On Building Git for Lawyers

It's curious to me how many people think "just convert it to a different filetype" will solve the problem.

Do you think there are other professions/industries that would benefit from this?

JUST CONVERT THE PDF INTO A STRUCTURED SCHEMA AND THEN LAWYERS CAN BECOME PROGRAMMERS LIKE GOD INTENDED

I think a lot of people unfamiliar with docx think of it as effectively the same thing as any other rich text format. Because of that, they assume converting it to other formats is trivial, not realizing that other formats support a small subset of the functionality docx does.

Definitely. Finance professionals, academic researchers, legislators, among many other professionals, encounter similar version control issues. We are currently focused on law because of our domain expertise and because the problem is particularly pronounced in the law.

The main reason people think that is because most of the MS Office suite's document formats are things that no programmer wants to touch if they can help it and usually when you're parsing them to something else, you can drop all the weirdness. Nobody loses sleep because the xlsx file you're using as an input for a script doesn't parse the excel graph that someone else put into it properly.

They're all incredibly capable formats (from a user perspective anyway), with the caveat that they're utter hell to work with in terms of a programming perspective. It's easier to just toss it into a black box parser/serializer and hope that all the text you need in/out comes out properly on the other side.

Actually generating docx or xlsx files (that aren't trivial) that look exactly like another input file (so you have to account for every notable difference in formatting) is a ton of work; most people who have touched webdev will probably at some point have had to format their emails for Outlooks half-assed ancient HTML parser and even there, you at least control what it's going to look like.

I can see something like this being useful in other law related areas. My wife's court office has hacked together some horrendous workflow for tracking offenders as they progress through the system using OneNote and Word, but it suffers from all the synchronization issues and conflicts you'd expect.

This would be great in engineering for specifications and such. We have product lifecycle management software to track document revisions and handle approvals but it doesn't integrate with .docx files, it just stores them. You have to download files manually and diff them in Word or Beyond Compare for redlines.