[lewisjoe]

In 2013, we were hacking away a document tracking system to solve exactly this. We thought we were disrupting the legal market while in reality the lawyers were way too comfortable with Word and emailing docx files.

Exactly like you've hinted, the right way to crack this is to bring a full-fledged word processor like Google Docs, but instead of ad-hoc realtime collaborations the software has to enable customizable unidirectional document workflows with controlled collaboration.

Most serious document creators don't want to branch and merge, instead they want to pass on the document through a series of stages. They want statistics on when, what and why of each stage. And at any point of time the document is in one definitive stage not scattered across emails/folders/versions/forks.

[crazygringo]

Yup. Even Google Docs supports this types of approvals workflow (in beta):

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9381067?hl=en

Unlike its normal collaboration mode, the file gets locked down.

[johnwalkr]

This looks great!

[fredguth]

I didn't understand the "customizable unidirectional document workflow". What does it mean?