Redlining Email, thirty years late

Here's a thing I didn't know until last year: lawyers spend part of their working lives colouring text. 

I don't mean that as a metaphor. I mean they receive an email from opposing counsel, find the text they want to change, select the words they want gone, click the little strikethrough button and make them red. Then they type in the new words, select those, underline them, and make the blue. Then they do it again at the next clause, and the one after that, until the email looks like a Word document with Track Changes turned on. 

That's because Outlook doesn't have Track Changes. Word has had it since roughly the Clinton administration. Outlook, the other program that lawyers have open about eleven hours a day, never got it. 

If you're tech-minded, your first reaction is probably the same as mine: you’re kidding. 
Your second is probably: why has nobody fixed it? 

Why nobody fixed it 

Well, there are two reasons. 

First: it's hard. I'll get to that. 

Second: people stopped complaining. 

I imagine it went something like this. Every so often a lawyer would file a ticket with IT: "I spent twenty minutes colouring text. Please make it stop". The IT team looked around on the market, rightly found nothing there, and closed the ticket. Lesson learned: don't bother. So, it just became part of the job: the way identifying pictures of traffic lights became part of buying a concert ticket. 

We only found out about this text-colouring problem because we make a habit of talking to the people who use our software. A lawyer at Allens mentioned the problem to us during one of our regular catchups and asked whether we could do something about it. 

So, we built Redline in Email, an Outlook add-in 

You open the message you're replying to and launch the task pane. It compares your draft with an earlier message in the thread and marks up every difference, just like Track Changes. 

You can keep editing and it tracks the changes as you type. You can accept or reject individual changes. When you're happy, click Apply to Email, and the redline goes into the body of your reply, ready to send. 

Best of all, the other side doesn't need anything installed. They get an ordinary email that happens to have strikethroughs and underlines in it. No plugin, no special viewer, no "please download our app to see this message". It's just email. 

Now, about "It's hard" 

You might reasonably ask why this took thirty years if it's only strikethroughs and colours. 

In Word, a tracked change is a thing. It's a real object in the document. Word knows it's a revision, who made it, and when. That works because Microsoft effectively sets the rules for Word documents, and anything that wants to open one has to play along. 

Email has no such owner. It's universal: countless mail programs, made by different companies, that only mostly agree on how to display a message. To give email real Track Changes, every one of them would have to agree on a new standard and then implement it. Good luck with that. 

So, a redline in an email isn't a tracked change. It's formatting dressed up to look like one. Unfortunately, even formatting isn't straightforward. 

Take Outlook. A numbered list you write in Outlook isn't really a list. It's a stack of paragraphs with the numbers typed in, plus some Microsoft-only instructions about how to indent them. Classic Outlook follows these instructions. Gmail ignores them. Outlook on the web has its own ideas too. 

Making a redline survive all of that is like doing surgery in oven mitts. That's where most of the engineering went. It didn't go into the comparison itself (we already had that, since comparing documents is what Draftable does). It went into the boring work of making sure the redline you see is the redline they see. 

Why now 

There's an old joke that a programmer will spend ten hours automating a twenty-minute task and another ten hours maintaining it. For decades that joke was also a fairly accurate cost-benefit analysis. Lots of chores were technically automatable, but building the automation cost more than putting up with the chore, so people kept putting up with it. 

That balance is shifting. Software is getting cheaper and faster to build, and chores that used to sit below the line are moving above it. 

So, here's my advice: go look for and reassess your own text-colouring problem. Ask yourself: 

1. How long does it take and how often? Twenty minutes a day is roughly eighty hours a year. That's two working weeks spent on strikethrough. 
2. Who else does it? Twenty minutes a day across fifty lawyers is more than two full-time people doing nothing but this. 
3. Does it need a lawyer's judgement? If not, software can probably do it. If so, software can often still do the legwork around it. 
4. What happens when it goes wrong? Hand-colouring a redline isn't just tedious, it's risky: miss one change and it can cost far more than twenty minutes. Chores that are easy to get wrong are worth more to fix. 

Reason one is taking care of itself. Reason two is up to you: tell someone. Tell your innovation team, or tell whoever builds your tools. You don't need to know how to fix it. You only have to describe the steps, out loud, to someone whose job is fixing things. That's the whole trick, and it's how this one got fixed. 

Talk to us 

Redline in Email is included with Draftable Compare at no extra cost. If you're already a customer, talk to your account manager about rolling it out. If you've got a text-colouring problem like this, we'd love to hear about it. Contact product@draftable.com.