Show HN: Easily compare legal documents with DocCompare | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Easily compare legal documents with DocCompare

doccompare.com

51 pointsckrumb24 comments

For lawyers, how is this superior to software like Workshare Compare (formerly DeltaView) that runs on the desktop, integrates with Outlook and document management systems, and doesn't require sending legal docs to the cloud? DeltaView (and a few similar software packages) are pretty well entrenched in the legal community.

It looks like your redlines are slightly prettier, but I'm not sure that's enough of a distinction to cause people to switch.

Also, how do you make money? I worry a lot if I'm asked to send confidential docs and there's no visible mechanism through which you profit.

By being faster, easier to use and cheaper.

> faster

DeltaView has right-click integration; that will always be faster than opening a web browser, logging in, and transmitting files into the cloud.

> easier to use

It's a tie at best. See the right-click integration point, above. DeltaView has a huge amount of customization potential, but most users don't need all of it.

> cheaper

That's what worries me most. What is the revenue model and why should lawyers trust a stranger to not misuse their docs (or Anonymous to not hack the server, etc)?

To put it in perspective, DeltaView is (at most) $175 bundled with other software. To a lawyer, that's an hour of billing time at most. I don't know why a lawyer would rather risk sending confidential docs into the cloud when the alternative is software that costs (at most) one hour of billing.

I don't mean to come across harsh, but the product appears to be at best an iterative improvement in an industry that is very slow to change and is very concerned about confidentiality. The benefit of "it's free" does not carry nearly as much weight among lawyers, who often able to pass costs along to their clients and don't have the same cultural attachment to "free" as do average 20-something developers.

It just seems like the professional legal market is the wrong fit for a very powerful tool. Are there other markets worth considering?

> To put it in perspective, DeltaView is (at most) $175 bundled with other software. To a lawyer, that's an hour of billing time at most.

You're undercharging :)

But apart from that you're exactly right.

In my experience, lawyers rarely worry about 'cheaper', especially when talking about numbers less than a grand.

Beautiful idea if it works. I wonder how much lawyers will like it, though, since they get to charge hundreds an hour to task an associate to be the mechanical Turk inside diff. They might not want to be efficient.

There are likely to be concerns (e.g. privacy, confidentiality, waiver of privilege...) about sending documents to a third party website.

lawyers may want this to be inefficient, but clients probably don't. also, lawyers are not the only ones who look at legal documents.

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I made this tool for myself and other entrepreneurs, not just lawyers. Last year when I was negotiating with investors I often wanted to diff their changes against my original forms. A tool like this would have helped me.

I recognize that there are many challenges involved in selling to lawyers, and I'm talking to lawyers about that. Here on HN I was hoping I would hear about how DocCompare is or isn't helpful to entrepreneurs, investors and hackers.

The last funding round I was involved in, I used a combination of mercurial (show changes over time) and scripted Word diffs. It worked really well. And there's no chance I would have uploaded any of it to a site or server I didn't control.

Just one datapoint.

Very cool!

But you really ought to talk to some lawyers about their use of it because solicitor-client privilege is pretty important and uploading it to website X sounds like disclosing the documents to X.

I would LOVE this for PDFs. A API would be super for this too, so we could integrate diffs into our applications.

I've uploaded the Series Seed docs (http://www.seriesseed.com/) and made them public. Check it out here:

http://doccompare.com/compare/viewresults/314170241641/

Looks nice but... What does this get me that the inbuilt comparison feature of Word doesn't do, apart from making me give you copies of all my legal documents?

Not all versions of Word have a comparison feature, and when present, it's not very easy to use. Track changes only works if all parties use it, it can't be turned on after the fact.

Even if track changes has been turned off, you can do a comparison between two documents that results in a redlined document. Not sure what this does other than make a pretty redlined document.

I didn't know there was a demand for document diffs.

I created http://diffchecker.com but it's mostly meant for programmers.

Is there a significant improvement in experience if I allow document uploads versus them copy and pasting the document contents?

Mostly that Word documents aren't blocks of text.

This is great but you could serve an unfilled niche by: (product suggestion....) offering something that OCRs PDFs and compares them to the original and says whether or not the signed document matches the one that went out. This would be useful.

I"m a little surprised that given your market, that you don't have a disclaimer / terms & conditions on your web app, or did I miss that?

If I need to compare documents, and I'm too cheap for the higher-end comparison tools, what is this going to do that Microsoft Word doesn't?

This is solid shenanigans prevention.

Yeah, it's useful for both checking revisions of a contract and for comparing an initial contract vs a 'standard' template contract to see the initial pressure points.

Since it's tailored to lawyers, make it obvious that you only store the DOC files for the duration of the comparison, and then you delete them from the server. And not just delete them, but fill the files with random data before deleting them.

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