Comment by b0a04gl
2 days ago
> "Finally got sick of diffing contracts in Word and emailing PDFs back and forth"
this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.
Word has offered redline merging for over several decades...
There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry.
The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.
No, it doesn't work. I'm a long-term lawyer (and a techie), so I'm fully aware of Word's features and shortcomings. Most corporate lawyers use a product called Litera which is pretty good but a clunky COM add-in.
As I said in another comment: you're basing your entire product around doing one feature, but your competition is the entire package.
Redline doesn't appear to be working in Firefox in the web demo you have available. As that is supposed to be your killer feature I would say that your product isn't yet in MVP state. Also, the UI is quite bad and not the slightest bit intuitive; it's the kind of UI that only makes sense once you already have been using it for a while. As you pointed out, most firm lawyers already know and use Litera, so you need to not just be better at your one chosen feature but you also need to be easier and more intuitive to use and you're not.
It's okay for you to be offended by this criticism; this is your baby. But I'm being realistic here. You can choose to ignore critiques and die stillborn, or address these complaints (which other comments have also pointed out) and actually make something that a small but sustainable niche of lawyers will happily use.
3 replies →
yeah word has redline merge, but it breaks the moment edits arent linear. try merging three branches of the same contract across two firms and an in-house team. tracked changes turn into spaghetti. no merge conflict UI, no real version graph, no concept of rebasing edits. you get a stitched-up doc with 20 authors and no idea who changed what when. and once someone accepts changes early, half the context’s gone. legal folks make it work, but that’s survival, not support.
It’s not good enough. I know because I had to use it for comparing different versions of contracts and it was painful.