On Building Git for Lawyers

Reporting back from my biglaw pal I sent this to:

> Big flaw in the product: 60 year old partner who still makes hand edits and has the Secretary scan the pages and send them out of order to the associate

> Second big flaw in the product: specialists edits get rejected because they don’t know the deal points and are just swooping in

I took issue with this as step 4 seems to involve an M&A lawyer accepting/rejecting specialist edits piecemeal, to which he responded "Right, but that doesn’t actually save that much time. It’s the same work that an M&A associate is already doing"

> Third big flaw in the product: big law firms are the least innovative organizations on earth

> Fourth big flaw in the product: having junior associates do menial tasks at $800-950/hr is a feature, not a bug, of law firm business model. So you are solving for something that the target customer doesn’t necessarily want solved.

and there it is :/

> 60 year old partner who still makes hand edits and has the Secretary scan the pages and send them out of order to the associate

We've designed our product to be backwards compatible with existing workflows. It does not require every team member to use the product to add value. Partners who prefer their way of doing things can continue to do so allowing associates to add their drafts to Version Story to create redlines and consolidate changes.

>specialists edits get rejected because they don’t know the deal points and are just swooping in

The possibility of incorrectly rejecting specialists edits exists with or without Version Story. Our product makes it easier to understand what's changed so lawyers can exercise their judgement about these decisions.

> Third big flaw in the product: big law firms are the least innovative organizations on earth

I think this assumption is worth challenging. Millennials are becoming partners at law firms and are spearheading initiatives to update their tech stacks. This is reflected in legal tech budget growth trends (https://www.legalcurrent.com/tech-spending-remains-especiall...).

> Fourth big flaw in the product: having junior associates do menial tasks at $800-950/hr is a feature, not a bug, of law firm business model. So you are solving for something that the target customer doesn’t necessarily want solved.

Making mistakes is not a feature (https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/40489). In the example I outline in the essay, the lawyer made three separate mistakes when manually merging documents.

I really hope you're right because I am 1000000% rooting for you. You just need two counterparties (could be two people in the same firm in the same practice!!) to use it to get some value somewhere in the whole process. As a humble software optimist, I believe there's room for this. I told him his critiques also apply to typewriters -> any old word processor -> MS Word, or fax -> email and those still happened so don't go taking an overpaid millenial's skepticism as normative for the whole thing. If Graeber taught me anything, it's that work is a gas and efficiency will not make the firms bill less.