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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 understo

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.

jcelerier 5y ago
> A glib response to a glib question: frankly, yes. that's wild. My experience editing word documents is that you have to have a dozen backups to be sure not to loose something due to basic keyboard / mouse manipulation mistake. I wonder what is their secret.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  Try updating your version of Word, it sounds like you’re having some rather severe technical issues.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    It's not a problem with word, it's a problem with anything that allows keyboard input. There's not a week where I don't see a mistakenly removed line for instance when checking a diff before commiting.
afarrell 5y ago
I'm going to name the phenomenon you're arguing against "UX projection". As a software engineer, when I imagine myself doing a lawyer's job, I would want a tool like this. But that misses the point. Good UX requires first being attentive to the actual problems expressed by users. Otherwise we end up with the pretense of empathy: projection.
Aeolun 5y ago
> 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 That may be a good idea, but not because they’ll tell you what their problems are. Asking people what their problem is leads to responses like ‘faster horses’ instead of ‘cars’, and this whole Word situation reeks strongly of that.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  That's funny, to me it reeks strongly of solutions in search of a problem.
trowawee 5y ago
I dropped out of law school before ending up in tech, but my parents are lawyers, my sibling is a lawyer, a large chunk of my social circle are lawyers, and I act as a go-between connecting my lawyer friends and family with non-lawyer friends who need some legal help (and also someone who speaks lawyer fluently enough to translate to normal people). All of this is just to say that the ideas that: 1) change tracking is easy to use and universally understood 2) timestamps in document names solve the version problem, and 3) that emails traded back and forth work as a document history does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse. I definitely think engineers are too quick to throw a "one easy trick!" at a big messy problem like this that obviously has a bunch of social/network elements in addition to technical challenges, but saying that the current situation is functional for most participants doesn't really seem to be accurate.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse. that is exactly my experience with any shared document > 20 pages in word

jcelerier 5y ago

> A glib response to a glib question: frankly, yes. that's wild. My experience editing word documents is that you have to have a dozen backups to be sure not to loose something due to basic keyboard / mouse manipulation mistake. I wonder what is their secret.

LiquidSky 5y ago
Try updating your version of Word, it sounds like you’re having some rather severe technical issues.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  It's not a problem with word, it's a problem with anything that allows keyboard input. There's not a week where I don't see a mistakenly removed line for instance when checking a diff before commiting.

afarrell 5y ago

I'm going to name the phenomenon you're arguing against "UX projection". As a software engineer, when I imagine myself doing a lawyer's job, I would want a tool like this. But that misses the point. Good UX requires first being attentive to the actual problems expressed by users. Otherwise we end up with the pretense of empathy: projection.

Aeolun 5y ago

> 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 That may be a good idea, but not because they’ll tell you what their problems are. Asking people what their problem is leads to responses like ‘faster horses’ instead of ‘cars’, and this whole Word situation reeks strongly of that.

LiquidSky 5y ago
That's funny, to me it reeks strongly of solutions in search of a problem.

trowawee 5y ago

I dropped out of law school before ending up in tech, but my parents are lawyers, my sibling is a lawyer, a large chunk of my social circle are lawyers, and I act as a go-between connecting my lawyer friends and family with non-lawyer friends who need some legal help (and also someone who speaks lawyer fluently enough to translate to normal people). All of this is just to say that the ideas that: 1) change tracking is easy to use and universally understood 2) timestamps in document names solve the version problem, and 3) that emails traded back and forth work as a document history does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse. I definitely think engineers are too quick to throw a "one easy trick!" at a big messy problem like this that obviously has a bunch of social/network elements in addition to technical challenges, but saying that the current situation is functional for most participants doesn't really seem to be accurate.

jcelerier 5y ago
> does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse. that is exactly my experience with any shared document > 20 pages in word