system for extracting and recording certain agreement content and making that searchable (and transferable!), as well as storing and searching agreement documents generally, it would be amazing.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing. so every lawyer on earth is able to use word 100% of the time without ever losing data, removing a sentence or closing a comment by mistake ?
  - LiquidSky 5y ago
    A glib response to a glib question: frankly, yes. 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.
Spooky23 5y ago
All you need is the political clout to get a court system or some big agency with quasi-judicial functions or a big city to adopt. It’s definitely possible. Adobe is a great example of a success story in the space. Problem is that for plaintext, you need a benevolent billionaire to fund the lobbying.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > Problem is that for [most useful things], you need a benevolent billionaire to fund the lobbying. I'm really starting to hate this. But what can any of us do?
throwawayboise 5y ago
Why does the editor matter, really? The lawyers can use Word if that's what they are best at. It seems orthogonal to the issue of managing digital signatures. The service can just as easily send an email with a hash/digest of the document version, the /s/ lines for all the signatories, and the document itself attached, as the "fully executed document"
giobox 5y ago
The problem with git for general text work is that it is distributed VCS... even software engineers struggle from time to time with the concept that changes can happen in isolation on separate copies then merge back to the "master copy" in a conflicting way that must be solved. If you were to pick a VCS for non-technical users (e.g. a group who historically just produce word documents), it would probably have to be a non-distributed system like SVN that allows for file locking. Conceptually, central VCS and file locking etc is much easier to understand for non-technical people than distributed VCS and merges in my experience; it's no surprise to me Word offers SVN style locking too for collaboration, which of course is anathema to the way git operates. Git can for sure solve this problem, I just think its too complex to use for most Word Processor users, especially conflict resolution, and is generally ideologically opposed to providing features to lock shared documents down.

charlieyu1 5y ago

I think conversion between docx and plaintext is a possible solution, contracts aren’t known for fancy formatting

sjy 5y ago
Outline numbering, cross-references and tables are all common features of contracts which are difficult to capture in plain text.
- iav 5y ago
  Also legal entity diagrams, picture appendices, and often math formulas with Unicode

misterpurple45 5y ago

Lawyers aren’t the users here. The users of law are normal people and companies that need to transact with untrusted parties. Well-paid lawyers clinging to Microsoft Word are a cost centre to most businesses, much of which could likely be automated. This isn’t necessarily a threat to the legal profession. See the history of accountants and spreadsheet software.

grogenaut 5y ago

I got one set of lawyers to stop using word once. Large game platform holder would send us EULAs in word format with all sorts of nice legal placeholders. Then they had us plug those into the eula tool they developed for the the platform, which only accepted like 5 total html tags and no unicode or smart characters. We had an engineer spend about 2 weeks writing software to convert them and hand checking the eulas. Finally I had a chance to talk with legal on another matter and asked "could you just send this to us in plain text?" they responded, "oh hell we have one of our paralegals spend like 1-2 weeks each game making them really nicely formatted so they look good, does none of that work" me: "no", them "what formatting works", me: about 15 minutes explaining basic html in word parlance. Them "got it, we'll make it look good in Notepad.exe and send those from now on as .txt attachments to emails. And they did. Saved several weeks of work on both sides per game.