What we really need is a common legal markup language[1]. Sadly, the few efforts that I've heard about seem to be stagnating.
Lawyers (finance people) will never stop innovating (increasing complexity), and they will not be one moment delayed by a protocol which falls short of their aspirations for sophistication (bamboozling). Therefore, the only adoptable protocols are mere transports. They might rigidly specify some commonly used things like property titles (stock orders) but foreseeing unusual or unknown requirements, such protocols will include custom extension features (user defined fields).
The end result is a protocol which is sort of useful but still does not suffice for the development of generic tooling. An example from FIX is the field which tells whether an order added or removed liquidity. The standard didn't have such a field, so now every exchange has its own different one.
If all exchanges have invented a liquidity-field, then there's a good chance the next version of FIX will standardize it, no?
Imho the legal system is very much ripe for digitalization. Both on the low-end (where it pretty much consists of overhead), and even more so on the high-end, where the complexity of legal contracts between companies or states has long exceeded what any team of lawyers (much less a mere mortal) can comprehend.
Basically, if you want a protocol for legal documents, you may as well use an existing one, such as PDF, XLS, TeX, etc. Trying to embed more domain knowledge in the protocol will never work at a highly generalized level. It would be like asking HTTP to standardize e-commerce.
All I'm asking is that we upgrade their tooling and process.
Your outlook for the abstraction potential seems overly pessimistic.
Most of Law boils down to a cascade of intermingled conditionals, nothing a computer couldn't handle.
Of course a bit of human intervention will always be required, for value judgements and the "hard questions".
However, in my (limited) experience with lawyers, very little of the time and money that a lawsuit consumes goes into the actual decision making.
The overwhelming majority is wasted on process and formalities.
Yes, "single source" is very much an euphemism.
In practice it's far from a single source, but rather a poorly synchronized mess. Which is exactly what I'm proposing to fix.
If we were to wrap it into a github-style model then cases could be represented as branches. Case-law would evolve in the form of patches and pull-requests.