We (Bonsai, YC W16) built something like this specifically for freelancers. You enter the parameters of your project and we'll generate a contract using a variety of pre-set clauses. https://www.hellobonsai.com/freelance-contracts

I've been wanting to build a legal IDE for ages, it makes no sense that lawyers are stuck using Microsoft Word with lots of bolt-on plugins rather than a VSCode / Sublime equivalent.

Said tools exist, though they're not particularly successful. Word is just too easy to use - even if the replacement is 5% better (which is unlikely), that's not enough to prompt a shift.

The issue is that the replacement isn’t 5% better (it is!), it’s the network effect. The counter pretty likely will ask for a redlined Word doc so you’re back to exporting it from your fancy scm-diffed Markdown file.

There are tools. Enterprises use them.

Also, some small-scale practice areas like family law have form generator tools.

Yeah - I was involved in helping a large company purchase one of these tools and it was a nightmare. The software was poorly made, and of course every corporation does things differently.

Part of the problem is that legal teams don't understand how this software works, and the companies that create it use salespeople who will promise all kinds of things, so you end up in the situation where an in-house team has been told it will cut down their hours by X%, the software isn't designed for whatever task it has been sold for, and it becomes a hack job to make it do so.

The areas like family law (or particularly executries) are great for document generators. Similarly in corporate where there is a lot more routine work. These have already come into law firms in a big way but it's not particularly innovative (though still welcome).

There are enterprise contract management systems that do this kind of stuff.