I haven’t seen anyone articulate this divide in legal workflows so clearly. Totally agree that tools like Google Docs just aren’t designed for how lawyers manage versions and track accountability. I think your background as an engineer gives you a unique perspective on this.
No, you can add the additional Office files as new revisions and they'll appear in Docs version history alongside any changes made in Docs. You can even have someone editing the Office file using a non-Docs tool such as desktop Office and it'll maintain the single source of truth. You do not need to create a new Google Doc in order to import a new Office version from a collaborator. Google belabored this point in their 2019 announcement: https://youtu.be/KsbTSNrmauc?si=WcQWa0qgWDnvTXkq (You can skip ahead to 3:11 to see exactly what I'm talking about but I'd actually watch the whole thing to get more info needed to fix the mistakes in your article)
Your ideas are great and there are definitely issues with using Docs as a lawyer, but you just need a little bit more familiarity with the tools you describe.
In the demo, they show Trevor opening the Google Doc from MS Word, making edits, and persisting those changes back to the Google Doc. Those changes are persisted because Trevor opened a file that is linked to the Doc via GDrive.
While, in a sense, this allows Google Docs to handle changes made in MS Word, it doesn't solve the all-or-nothing adoption problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, when a counterparty sends back a new revision that was not saved directly to the Google Doc, this feature does not present them with a way to add those changes to the Doc.
Hey, just so you're aware, there's actually a lot of factual errors in this document. Google Docs offers Office editing mode, which literally lets you do a bunch of the features that you mentioned such as importing a Word file or diffing a Word file and a Google Doc. Basically everything in the paragraph "All-or-nothing adoption" comes from a naive misunderstanding of the Google Docs feature set. You can make copies of Google Docs and compare copies of Google Docs and merge copies of Google Docs just like you can in Word. It's like assuming Microsoft Office doesn't offer real-time collaboration or sharing just because you haven't used those features before in Office for the Web.
>Office editing mode literally lets you do a bunch of the features that you mentioned such as importing a Word file
Yes, Google Docs allows you to import word documents *as new documents*. If you have a live Google Doc that you're using as the source-of-truth for a document, Google Docs does not support the ability to incorporate changes from an external redline drafted in Word. The only way to do that is copy and paste.
Yes, you can make copies of Google Docs, compare them, import new versions from Word, etc, but that leaves you with a workflow like I described in my earlier post (https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-lawyers). Maintaining a version history as a collection of separate Docs or files is a confusing and error-prone workflow which is precisely the problem that Version Story solves.
I haven’t seen anyone articulate this divide in legal workflows so clearly. Totally agree that tools like Google Docs just aren’t designed for how lawyers manage versions and track accountability. I think your background as an engineer gives you a unique perspective on this.
No, you can add the additional Office files as new revisions and they'll appear in Docs version history alongside any changes made in Docs. You can even have someone editing the Office file using a non-Docs tool such as desktop Office and it'll maintain the single source of truth. You do not need to create a new Google Doc in order to import a new Office version from a collaborator. Google belabored this point in their 2019 announcement: https://youtu.be/KsbTSNrmauc?si=WcQWa0qgWDnvTXkq (You can skip ahead to 3:11 to see exactly what I'm talking about but I'd actually watch the whole thing to get more info needed to fix the mistakes in your article)
Your ideas are great and there are definitely issues with using Docs as a lawyer, but you just need a little bit more familiarity with the tools you describe.
In the demo, they show Trevor opening the Google Doc from MS Word, making edits, and persisting those changes back to the Google Doc. Those changes are persisted because Trevor opened a file that is linked to the Doc via GDrive.
While, in a sense, this allows Google Docs to handle changes made in MS Word, it doesn't solve the all-or-nothing adoption problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, when a counterparty sends back a new revision that was not saved directly to the Google Doc, this feature does not present them with a way to add those changes to the Doc.
Hey, just so you're aware, there's actually a lot of factual errors in this document. Google Docs offers Office editing mode, which literally lets you do a bunch of the features that you mentioned such as importing a Word file or diffing a Word file and a Google Doc. Basically everything in the paragraph "All-or-nothing adoption" comes from a naive misunderstanding of the Google Docs feature set. You can make copies of Google Docs and compare copies of Google Docs and merge copies of Google Docs just like you can in Word. It's like assuming Microsoft Office doesn't offer real-time collaboration or sharing just because you haven't used those features before in Office for the Web.
Hi Rick, thanks for reading!
I think you misunderstand what I'm describing.
>Office editing mode literally lets you do a bunch of the features that you mentioned such as importing a Word file
Yes, Google Docs allows you to import word documents *as new documents*. If you have a live Google Doc that you're using as the source-of-truth for a document, Google Docs does not support the ability to incorporate changes from an external redline drafted in Word. The only way to do that is copy and paste.
Yes, you can make copies of Google Docs, compare them, import new versions from Word, etc, but that leaves you with a workflow like I described in my earlier post (https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-lawyers). Maintaining a version history as a collection of separate Docs or files is a confusing and error-prone workflow which is precisely the problem that Version Story solves.