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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

Every real estate transaction I've done has involved two sets of lawyers mailing Word docs to each other with me cc'ed with names like "Purchase and Sale (2) - Copy - Latest".

I actually mentioned to my last lawyer that there is established and well used technology that can show changes between documents. She seemed uninterested and a couple of days later I had to email her about a clause that got dropped in one of the Word doc email tornados the day before.

I see no mention of any kind of version control in this article. It seems crazy to me but I guess that would drive down billable hours.

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If I were in charge of digital literacy for the next generation, I would make "understanding version control" one of those basic things. I lost so many hours of papers, programming assignments, etc over time because the non-VCS version of iterating on a "draft" of a document for the non-educated is "Copy of copy of copy of paper-final draft (4).docx".

Lots of firms (usually bigger ones) use version control internally. But it can be a mess to try to get two or more firms, their clients, etc., all to use version control, let alone the same system.

Pretty much everyone uses track changes in Word, though. And if not they should.

Just as it's hard to get two software firms to use the same version control syst- oh wait literally everyone runs on git.

Well, software firms have already been using some variant of VCS for a while. The legal world needs to first get sold on the concept (at least on all the bits beyond Word's "Track Changes" functionality), and then... well, nobody but techies looks at VCS based on richness of CLI commands, or depth of mathematical foundation, or provenance / industry cred of its authors -- lawyers will want something with reasonable GUI UX; whether it's powered by Git or Mercurial or whatever, doesn't really matter.

(FWIW, I think embedding Git support in MS Office would do a lot towards VCS adoption outside of tech.)

This is actually a problem in the games industry, where git is generally impractical for assets and things like Perforce or even SVN are used instead. It’s often preferable to put the code in the same place too, which interacts poorly with disciplines that have good reason to use git instead.

If you want version control you need a format, that is amendable to version control. So, some uncompressed text markup.

Interesting observation over the last few weeks of playing with OpenDocument is that the revision control feature works by creating new local style for every change, which creates total havoc when you try to diff the .fodt or content.xml by external tools.

We used the Compare Documents feature in Word when I was in practice a decade ago. I don't know why it wasn't mentioned; perhaps because its in such wide usage?

I don’t think lawyers want version control of contracts. They want what is outlined in the contract to be the final agreement. An agreement with a bunch of history attached seems like it would be worse.

But you could still use version control for drafting. You don't include version control history in your shipped binary but it's still very useful for coding.

I'm not sure what that would change legally, the contract signed is still the contract agreed to. Most of the time you either sign on paper or e-Sign a pdf neither of which will communicate the history so it would just help keep track of changes.

You want it for the process of drafting. In fact, it is quite common in the SF startup world (and probably elsewhere) while redlining to send back and forth a Word document with Track Changes turned on. One time, someone turned it off and then pasted over a different document, and then turned it back on and made some edits so only a few changes were made. It's really quite shady but you have to deal with all sorts so we just fixed it up.

Ultimately, a tool like Juro would be pretty cool, but if you're the guy trying to get the contract done you're not going to introduce a new thing to the workflow. Everyone will object.

While negotiating over a contract, seeing the changes is very useful. It's very common. Talk to someone who is in procurement or who is in sales.

Proper version control would ruin all the fun - it would make it easier for unwanted parties (such as e.g. the partner you have office rivalry with, or legal discovery process you're at the receiving end of) to step through the history of your documents, while making it harder for the opposition or other third parties to ship all the juicy history to you by pure accident (i.e. sending the OG Word document with "Track Changes" still on).

(Disclaimer: IANAL, most of my "knowledge" about the legal profession comes from the TV show Suits.)

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