Contract redlining version control chaos between opposing counsel using different tools

When two law firms negotiate a contract, one side typically uses Microsoft Word's Track Changes while the other may use a different redlining tool (like Litera Compare, Workshare, or even Google Docs), resulting in lost markup, flattened tracked changes, and invisible edits that slip through undetected. So what? Attorneys on the receiving end must manually re-compare the entire document against their last version to catch stealth edits — additions or deletions the other side made without marking. So what? This manual re-comparison can take 2-4 hours per round on a 60-page agreement, and complex M&A deals can go through 15-20 rounds of redlines. So what? Associates billing $400-600/hour spend tens of thousands of dollars worth of time on purely mechanical document comparison work that adds zero legal value. So what? Clients ultimately absorb these costs, and junior associates burn out on tedious work that erodes their job satisfaction and increases attrition at firms. So what? Law firms lose talent, clients lose trust in billing fairness, and genuine substantive legal issues get less attention because attorneys are exhausted from version control busywork. This persists because the legal industry lacks a universal redlining interchange format — each vendor's proprietary markup encoding is incompatible with others, and no single firm can force opposing counsel to adopt their toolchain.