[ghego1]

You are right, this happens a lot when drafting documents out-of-court documents.

IMHO this is a useful "feature" for lawyers. Don't forget that usually lawyers of two parties are working"together" only apparently, when in fact they are always litigating for their client's best interest.

The goal is not to reach a common agreement, but to reach the agreement that best serves the interest of one's client, most of the times at the expenses of the other party.

This is achieved in many ways, one being having text in a contract that the other party is not fully aware of, either because it's not properly understood or noticed.

This means that including in a document text without the other party noticing is a good old trick that quite valuable to any lawyer.

As a lawyer my position on this is that it's the other party to blame if it did not check the document properly (I always compare the documents for differences even when sent with revisions).

> (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them

I tend to disagree with this line of thought. Lawyers have a thousand ways to inflate their timesheets. Using a tool that makes their life more miserable by forcing them to do manual work that could be automated is certainly not one of them.

[beagle3]

> As a lawyer my position on this is that it's the other party to blame if it did not check the document properly (I always compare the documents for differences even when sent with revisions).

As a non-lawyer, this is why they say "the problem with lawyers is that 95% of them give the rest of them a bad name". And as I mentioned, I also always compare.

> Lawyers have a thousand ways to inflate their timesheets. Using a tool that makes their life more miserable by forcing them to do manual work that could be automated is certainly not one of them.

I agree, and they do inflate them regularly -- all lawyers I asked to draft NDAs and employment agreements for me charged a few hours worth for the first one "because they had to write it" even though it was unchanged from another client (for sure; I've seen that exact one before).

Still, they need to keep an air of "being busy" and "working hard", and the best way to do that is to occasionally work hard.