[rickycook]

i’d argue that it’s not “designed to fit our workflow” so much as designed around a subpar, but flexible tool that everyone was using. that don’t make it good; that just makes it ingrained

[gamblor956]

Track Changes tracks changes. By multiple authors. And allows comments outside of the substantive content of the document. It works across multiple versions of itself, and is even compatible with competing software. And best of all, it requires no additional software to learn or maintain.

That makes it superior for legal documents to all version tracking systems that I'm aware of that are used in the programming field.

[jaredchung]

Well yes, if you constrain the solution set to satisfy "requires no additional software to learn" then you'll end up with the status quo solution.

One thing I've always been concerned about when negotiating a legal agreement is how I verify that the tracked changes actually track every change. Because Word lets the user decide which changes to track, I'm always reading the untracked sections as well to confirm that no other changes were sneakily introduced. That's something that git addresses well. Does Word have a solution there? If not, does that ever concern you?

[fastball]

You say "requires no additional software", I say "doesn't allow me to use whatever software I want". For example, I can't edit a legal document while SSH'd into a host computer on my firms network.

Also, Track Changes doesn't allow two people to work on a document asynchronously, while git does.

I have seen a ridiculous number of errors in legal documents given the fact that a huge part of the legal profession is to produce solid/error-free documents.

But while the law profession's response to this seems to be just "be a better lawyer", the software industry's response is "build better tools that don't allow me to make errors". I'm sure I don't need to tell you which method I think is preferable in the long term.

[lenzm]

You're asking for trouble if you are relying on track changes. Anyone can disable track changes, make changes without highlighting them and send it back with track changes reenabled. You need to compare any received file against what you last sent to see the real diff.

There's got to be a better way.

[alkonaut]

So if you have a set of documents that are all being negotiated at the same time between parties. How do you show what changed in DocumentA at the same time as the concessions in DocumentB? By comparing timestamps?

It feels like the CVS way of versioning (Every document has a history) rather than the modern way of versioning (A set of documents has a history).

Perhaps this is a smaller problem for these kinds of documents because while my changes are often a dozen changed documents in a set of a hundred thousand documents, these word processor changes are typically across one or two documents in a set of one to ten?

[testvox]

Git has all those things, except yes it is a different tool.

[mikeryan]

Track changes in Word works pretty well for turns of a contract. What features do you think are provided by "version control" that aren't handled by Track Changes for contracts?

[sjy]

The ability to keep track of many, potentially thousands of individual changes and assign labels to significant versions. Track Changes is basically like Git if every file write triggered an automatic commit with no commit message and anyone could rewrite history at any time. SharePoint major versions are better but they’re not free, standard, portable or popular.

[osrec]

I agree. Most legal docs could probably be better captured in markdown or asciidoc rather than MS Word (and all the bloat it brings with it).