Lawyer Lachlan
Personas
Lawyer Lachlan
About him
Lachlan is the owner of a boutique law firm in Sydney, Australia. He specialises in commercial law, so does a lot of commercial-related contracts like partnership agreements, business sale, etc.
Use Case
Lachlan uses Simul for version control and collaboration on Word docs.
He starts a new doc with a template and uploads it to Simul. He’ll then invite the other lawyers in his firm plus the client to work on it and Simul automatically creates a new version each time it is changed.
When it’s time to send to the counterparty, he’ll download the latest version and email it. Once they’ve made their changes, he’ll upload it back to Simul to see what changes they made and to keep it in the version history.
Occasionally Lachlan will go back over the history of the document and open old versions to copy out content that was in an earlier version but perhaps got deleted
Previous solution & pain points
Before Simul, Lachlan and his lawyers were using a shared drive to store all version of their Word docs. They’d save each change as a new file with a filename like ‘Contract V27_Aaron_Edits_Final’
Problems with this include:
1. Finding latest version - Crazy filenames like ‘Aaron_FINAL_FINAL’ made it hard to know the latest version..
2. Working simultaneuously - If people worked on a doc at the same time, there’d be 2x Version27 and conflicts.
3. See changes - If they wanted to see how the doc changed over time, they’d have to open all 27 versions and do a manual compare.
Benefits
Lachlan and his team get the following benefits:
1. Access to latest version - 1 click access to latest version means they never work on the wrong version.
2. Work simultaneously- Multiple people can work on a document simultaneously and their changes are easily merged and highlighted.
3. See changes - Easy to see full history of changes in one place.
4. Access old content - Easy to find and access content from older versions.
Lawyer Lachlan
Buying Trigger
Got sick of the problems associated with filename based version control and thought there had to be a better way.
Buying Process
A quick Google search for something like ‘Version Control for Word’ is how he found Simul.
He then created an account, uploaded a document and played around, opening it in Word, making edits and then creating versions.
Once he understood how ti worked, he realised how valuable it would be so upgraded to a paid account and showed the rest of his team how to use it.
Choice Factors
There were a few things that were important to Larry when choosing a solution:
1. Integration with Word - They do all their contract authoring in Word, so it had to really well with Word.
2. Easy to use - Easy enough that even the least technical savvy lawyers can use it.
3. Secure - Lots of confidential documents being worked on, so needs to be secure. On-premise preferable.