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Further amazing that many of the people who are responding to this seem to assume I’m not a lawyer.

sometimes it seems like the practice of law is an extended exercise in collective reading comprehension

Lawyers are right up there with bankers for believing "this is standard industry practice" is synonymous for "this is a good and sensible thing"

Because, based on your response, it doesn’t sound like you are. This isn’t a formatting issue. It’s all the references throughout the document and other documents that need to be changed and verified when 2.4 is deleted and all the sections renumbered.

It's only a solved problem if all the references and cross references are in one document or at least linked set of documents. If multiple docs in multiple file systems and perhaps 1000s of emails all refer to para 2.5, you can't just change it to 2.4.

software developer with experience in legal publishing here, and yep, that is exactly how it works even if you technically could renumber paragraphs on update, you may choose not to because other people (a.k.a. users) may have already referenced them

furthermore, legal publishing is...weird you've got stuff that is published in full only once every x years, with a supplement printed every year in between describing the changes but at the same time it all has to be in sync with your searchable online content updated daily

It’s a solution in search of a problem; lawyers do this for a good reason, stated by some of your commenters.

I know what lawyers do, thanks; signed, guy whose current titles are VP Legal and Adjunct Professor of Law; etc etc etc

Good for you. I can guaranty you that nearly every lawyer who does complex transactional work agrees on this point-it’s not a real problem.

Something not mentioned in this thread is that your client is paying for all this. If you can solve the problem of taking something out in 2 seconds instead of 10-15 minutes you do your client a service

You don’t know what you are talking about. I have practiced law for 40 years and completely unanticipated screw ups happen when you are suddenly changing the numbering and things like that. Leaving the number is the absolutely safest route.

Skill issue

Read through all of the responses to this and the original post. No it is not.

A better Word is possible.

As a writer who uses Word to edit construction specifications I can attest that the problem has not been solved. Not only does it not automatically renumber a sequence when a section is cut, if you try to force it to renumber it often misformats large sections of the doc. still sucks 40 years later