Git can be used for law in different levels of engagement.
Git as an archive of a transaction - a kind of on-going electronic deal binder. Open a git repo in a private space (or in a private repo on GitHub). Organize the file folders as you wish or according to a template. Save the relevant documents in the repo, adding additional documents and new versions of documents as you go. Use the git “commit” command often.
Git as a deal room. Allow others to also contribute documents to the repo - and/or ask them to collaborate using “pull-requests”. This gives an automatic and secure system of attribution of who submitted what, when, and - if you use commit messages - why.
Git as deal room can also allow for nested collaboration - an internal team can work on a “branch” (dedicated version) of the repo, and the lead deal maker can “push” those materials to the main branch (shared with the other party) as they deem appropriate. The legal team at GitHub has this video of intense use of git as deal room and knowledge management system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4WspUk-gkw
Start doing legal documents in git-friendly formats. Git will keep perfect versions of whatever files you want, including MS Word, Excel, PDF, CAD files, email chains, etc. Its versioning will tell you what file when, but it won’t really show you the differences. But it will do that for files that are “text” files, including those in most markdown formats. This will allow you to see the specific changes as between different versions of a file. So you can have a fixed name for a file and be able to cruise back and forth in time seeing what changes were made. You can see what was the change since the last time you looked, even if there have been multiple changes in between. All within git.
Benefit from model documents using git and GitHub. There are repos for various model documents already on GitHub, including a collection at github.com/CommonAccord/. You can “clone” those repos into your own deal room - getting the benefit of the work and also be able to show to your counterparty and others that you truly have started from the publicly-available model. You might occasionally be moved to contribute back any improvements or adaptations to a different set of circumstances.
Go “Source” format with ProseObjects. To get the full benefit of git, collaboration, public models and the like, you can document your deals using a source format (combinable, “composable”) for them. ProseObjects is the most general of those approaches. See www.commonaccord.org. This will allow you to state each step as a list of deal points and modifications. It will also allow you to use the full variety of model document solutions for each part. Finally, it makes your documents “computable” in the sense that the lists form a “semantic web” or “Directed Acyclical Graph” that a machine can easily travers.
Tools:
For the introductory levels where you are managing files in a git repo, we recommend the GitHub Desktop application. https://desktop.github.com/
If you are working with markdown - or better with ProseObjects - we recommend Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/. This is rather like a file manager, it presents files in their folders, but it also lets you directly edit text-oriented files, save, and do that various git functions - committing, pushing, managing pull-request, seeing differences between versions, etc. Note that you can also use VS Code in the browser (!) directly on a repo hosted at GitHub, and now even locally on your own files. https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev.
There is a somewhat messy collection of videos at - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=GitForLaw