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Ask HN: How do you collaborate on legal documents?
I'm a product manager for a web service and I have to work a lot with people from legal to write TnC, data privacy, etc.
Of course, legal likes to work with Word documents, but those can't really be used online. Right now, I've to convert the word documents to markdown and forward them to the devs, but conversion most of the times does not work properly and manual work is necessary all the time.
Did anyone already find a good way to handle those kinds of documents, so that legal can work as they are used to, but at the end we're getting sth. that can be used on the web?
Of course, showing a PDF would be an option, but it just doesn't look nice/integrated.
- bombcar 4y agoUsually the word documents are simple enough that "paste and match style" is all we need to do to get them in a usable form. But if that's not good enough, try something like Confluence, I guess. It's "word-like" enough for editing, and relatively related to something akin to reasonable HTML. But I bet what legal really likes is track changes.
- nlewko 4y agoLegal won't even use track changes sometimes - they'll just made edits and then blackline/redline the original doc without the edits against the new doc with the edits to show changes which requires an extra step of conversion. Clio is a tool some of my colleagues use and they say it's pretty good. Maybe give that a try!
- xamp 4y agoYep, that describes it pretty good Thanks for the hint. I'll have a look at it.
- xamp 4y agoIn theory yes, they are fairly easy. But legal for examples often doesn't use enumeration in word properly which then results in the markdown to break etc.
- racedude 4y agoCheck out Ironclad
- xamp 4y agoThank you. I'll have a look.