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I'm the lead developer at Contractually (a Vancouver-based startup): http://www.contractual.ly http://www.contractual.ly. We take contracts out of Microsoft Wor

I'm the lead developer at Contractually (a Vancouver-based startup): http://www.contractual.ly http://www.contractual.ly. We take contracts out of Microsoft Word and email and put them in an online format that understands the business data and process that is involved. We're solving problems form the low level (version tracking, redlining, commenting) to the high level (renewal reminders, workflows, tagging, reporting). We're currently focussed on large businesses and enterprise. To answer your question, there's not many startups in the legal space because people and businesses are really worried about their contracts. The conservative nature is one that needs to slowly be eroded, and that's where we're at now. E-signature providers have taken away a lot of concerns and we're starting to see opportunities in areas outside of just signing. At Contractually, we're seeing more competition (a good thing, of course) targeting small businesses right up to enterprise. Typically, they solve some small part of the contracts problem: Assembling documents, or e-signatures, or workflows, etc. The competition isn't just coming from startups (e.g. glider.com, acquired last year), it's also coming from large incumbents (e.g. Merrill DataSite for contract management, launched last month). It's an exciting time and I think we'll start to see big chunks of the problem solved over the next few years.

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codingdave 11y ago
This is off on a tangent, but... I just took a look at a demo video on your site - I'm just guessing based on appearances, but are you using CKEditor for your base editor, and then popping up a new window using the lite plugin to show tracked changes? If so, we're using the same toolkit... but if not, I'd love to know if you found a better track changes project via open source, or if you rolled your own. The lite plugin works OK, but not well enough for some of our more legal-focused clientele, so I'm scoping out other options.
- mattdotc 11y ago
  Have you checked out Ice? I'm not sure if it will fit your needs, but if you haven't taken a look, perhaps you should. https://github.com/NYTimes/ice https://github.com/NYTimes/ice
  - bmulholland 11y ago
    lite is a plugin for CKEditor that is built on top of ICE: https://github.com/loopindex/ckeditor-track-changes/#track-changes-plugin-for-ckeditor https://github.com/loopindex/ckeditor-track-changes/#track-c...
    - mattdotc 11y ago
      Nice! Thanks for mentioning it. I had no idea about it.
- bmulholland 11y ago
  We are using CKEditor, but are not currently using lite. Our version compare is done separately using an HTML diff engine. We have a number of requests for redlining-as-you-type, which we don't currently do, and will probably implement that with lite when we get to that. I have implemented it as a proof of concept twice now, but keep finding bugs and issues that block us from releasing it as a feature. Seems like you might be hitting some of those as well? My recommendation would really come down to what issues your legal-focused clientele have with the current solution. If it's accuracy, storing each version in its entirety and comparing those versions is basically what lawyers do today with Word.
  - codingdave 11y ago
    Yes, we likely have some common ground on the problems we are hitting. We are doing OK on accuracy - we do keep all approved versions in an archive. The problems relate more to the plethora of ways lite can fail - I don't have my full list in front of me, but as a minor example, deleting an entire bulleted item from a list leaves the bullet in place within the editor as normal text. It sounds nitpicky, but it really makes the documents look funky, and the formatting is very important to our people, so the content editors spend extra time reformatting documents, which is not ideal. Nevertheless, I haven't found a solution that does any better, and we don't have the resources to reinvent that wheel (yet), so we do have lite in production... it just is one of our pain points. And to be fair, lite is improving - our list of complaints is smaller than it was a year ago, and each new release fixes a few things.
    - bmulholland 11y ago
      For what it's worth, we're hitting many of those same problems even without lite. People are finnicky about how their contracts look, and they tend to spend a lot of time getting them to look just right. It's especially difficult with the jump from Word to HTML, even when it's abstracted via e.g. CKEditor. May I ask where you work?
      - codingdave 11y ago

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codingdave 11y ago

This is off on a tangent, but... I just took a look at a demo video on your site - I'm just guessing based on appearances, but are you using CKEditor for your base editor, and then popping up a new window using the lite plugin to show tracked changes? If so, we're using the same toolkit... but if not, I'd love to know if you found a better track changes project via open source, or if you rolled your own. The lite plugin works OK, but not well enough for some of our more legal-focused clientele, so I'm scoping out other options.

mattdotc 11y ago
Have you checked out Ice? I'm not sure if it will fit your needs, but if you haven't taken a look, perhaps you should. https://github.com/NYTimes/ice https://github.com/NYTimes/ice
- bmulholland 11y ago
  lite is a plugin for CKEditor that is built on top of ICE: https://github.com/loopindex/ckeditor-track-changes/#track-changes-plugin-for-ckeditor https://github.com/loopindex/ckeditor-track-changes/#track-c...
  - mattdotc 11y ago
    Nice! Thanks for mentioning it. I had no idea about it.
bmulholland 11y ago
We are using CKEditor, but are not currently using lite. Our version compare is done separately using an HTML diff engine. We have a number of requests for redlining-as-you-type, which we don't currently do, and will probably implement that with lite when we get to that. I have implemented it as a proof of concept twice now, but keep finding bugs and issues that block us from releasing it as a feature. Seems like you might be hitting some of those as well? My recommendation would really come down to what issues your legal-focused clientele have with the current solution. If it's accuracy, storing each version in its entirety and comparing those versions is basically what lawyers do today with Word.
- codingdave 11y ago
  Yes, we likely have some common ground on the problems we are hitting. We are doing OK on accuracy - we do keep all approved versions in an archive. The problems relate more to the plethora of ways lite can fail - I don't have my full list in front of me, but as a minor example, deleting an entire bulleted item from a list leaves the bullet in place within the editor as normal text. It sounds nitpicky, but it really makes the documents look funky, and the formatting is very important to our people, so the content editors spend extra time reformatting documents, which is not ideal. Nevertheless, I haven't found a solution that does any better, and we don't have the resources to reinvent that wheel (yet), so we do have lite in production... it just is one of our pain points. And to be fair, lite is improving - our list of complaints is smaller than it was a year ago, and each new release fixes a few things.
  - bmulholland 11y ago
    For what it's worth, we're hitting many of those same problems even without lite. People are finnicky about how their contracts look, and they tend to spend a lot of time getting them to look just right. It's especially difficult with the jump from Word to HTML, even when it's abstracted via e.g. CKEditor. May I ask where you work?
    - codingdave 11y ago