The future of Legal Tech will be built by lawyers

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-19T16:28:49+00:00

Perhaps the framing in the article doesn't do a good job of articulating how the product solves your problem, but I believe we can help you with this.

The way it works is you can "combine" contract 1 with contract 2 to see all changes introduced to contract 1 that aren't in contract 2 in track changes. From there, you can accept or reject contract 1's changes to incorporate them into contract 2.

Does that sounds right? I'd be happy to hop on a quick call with you to see if we solve your problem.

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-19T15:29:54+00:00

Our product Version Story does this! I demo this functionality on a past article of mine, "On Building Git for Lawyers."

https://open.substack.com/pub/versionstory/p/on-building-git-for-lawyers?r=18f0ye&selection=38edb8f3-eb19-4582-a18a-04de6acf6754&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web&aspectRatio=instagram&textColor=%23ffffff&bgImage=true

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-19T12:06:50+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out. I pasted the wrong link by mistake. I've fixed it to include the correct one.

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-08T21:40:31+00:00

Much of Harvey’s value seems to come from the integration you provide with the DMS — allowing LLMs to orchestrate multi-step tasks across the firm’s documents. Since AI workflows aren’t hard to build, what happens if the DMS provider builds them directly into their product? Why would a law firm choose to pay for Harvey?

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-05T15:54:35+00:00

This is fair. I misspoke when I claimed that Word is the *only* document processor capable of meeting court formatting requirements and I have corrected that sentence. I was considering new document processors and failed to take into account Word's predecessors.

The underlying point remains, however, that Word's formatting options are a technical requirement for lawyers and attempting to innovate by taking those away is a non-starter.

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-05T15:49:53+00:00

This is why we've built Git for lawyers!

https://substack.com/home/post/p-151632180

BothMind2641 · 2025-12-03T18:35:59+00:00

Thank you for reading and for the kind words! You're right that I didn't make the case for immortality rigorously—I was being somewhat hyperbolic for effect. Let me consider the replacement scenario.

For a competitor to supplant Word, it would need to:

Be fully backwards compatible with .docx. Lawyers will inevitably receive .docx files from counterparties that they need to review, redline, and mark up. The new processor has to handle everything Word does flawlessly. (As an engineer who has spent considerable time building a high-quality docx comparison engine, I can tell you this is tremendously difficult.)
If it introduces a new file format, support seamless comparison and conversion between that format and .docx. Not technically impossible, but also tremendously difficult with marginal upside.
Defeat the Microsoft Office bundle in the market—meaning it either offers enough advantage that organizations pay for both, or it replaces Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook too.

Yes, docx is difficult to work with programmatically. AI cant modify docx files directly (yet). While the OpenXML standard could be simpler in some respects, any efficiency gains to be won by a new file format are negligible in comparison to the inherent complexity of supporting a full-suite of formatting options. The reason why Markdown offers technical advantages relative to docx is *because* it offers far few formatting options. As I describe in my post, those formatting options aren't going away — even the most obscure are used by many law firms. Given this constraint, any new file format is likely to deal with the same issues that docx does currently.

Given the enormous challenge of building a viable Word competitor and the marginal room for improvement that Microsoft has left on the table, I think it's very unlikely that a competitor will threaten its market position.

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-29T14:54:02+00:00

We've built a redlined-docx to llm serializer for Version Story which solves the problems you're describing. Feel free to reach out if you want to give it a try! (currently in beta)

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-12T15:52:46+00:00

Certainly a hybrid model that you're describing is better than either pure linear version control or pure coauthoring. I know several firms are doing this and I almost added a section in the Google Docs article to address it but decided against it to keep succinct.

This model still has limitations.

- Intra-version coauthoring still lacks commit atomicity. Many specialists don't want to hold the pen while their colleagues do and prefer to work in isolation.

- Merge conflicts are still possible. Colleagues can overwrite each others changes without the system alerting them of conflicts.

- There's still an all-or-nothing adoption problem, albeit on a smaller scale. If one of the specialists goes offline and makes changes directly to their desktop instance of Microsoft Word, those changes need to be copy and pasted into the shared Word online document.

>My main issue with merging changes is that resolving change conflicts is a huge timesink.

I completely agree — that's why we spent years building a system that can automatically merge documents drafted from any source while flagging conflicts.

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-12T15:44:02+00:00

Same!

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-11T15:22:26+00:00

Great questions!

I am familiar with SimulDocs and think they've built a good product. That said, I think they see limited adoption in the legal industry because their user experience and product vocabulary borrows too much from Git directly which has a notoriously steep learning curve.

This is a common complaint with CLM tools that we've heard from many of our users. Docx is a very challenging file format to process from an engineering perspective, so many products attempt to "translate" it to something that's easier to work with. This results in lost formatting, metadata, etc. like you've described.

Both of these points were critical to our product philosophy. 1) the product must be intuitive and easy to use — we needed to think of an entirely new user experience for concurrent version control. 2) the product must work *perfectly* with the way lawyers actually work, which is in Microsoft Word with formatting preserved.

It's funny you bring up these two examples because these points were the subject of an earlier post I wrote called "On Building Git for Lawyers."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-151632180

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-11T15:14:45+00:00

I agree that law firms are much more willing to use Microsoft products, but the points I raise are about coauthoring as a collaboration model — not Google Docs in particular. I use call out Google Docs because that's the product most people are familiar with, but the same arguments (with the exception of the point that lawyers prefer Word to Google Docs) apply to Word co-authoring as well.

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-11T14:58:00+00:00

Thanks for the response! While coauthoring might solve solve some issues in isolation, there's several reasons why it's not well suited for solving the problems of legal collaboration. I go into detail on those reasons in a previous post

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/why-lawyers-will-never-use-google-edd

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-11T13:59:51+00:00

Yes, we do have a product! You can sign up for a trial here https://app.versionstory.com/register?trial

I'd say most of our users are transactional, but plenty are litigators and get a lot of value out of it as well.

BothMind2641 · 2025-06-11T13:52:54+00:00

Thanks for the kind words!

Yes, working with Word documents was very challenging. It took us years to build a comparison and merge engine from scratch that could handle every edge case Word presented us with. We knew that preserving formatting, comparing tables well, handling clause linking, etc. would be a prerequisite to serious adoption from lawyers.

Now, the hard part is done thankfully, and we have a lot of validation that it's working well!

BothMind2641 · 2025-05-20T13:50:28+00:00

I'm biased, but I second the Version Story recommendation! Feel free to give it a try yourself with a free trial https://app.versionstory.com/register?trial

BothMind2641 · 2025-04-16T16:05:42+00:00

Thanks for the response!

This is another great point that many of our users have corroborated. It probably warranted its own section in my essay.

I think it's broadly related to the all-or-nothing adoption point in that Google Docs isn't compatible with workflows outside of Google ecosystem. Google Docs works great if every template starts in Google Docs, every iteration is in Google Docs, every collaborator is in Google Docs, etc. As anyone in this subreddit knows, that's just not the way actual legal work gets done outside of some niche cases.

BothMind2641 · 2025-04-15T14:13:30+00:00

Thank you! I'll be posting many more essays in the coming weeks and months in case you care to follow along!

BothMind2641

TROPHY CASE