Your posts so far show that you don't have any experience working with legal documents, especially the process of producing them. I don't work in a corporate setting, but my experience in working with corporate folks is that that their idea of a perfect document is a much lower standard than mine given the legal ramifications of our documents. We have defined terms and internal and external cross references as well as complex mathematical functions reduced to words, any of which if even a little off can have a dramatic impact on legal outcomes. There are many moving pieces in complex corporate transactions and quality control at every step of the drafting process is essential. Even with three or four layers of internal review, client feedback and other law firms also doing three or four layers of internal review, docs get screwed up all the time. The consequences can range from mild embarrassment to major institutional client deciding to move work elsewhere.totesTheGoat wrote:Care to explain what issues and risks Word's track changes functionality brings? "The juniors are lazy and make mistakes" isn't a responsive answer, "it takes longer" isn't really true, and "the juniors won't learn from it" is laughable for a number of reasons.
To reduce this risk, while allowing partners to work on multiple projects at a time, the drafting process involves documents going up and down the line internally. Partners give general comments, senior associate give more specific comments, and junior folks run the changes while constantly scrubbing the doc for internal consistency and mistakes. If partners and senior folks were tasked with making changes themselves they would have no time to do anything else. So they make general comments as efficiently as possible and go back and forth with more junior lawyers to make sure they get implemented. There is no way it is more efficient for a partner to implement comments globally at their billing rates than it is to have the juniors do so.
So, the discussion in this thread is not on whether the senior folks should be inputting changes directly - I don't think anyone would argue that is how the system is supposed to work. It is about whether the senior folks make their comments electronically using Word review functions or just print out the doc and mark the changes directly on a hard copy. For me it is more efficient to hit print, mark my changes on the doc and then hand them over to a junior to incorporate. For example, if my only comment is to change "IPO" to "Qualified IPO" throughout the document, it is much faster for me to print the relevant page, write "Qualified" in front of IPO once and then add "global change" after it than it is for me to do the same in Word, save the doc to my desktop and then attach it to an email to the guy in the office next door. It is also much more efficient for me to print a document out and mark it while reviewing physically than it is to either review on a computer or have to keep looking up to make comments on the screen. But I know that folks who prefer to work in tracked changes feel the opposite is true, and I can't say that they are wrong. People are just wired differently.
From the junior's perspective, they should never just be accepting changes. I used to print out tracked changes markups and implement all changes manually just to make sure there were no typos or other snafus (spoiler alert - seniors have them all the time). So ultimately tracked changes put me in the same place as if I had just received hand markups, which I think is also true for quality junior associates generally. The time saved transcribing is just replaced with another process to make sure the document is perfect.
