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On Building Git for Lawyers

(jordanbryan.substack.com)
162 points jpbryan | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hugocbp ◴[] No.42138031[source]
As an ex-lawyer for over 10 years, this was a huge issue for me, specially when the other party is adversarial (e.g. another lawyer for the other part that is not exactly forthcoming with the changes).

Back in the day, to solve that (before I became a software developer and knew about git), I basically re-implemented "git in Microsoft Word version control".

On bigger contracts with dozens and even hundreds of pages, with more than 2 parties involved, we could have 3-4 parallel changes to the same documents at once. And a lot of times some of the parties didn't want to advertise their changes.

What I did was construct a table in Excel with each "version" of each clause, and where they were present omitted. It was a lot of work to maintain, but back then I didn't know any better, but worked.

By saving the versions of the files we sent for revision (think of the main branch), I could receive the version from other parties (kind of like feature branches), turn on Word changes, paste the complete content of the original, and we could visualize the difference.

It's been more than 10 years since I stopped dealing with contracts, but I imagine a lot of lawyers, specially older folks, are still either doing very convoluted processes to track changes like me or not even bothering most of the times.

The article is spot on on the issues (even brought back some memories). This is something I'd use for sure in my previous life.

replies(1): >>42138153 #
nullhole ◴[] No.42138153[source]
> By saving the versions of the files we sent for revision (think of the main branch), I could receive the version from other parties (kind of like feature branches), turn on Word changes, paste the complete content of the original, and we could visualize the difference.

IANAL, but this was a key step for me as well. If you maintain copies of the versions sent out (and modified copies sent back), you can always get a clean diff of the copy sent out versus the copy sent back, or of an earlier version versus a subsequent revision.

The compare/combine tools in Word aren't great, but they are functional. Kind of like a local maximum, I suppose.

replies(1): >>42138604 #
1. hugocbp ◴[] No.42138604[source]
Exactly. The part where I used Excel was because Word didn't really scale for more than 2-3 sets of changes like that.

So my "copying current version changes" to Excel was kind of like git merging to the main branch.

People from outside the craft usually get super confused and frustrated by how many hours those contracts could take ("it is just a Word document!"), but that used to be a huge reason why.