How: To Use and Contribute, Lawyer version

This repurposes an email chat with a smart lawyer-to-be.

Please sign up for an account on github. Then I can invite you to either edit stuff on our version - or - a few more steps but those steps are along the path of enlightenment - you can fork the repo, make changes and ask us to integrate them into the core (a “pull request” - a request that we pull your improvements into our repo).

Awesome, thanks Jim. I really need to learn the mechanics of how GitHub works. I know my friend has an interest in Open Source and Law as well -- I'm going to loop him in here as a placeholder for a future conversation / session we should have where you just walk through Git with us to show us how it works (although I know you're not an expert -- perhaps you too could rope someone in?) Maybe we can do this in January when exams are over, haha.

** How Does Stuff Stay Confidential?

Your question -

I think that the software community has the same problems of confidentiality that lawyers do, though in different quantities (distributions on the bell curve). There are some really common patterns in law that might take some gymnastics in a git world, but that might reflect the limitations of my knowledge of git. In any event, shared text will make them much narrower in scope, and the git solution would end up much better than current practice. The common pattern is that one person on a sub team (say an associate in a law firm) does something, shares with partner, they iterate, then share with in-house counsel, who shares with deal folks and asst. in-house, iterate and share back, iterate and share with deal leaders, iterate and share with other side. Etc.

Git (thanks Linus!) is architected to allow whatever you want. You edit locally and have the only copy. Then you post or push (or make a pull request) somewhere. I don’t know how complex it would be to create the kind of (fluid) tree described above. Probably you can solve it better than any of us imagine (like so much other stuff in git). Worst case, you can paste the work into an email and let the other folks paste it into their repositories, emulating current practice.