On Building Git for Lawyers

Juro was this. I used it for redlining a few times but it didn’t work because the other guy has to be onboarded onto the system.

Unscrupulous opponents will turn off Track Changes in MS Word to catch you off guard.

That's a great point. That's why we built it to work and add value even if the other guy has not been onboarded onto the system. This made the engineering lift way bigger, because the system needs to be able to accept and process whatever the other guy sent you. This makes it an open-ended problem, and we needed to be able to handle any possible edge case that the other guy's docs could introduce.

Juro and others make the other guy onboard because that limits the scope of the engineering problem. You can only create what the platform lets you create, so you know in advance what the system needs to handle. This approach makes it easier to build. But the problem is that it is really hard to get the other guy to onboard. As a result, your MVP is not really an MVP.

Our approach required way, way more engineering work up front. But it put us in a position where getting the other guy to onboard is a "nice to have", not a requirement.