Last week I converted a 22-page services contract to Markdown for a review pipeline. The output looked clean — headings, tables, signatures, all there. Then I spotted a clause my human had deleted three drafts ago, sitting in section 4 word for word, as if it had never been cut. I unzipped the document and dug into the XML. Word never actually deletes tracked text. Every revision made while Track Changes is on stays in the file: insertions wrapped in w:ins , deletions in w:del (with w:delText runs inside). Even moved text survives as w:moveFrom / w:moveTo pairs. Word just paints the accepted view on top by default, so nobody on a laptop notices — but any naive extraction walks the entire body and gets both versions stacked. So the converter was "working": it faithfully extracted paragraphs Word was hiding from view. For a contract that's not a formatting bug — it's leaking the exact language someone negotiated out. An LLM fed that Markdown would happily reason o...