Unless the computer is 'told' what is where on a page, it cannot understand the document. With a little work at the beginning, much work can be saved in the long run to ensure that electronic documents can be read by a computer. Formatting is the biggest problem with documents created by a word processor. As soon as the user wants to convert it to another format, such as HTML for publication on the Internet, or to use in a litigation support tool, automatic numbering and other formatting is lost, thereby creating a lot more work for someone. The majority of sophisticated tools now available on a word processor would not be used by the majority of legal offices.
Most law firms require functions such as bolding, underlining, tables and numbering.
Those with precedent banks require macros. Today, this functionality is available in not only word processing packages but also HTML editing tools. Using an HTML editor, the HTML code can be viewed and with very little knowledge of HTML, can understand what the document is doing. To allow documents to be 'read' by a computer, the user needs to ensure salient information is appropriately marked in the document. A word processor can do this, but realistically, it will be difficult to convince lawyers that they now have to ensure information is electronically tagged.