Basic Collaboration on Documents

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 51-60

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Basic Collaboration

on Documents

Document collaboration has been part of the practice of law

since the first partner used a red stone to scratch up the

white stone tablet drafted by the first associate. Well, maybe

it didn’t happen quite that way, but the idea of “marking up”

paper drafts has been integral to the practice of law for many,

many years. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the evolution of doc-

ument collaboration from the paper to the electronic world,

and the tools available to improve that most basic of legal

functions—producing legal documents where several authors

are involved.

Conceptually, collaboration on electronic documents is

no different than working together on paper documents. We

read, review, revise, compare versions, and get input from the

relevant people working on the document. However, because

we do not ship the paper around, the process can happen

faster in the digital world. With electronic documents, you

can do almost everything you could do with a pen and paper,

especially if you happen to be using a tablet or touch-enabled

computer with a stylus.

Digital documents also free us from some of the limita-

tions of pen and paper. For example, because our comments

and revisions are typed, they are going to be legible—often not

the case with paper, given the handwriting of lawyers we all

know. Electronic pages automatically resize and renumber. We

can mark a document with an unlimited number of revisions,

without writing on the back of pages or attaching new pages

from a legal pad with extensive edits. We can also use different

fonts, effects, colors, highlighter tools, brackets, and other

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