What might be useful would be better change tracking and management. The problem here is Word's dominance as a means of exchanging drafts. When working on an agreement, I and opposing counsel usually exchange Word drafts along with PDF redlines, which works well enough. Some attorneys like to use the "Track Changes" feature of word, but after a few turns you end up with a complete mess. Still, the sophistication and power of a git or mercurial would probably be wasted in the sort of contexts in which lawyers typically work (a series of form-based documents which are individually tailored in essentially one-off transactions).
I'll ignore your quip about productivity, except to note that you might feel differently if you were the one paying the fees.
Thinking more broadly about tools for lawyers, I feel like too many attempts have fallen into the trap of "we need to disrupt everything and remove all rote work." From the lawyers I've talked to, the common thread is that they just want better visibility and a second pair of eyes; they'll be responsible for their work product at the end of the day and will need to type changes manually, but if something could help them find the "gotcha" buried on page 93 with slightly greater speed and reliability (or, to wit, find all typos from Word's automatic numbering), without requiring a full change in toolkit, it could meaningfully improve quality of life for counsel and clients alike.
It's a hard problem to actually fix, and mostly a byproduct of the attorneys monopoly on the legal profession and various mandates to make it require human intervention.
Where we need to get to is letting technology and true startups (with limited liability) provide legal services.
I will give a shout-out to fairclaims.com which I recommend so much more over traditional arbitration/mediation firms. One example of the type of thing we need.
Haha.... I was thinking exactly this while reading the article.
When adding or removing a template clauses in legal documents, it can trigger a reflow of the entire bulleting and indentation structure.
But there's definitely a need among solo practitioners and small firms, and that need goes beyond templating to include better ways of organizing documents, automating workflows, ensuring security, and so forth. There are companies like Practice Panther which are trying to do this, but the problem I've seen with them is they encourage vendor lock-in and make it hard to do anything not officially supported by the platform.
I find tremendous purpose and joy in enabling more productive and efficient work by developing digital tools & applications, especially for intelligent individuals such as your mother and other lawyers.
If interested in sharing more, whether you want to have nothing to do with a potential venture or not, I have my public email on my profile. Cheers!
If you want to make legal texts even worse to read and write, throw in a heavy dose of CS-esque structuralism.
The biggest enemy of programming languages as general purpose tools for business is the idea that code == hard, and coder == expensive specialized labor.
If we reach a point where programming is taught as a basic skill like arithmetic or writing then maybe we can apply standard PL tools to basic business tasks.