

Show HN: Easily compare legal documents with DocCompare - ckrumb
http://doccompare.com

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slapshot
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.

~~~
ckrumb
By being faster, easier to use and cheaper.

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slapshot
> 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?

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russellallen
> 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.

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patio11
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.

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

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ckrumb
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.

~~~
kogir
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.

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

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ckrumb
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/>

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russellallen
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?

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ckrumb
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.

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jedc
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.

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shadow_s
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?

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jonknee
Mostly that Word documents aren't blocks of text.

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a3camero
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.

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chaostheory
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?

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Duff
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?

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guiseppecalzone
This is solid shenanigans prevention.

~~~
dongle
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.

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rorrr
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.

