The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Just to get a contract through with a few changes, we go through Word diffs, manual review, and these crazy confusing to parse tracked changes. And then when everything is said and done, the lawyers produce a "final PDF" and we have to run another comparison in Acrobat.
It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.
It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.