undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbeagle35y ago0 comments

I am not a lawyer, but as an entrepreneur I've had to send-and-receive a lot of legal documents with investor's lawyers, almost exclusively in .docx.

I never trust the received file's "track changes", always compare to the latest version I've sent -- and it is extremely common to find a change that wasn't mentioned/discussed, and somehow magically "accepted" or otherwise not tracked in the other side's "track changes". Whenever I point these out, I always got a "oh, yes, forgot about that one", or "I didn't intend to put that in" or "I'm not sure why it didn't appear in the track-changes view" -- but out of tens of these (with multiple lawyers over multiple years), not one was ever in my favor.

Branching might not be as interesting on a single project - but diffing is, very much; and I'm sure it's not more coveted mostly because most lawyers either (a) don't realize how good it makes life for you when you can diff and blame easily, or (b) are abusing the fact that it is so hard to diff/blame on documents, and certainly (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them (a famous Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind).

0 comments

ghego15y ago

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.

beagle3OP5y ago

> 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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse