> "Finally got sick of diffing contracts in Word and emailing PDFs back and forth"
this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.
As I said in another comment: you're basing your entire product around doing one feature, but your competition is the entire package.
Redline doesn't appear to be working in Firefox in the web demo you have available. As that is supposed to be your killer feature I would say that your product isn't yet in MVP state. Also, the UI is quite bad and not the slightest bit intuitive; it's the kind of UI that only makes sense once you already have been using it for a while. As you pointed out, most firm lawyers already know and use Litera, so you need to not just be better at your one chosen feature but you also need to be easier and more intuitive to use and you're not.
It's okay for you to be offended by this criticism; this is your baby. But I'm being realistic here. You can choose to ignore critiques and die stillborn, or address these complaints (which other comments have also pointed out) and actually make something that a small but sustainable niche of lawyers will happily use.
That's not the killer feature. I'm not sure where you got that impression. It's the integrated whole which is the feature. Sorry it seems not to work on firefox, but I'll definitely work on that. It's a desktop application with a "web preview" that is being presented here. Most lawyers never interact with the web preview (or the website for that matter) because it just arrives on their desktop.
Agree to disagree on the UX, but points very much appreciated!
[Edit: what OS and generally what type of edit? Firefox on Windows is working, but perhaps there's a specific edit which caused it to crash. Thanks so much!]
yeah word has redline merge, but it breaks the moment edits arent linear. try merging three branches of the same contract across two firms and an in-house team. tracked changes turn into spaghetti. no merge conflict UI, no real version graph, no concept of rebasing edits. you get a stitched-up doc with 20 authors and no idea who changed what when. and once someone accepts changes early, half the context’s gone. legal folks make it work, but that’s survival, not support.
It’s not good enough. I know because I had to use it for comparing different versions of contracts and it was painful.
Word has offered redline merging for over several decades...
There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry.
The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.