The Immortality of Microsoft Word: Why Legal Tech Can't Replace It

As a software engineer with five years of experience in legal technology, the author analyzes the fundamental reason for industry product failures: technologists misunderstand legal workflows. Microsoft Word remains irreplaceable in the legal industry, with its docx file format having become the network protocol that defines society’s legal commitments. The legal system is decentralized, all existing case law is in legacy formats, and courts have strict formatting requirements (such as font size and line spacing), making tools like Markdown inadequate. Attempting to replace Word with new formats introduces friction and disrupts the ecosystem. Innovation should be based on a deep understanding of legal practice, not a blind pursuit of technical elegance. The article emphasizes that legal tech needs products that truly understand lawyers’ needs, rather than revolutionary changes, to help lawyers focus more on legal judgment rather than document processing.