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Comment by syats | Hacker News Reader

Silly but honest question: why hasn't google docs taken over the legal world?

I find g suite's collaborative editing waaay better than sending around docx/xlsx files with dates in the filenames.. and don't even get me started with that office365 thing.

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Google can and will cancel your account for a host of reasons and there is no recourse, no customer service and when that happens, you're out of luck. You don't have control over your documents and the Bar mandates that you do. Of course, you can back everything up, but then why use Google in the first place.

My wife is a lawyer. The biggest issue is that they have proprietary document management systems for security. G-suite is just as big a risk as O365.

AFAIK, MS Office has had multi-user coauthoring for a while, even between their (free) online apps and the desktop apps. I know I've used it in Word for sure, not sure about Excel or PowerPoint. It's actually pretty good, though I still wish MS would launch a Linux native version of Office (the web Word is good enough for reading and making small changes but not really for daily driving).

Google Docs do not have the 1:1 feature parity as Word and LibreOffice. Law Firms are particular with their documents and templates. It have to be consistent across word processors which Google Docs lack. Google Docs is a ultra-lite version of Word/LibreOffice.

Workplace collaborative editing is superior, you are right. At the same time, it lacks a lot of thing in other way.

I can understand not wanting sensitive documents in the cloud. It's also way too easy to share Google docs (good for collaboration, bad for confidentiality).

I'm more surprised something like LibreOffice or Emacs Org-Mode hasn't taken over. You'd think lawyers would want to truly 'own' the software they use for sensitive documents and not rely on a company who may or may not have spyware in the software.

Perhaps because of confidentiality? Lawyers would best understand the pros and cons of Google's Terms and conditions, and are probably the only one who read it.

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