Contract Negotiation and Review Chaos: The Hidden Productivity Crisis
Abstract
Contract negotiation remains surprisingly chaotic despite decades of legal technology advancement. Lawyers employ wildly inconsistent review methods – some run redlines and work off of the redlines. Others directly edit the document that was provided, trusting that Track Changes was left on. Some lawyers do not make edits at all, but instead leave cryptic comments (sometimes embedded in the text of the document, other times using the “comment” feature) for assistants or opposing counsel to decipher. And periodically, lawyers also reserve certain previous edits as “still under review”, making it impossible to simply work off of a redline (as running a redline would accept those changes). Meanwhile, document comparison tools frequently flag “non-changes” as changes when converting between different document formats, such as Word and PDF, picking up links in documents, etc., creating unnecessary confusion.
