Similarly, I am a qualified lawyer. I previously worked in a big law firm in London, which describes itself internally as both the “best” and “the most advanced” law firm in the world. I now work full-time as an engineer in software, and increasingly in hardware.
I agree with both comments.
To add, in large-scale corporate/commercial practice (which is the area which I practised), Git would be useful in replacing email-based collaboration, but the switching costs seem too high.
Currently, the corporate law contract negotiation workflow is as follows:
1. a party adds their tracked changes to a Word document based on a template contract;
2. the party emails this document to party B;
3. party B reads the changes, may discuss the changes with their client, adds their tracked changes, and then emails the updated document to party A.
This process repeats for every document, punctuated by occasional conference calls between the parties, until the parties agree.
‘Git for law’ would be useful for lawyers in increasing efficiency - and thus reducing costs for clients.
However, the benefits for law firms of adopting a new Git-based workflow are likely to seem relatively small to lawyers. Their current email-based version control system is messy and time-inefficient, but generally functions with minimal error.
On this basis, I would predict that most corporate law firms would be very slow to adopt a Git-based system - the benefits may not justify the costs.
One should also note that lawyers, particularly contract/commercial lawyers, are conservative by profession. In my experience, most lawyers are very slow to adopt new technologies, highly risk-averse, and skilled at spotting risks. The combination of these traits means that any technology will have to offer a very high benefit to replace an existing legal workflow.