What if there was a better text editor for lawyers?
That question has been rattling around in my brain for the better part of a decade. What would it look like? What would it feel like? And who would build it? I am finally at a point where I think I can start to fill in some of those gaps, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind a bit.
I started law school at NYU in the fall of 2015, but I figured out early on that I did not want to be a lawyer forever. I decided to stick with it for the promise of a stable job, and in the meantime I started exploring other opportunities. In the summer after my first year of school, I started programming. It was not long before I fell in love with it.
In those days, I was not building anything of consequence—small games, personal websites—but what really pulled me in was the tooling, the experience of developing software. The text editor I used for coding knew as much about the code as I did (and sometimes more). When I started typing, it would give me suggestions based on variables I had already defined. When I hovered over a function that I did not write—perhaps because it came from a third-party library—it would tell me what the function did, and if I needed to know more for some reason, it would let me click through to the definition to see how it was implemented, without leaving the editor.
But the best part was the tight feedback loop. I could change a piece of code and watch the website update in realtime. There was zero latency between intent and outcome. It felt like running through the air: for every step I took, the editor would put a foothold underneath me. I was enamored with all of it, and I knew for certain that I wanted to be a professional developer one day.
That dream did not pan out right away though. Instead, I finished my degree and took a job at a white-shoe firm in the city working on international arbitration and litigation. The first thing that struck me was how primitive the tooling was, especially Microsoft Word. The interface was stuffed with features from 40 years of accretion and no one had bothered to clean it up in all that time. The style system was a source of constant frustration. And most importantly, it had no grasp on the meaning of the content in a document. That feeling of working with a tool that understood what you were doing as well as you did was nonexistent. Perhaps I felt it more because I was coming from greener pastures.
It seemed like such a shame. There were only two choices at the time: be a lawyer and work with antiquated technology, or do something else and live in the twenty-first century. There was no third option.
This is when I first started thinking about what a better text editor for lawyers might look like. Around that time, my close friend Hamza—now my co-founder—saw his wife dealing with the same issues in law school and arrived at the same idea from a different path. We workshopped the idea a bit, but nothing came of it. Hamza was still early on in his career as a developer, and I had not even started mine. Building a rich text editor is not an easy task, even for an experienced developer, and building one that can rival Microsoft Word is a taller task than that. At that juncture, we were simply not prepared to scale the wall.
Years passed. I jumped to a firm in San Francisco to be closer to family, and then a year later I quit the practice of law altogether to pursue software engineering. I landed my first job as a developer at Amazon, where I cut my teeth working on Alexa. Some time after that, I moved to a small legal tech startup called Bench IQ, where I learned how to build a software product for lawyers. I thought about this particular problem from time to time, but every time I shooed it away thinking I needed more time to prepare. All the while, I thought surely someone would come along and beat me to the punch.
But it never happened. Here we are in 2026, with self-driving cars, robots, and artificial intelligence, and Microsoft Word is still the only game in town. This is especially true for litigators. Companies like Ironclad and Juro have moved the needle for transactional work, but there is no dawn on the horizon for litigation.
It is hard to say exactly why. Part of it is the pool: the people that understand legal drafting rarely build software, and the people who build software rarely understand legal drafting. Part of it is the technical challenge: building a rich text editor is notoriously difficult, which is why so many companies settle for building Word plugins instead. And part of it is probably the perceived inevitability of Word in this space. In any event, no one seems to have accepted the challenge.
That is fine by me. If no one else wants to step up to the plate, I will. Lawyers deserve so much better. They deserve a text editor that thinks the way they do, that propels them forward instead of dragging them down. They deserve an editor that helps them close their laptops earlier instead of one that keeps them up into the late hours of the night.
That editor exists already in my imagination. It looks like a tidy desk: the drawers are deep, but the surface is clear and has only what you need in the moment. It feels like a pen in the hand: weightless, natural, sure of its purpose. It thinks in terms of arguments, briefs, and cases, not just ink on a page. And we are uniquely positioned to build it. There are few people that have experienced these issues firsthand, fewer still that can envision a future beyond them, and even fewer that have the skills necessary to bring that future to life.
If you are a litigator tired of fighting with your editor, we want to hear from you. Help us shape the next generation of legal drafting.
Thanks for reading.
Peace.
Mustafa Moiz, Esq.
Co-founder & CEO, Rhetoric