Lawyer here: because your engineer's POV is wrong. I don't know what else to say. It comes from a lack of knowledge of how lawyers actually work and therefore what we actually need for our work. It is not identical to what software engineers need or want for theirs.

The drafting process is the area in transactional practice that least needs "disruption". The process is long-settled and fairly universal. Track changes are not "crazy confusing to parse", they're a simple and easy way to know who edited what and when. Version control? Basically meaningless for lawyers. The only version of the contract that matters is the most recent one, so we just need a way to track that. In actual practice we don't just revert back to some older version; that doesn't even make sense to someone who understands what we're doing.

What really needs disruption, or at least improvement, are contract management platforms. I've worked with all the major ones and they're all pretty bad and clunky in their own way (IME Ironclad is the least-worst but still leaves much to be desired).

If someone could develop a simple, intuitive system for extracting and recording certain agreement content and making that searchable (and transferable!), as well as storing and searching agreement documents generally, it would be amazing.

It's a plain text file so there is no formatting. You can add extra spaces or tabs if you would like and they will appear in the final contract.

So I guess it's up to each drafting lawyer to come up with their own formatting conventions. I think that is potentially a recipe for disaster, unless the intention is that the plain text contract will only ever be edited by way of an interface that enforces standardised formatting conventions (which seems like it defeats the purpose).

Don't get me wrong, the current process of lawyers marking up each other's Word documents is a pain, but at least with Word when you go to enter a new clause it will by default have the same formatting and styling as all the other clauses. Maybe I'm missing the use case though.

Also, just to mention, version control and e-signatures are already available to transactional lawyers, though the solutions are imperfect and I guess they aren't available to everyone (I presume the software is expensive).

I don't mean to be critical or unduly sceptical by the way. I personally would love a move to simple, text-based processes for drafting and negotiating documents. But my own experience tells me that non-technically-inclined lawyers and clients would be slow to adopt a solution like this.

Do you see this product serving the lawyer-lawyer use case, lawyer-individual use case, or to an individual-individual market?[0] As an individual, I feel like there may be a lot of friction in drafting and sending a contract for another individual to sign. The chain of custody/assurance of no editing is one aspect that would drive me to do this process through a lawyer (or any other document signing company, but I don't have any experience with them).

Can I request/propose changes to a document sent to me? Or is this more for final drafts to be sent for final signing? Being plain text, I imagine diffing could be very straightforward.

It seems to me there's an assumption that email access is enough to validate you are the person this is intended for. I wouldn't be surprised if other online offerings like this had similar assumptions, but I'm not sure if I agree with the premise. I would imagine an entity sending a contract could include a PGP key, and you signing it could also sign the message, but a lot of this seems like a post-signing check, not a pre-req to sign.

I like that there is a style manual that formats the draft. I know it exists as a guideline for non-digital uses too, but conforming to a standard in the digital representation should make sharing and templating more standardized. Not a question, just something that excites me as not-legal-expert person.

Do you think making a plugin for Microsoft Word that calls your website would be a middle-ground for moving people into your service?

I like how you mention IDEs as well. I truly do not know the current flow for making a contract, and assume it is that there are templates that you change to match the specific situation. Completing templates in a guided manner seems like it could be a big deal, especially if there are sub-templates for each variation that a section would have.

Overall, I'm excited. I think the legal system has a lot of pain points for lawyers and individuals alike. Some of those can't be fixed, but tech can definitely solve some, and I think this is one of the problems tech CAN help with.

[0] Lawyer in this case can also mean a business' or other entity's legal counsel.