Groundwork
· 3 min read

Your DMS can't tell you what version five was

Label document versions by what happened to them, and a firm's final work gets curated while lawyers work

Groundwork

The other side sends back a revised draft. You spot a strange paragraph and want to know who put it in. So you open your sent items and look for the last version you sent where that clause changed.

You go to your email because the document management system (DMS) can't answer the question. It holds every version, numbered one to eleven or twelve. Version five tells you nothing. It might be comments you gave a trainee, or the partner's comments. It might be the draft sent to the other side, or the one they sent back.

Twelve numbered versions look identical; labelled versions show which ones mattered NUMBERED v1v2v3v4v5v6v7v8v9v10v11v12 Version five: trainee comments? partner? the other side? LABELLED sent to other sidereceived backpartner commentsexecution
Labels show which versions mattered.

Two things a version number can't do

Linear numbering fails lawyers in two ways. First, it can't mark which versions mattered. Only some drafts count later: the ones exchanged with the other side, the partner's mark-up, the execution version. Numbering gives them the same weight as every internal draft in between.

Second, it can't branch. A draft might go to a tax lawyer and an employment lawyer at once. Sometimes, for good reasons, you want to keep them apart, so nobody sees another person's drafting on the fly. Software teams handle this with branches in tools like GitHub. The DMS has no way to hold those separate versions side by side and let you reconcile them.

A draft branches to tax and employment reviewers, kept apart, then the comments are reconciled tax comments employment comments draft reconciled kept apart
Two reviewers, kept apart, then reconciled.

The workarounds make things worse

Lawyers find ways round this. Some search their sent items. Some work only from the version they sent, looking at the redline, so nothing slips in unnoticed. Either way, the version that went out is the one the lawyer trusts.

A comment on a version in the DMS helps, but it's free text, and anyone who wants to use it as data has to structure it first. Saving a new document for each version, with a naming convention, is worse. That's how a folder ends up holding "final", "final final" and "final, final, not final", and the firm gets more documents to sift through without any more structure.

A folder holding final, final final, and final, final, not final SPA final.docx SPA final final.docx SPA final, final, not final.docx ? Which onewas signed? More documents to sort,no more structure
The naming convention works for the team that invented it, and for nobody else.

The same gap makes delegation hard. Running a document comparison takes seconds. Knowing which two versions to compare takes context that sits in the lawyer's head. An AI tool asked for the latest draft has the same problem, because the answer isn't on the face of any document.

Label the version by what happened to it

So tag each version by what happened to it: first draft, partner comments, sent to the other side, received from the other side, auction draft, execution version, executed version. Tag the branches too: tax comments, employment comments. The strange paragraph then gets traced through the version history instead of the inbox, and the trainee asked to run a comparison can see which versions to pick.

Curation as a by-product

Structured versions would also do a knowledge job firms struggle to get done. You can't tell whether a document is final from its four corners. Finality comes from what happened to it, so someone has to mark it. Firms have tried post-deal forms, and plenty of them say their lawyers will never fill one in.

Tags capture finality anyway. If the version sent to the other side and the version that got signed carry tags, the firm's final work is curated as people work. The tags are also great metadata: they say where a draft came from and what stage it reached, which nothing in the text can tell you.

Sending and saving tag versions automatically, which curates the firm's final work as people go Email a draft tothe other side Save their draftwhen it arrives One click at save:partner comments sent received partner Final work,curatedno form to fill in
Most tags can come from sending and saving. The rest need one click in a step lawyers already take.

Tags only work if applying them costs the lawyer nothing extra. Some can come from the act itself. Email a document to the other side, and the system tags that version as sent. Save a draft that arrives from them, and it's tagged as received. The rest need a click, and that click has to sit in the save step lawyers already go through.

Where this goes

Most DMSs haven't got their hands around this yet. Some let you mark an official version or separate major and minor drafts. How many lawyers use those features is an open question. If very few do, the problem is behaviour as much as software, and a label the lawyer has to remember is just a smaller form.

Structured versions will stick only if most tags arrive as a side effect of sending and saving. If a vendor builds that, expect it to launch under a far grander name than "version labels".