Difficulty there is collaboration with various groups that are completely set on Word. Some of those groups are external: in most cases contract format is dictated by the client and that invariably means a Word document laid out in their specific structure with tables for deliverables and subheadings and boilerplate and the rest. Reverse-engineering hundreds of those things into something Pandoc can spit out is a giant challenge and likely a bit fragile. Then you have internal legal function which uses Word and various workflow plugins to do their job of sense-checking all of it.

The obvious suggestion would be to have internal groups (excluding legal) collaborate on some common plaintext markdown format where DVCS tools would provide an advantage, then publish to docx and hand over to legal for review. Unfortunately what always happens is that major changes to the contract are needed after legal has done their work, and it's easier (and acceptable) for all groups to work on the final paper together. That's where it breaks down.

I really feel that in 2016 having some poor bastard do clerical coordination of this stuff is just wrong. It's a mechanical task that's highly both error prone and a major source of operational risk, and it should be doable by the computer.

I actually kind of want to build this. Word (and the rest of office, I have the same problems with spreadsheets and powerpoints) plus plugins as the IDE, solid version control in the backend.