Defensive Computing for Lawyers

Frank Hayes, writing in Computerworld, does a great job recounting how an Excel to PDF conversion resulted in Barclays Capital making a multi-million dollar mistake in their offering to buy part of Lehman Brothers. In and of itself, it's an interesting story, but Hayes concludes with this advice for using technology:

Keep it simple.
Don't make assumptions.
And never, ever trust tech more than you really have to.

Agreed.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

[BenjaminWright]

Similar problems happened in the world of paper, xerox machines and typewriters. A creditor lost millions of dollars because, sometime in the 1980s, a law firm secretary typed $92,885 on a mortgage for a ship, instead of $92,885,000. The mistake was replicated into scores of different paper documents, reviewed by many lawyers. No one caught the mistake until the ship owner went into bankruptcy. The Law of Electronic Commerce (Little Brown) Section 5.3, 1992 Supplement. --Ben

[DrollTroll]

Dude, Defensive Computing is more then enough, we don't need no Defensive Xeroxing or Defensive Typing blogs!

[tenc21]

Keep it simple.
Don't make assumptions.
And never, ever trust [ tech] more than you really have to

Hey, these rules apply to lots of things; you can put in lots of words for "tech" and these rules still work. It's just common sense,. [eg, business plans, war strategy, voting surveys, romantic relationships, etc.]