Editing Legal Contracts in Word

I'm chilling in the ICU watching brother sleep peacefully and doing some work (because the hospital has free wireless!).

Currently, I'm spending hours going through a 48 page contract that has 12 versions of edits in track changes. No one wanted to man-up and do the work to accept or reject the trail to create a clean version.

Technically, with our last call and responding document, we all agreed that it was the other side's responsibility to respond to our draft with a clean version.

Instead, their in-house counsel populated the document with oh-so-helpful comments attached to every change, like, "We accept this edit," or "We reject this edit."

Why?

Why?

Why, if you were in-house counsel, would you not just click accept or reject? Why create a comment and type it in? It was more work for them and now it's more work for me because I have to both accept or reject, AND delete the comments.

My client is not going to like the billable hours total on this project...