[FrobeniusTwist]

I'm a lawyer, and a former (and still occasional) programmer. In my experience, tools developed for (or at any rate, targeted at) lawyers seem to always be bloated, slow, and of negligible utility as far as I can tell. For "legal development" purposes (i.e., writing a letter, contract, memo, brief, etc.), nothing I've experienced surpasses plain old Word Perfect (still in use in some offices I deal with). Word's automated numbering system can burn in eternal damnation.

What might be useful would be better change tracking and management. The problem here is Word's dominance as a means of exchanging drafts. When working on an agreement, I and opposing counsel usually exchange Word drafts along with PDF redlines, which works well enough. Some attorneys like to use the "Track Changes" feature of word, but after a few turns you end up with a complete mess. Still, the sophistication and power of a git or mercurial would probably be wasted in the sort of contexts in which lawyers typically work (a series of form-based documents which are individually tailored in essentially one-off transactions).

I'll ignore your quip about productivity, except to note that you might feel differently if you were the one paying the fees.

[btown]

https://draftable.com/ https://api.draftable.com/examples is a secret weapon I've used frequently as a non-lawyer, including to silver-platter documents for counsel and to review things sent by external parties: you can give it two versions of a contract, and it automatically derives a redline, meaning that as long as you have sane file naming schemes, you essentially have `git diff` for contracts without ever needing the overhead of managing a repository. It's remarkably robust and has self-hosted options.

Thinking more broadly about tools for lawyers, I feel like too many attempts have fallen into the trap of "we need to disrupt everything and remove all rote work." From the lawyers I've talked to, the common thread is that they just want better visibility and a second pair of eyes; they'll be responsible for their work product at the end of the day and will need to type changes manually, but if something could help them find the "gotcha" buried on page 93 with slightly greater speed and reliability (or, to wit, find all typos from Word's automatic numbering), without requiring a full change in toolkit, it could meaningfully improve quality of life for counsel and clients alike.

[mchusma]

I'll piggyback on your final comment to state that the biggest problem in the legal space is cost (effectively a proxy for productivity). Almost all litigation against individuals and small businesses is an exercise is borderline blackmail (e.g. this will cost you $100k to defend and win so might as well pay $10k).

It's a hard problem to actually fix, and mostly a byproduct of the attorneys monopoly on the legal profession and various mandates to make it require human intervention.

Where we need to get to is letting technology and true startups (with limited liability) provide legal services.

I will give a shout-out to fairclaims.com which I recommend so much more over traditional arbitration/mediation firms. One example of the type of thing we need.

[matchagaucho]

"Word's automated numbering system can burn in eternal damnation"

Haha.... I was thinking exactly this while reading the article.

When adding or removing a template clauses in legal documents, it can trigger a reflow of the entire bulleting and indentation structure.

[torstenvl]

I am a lawyer and I use Track Changes a lot - but I cheat. I'll change my name in Word to something that makes sense for versioning. Redlining the 40-year history of a statutory provision? Well first my name is NDAA FY '84, now it's NDAA FY '15, etc.