Mistakes are part and parcel of the human experience.
Everyone makes them whether at work or at play.
But when it comes to documents – especially official ones in the legal domain – errors often bear a very high cost. Moreover, this cost is more than just financial. A loss of reputation, credibility and goodwill is also a very real concern with errors and inadvertent human carelessness.
Document Errors: Financial Costs
Document errors that directly cause financial losses are fairly rare, butthey do happen. Here are some famous examples!
Macy’s, the American store chain, once sent out a product catalogue offering a $1,500 necklace for just $47. The intended price was $479 and this small typo caused huge losses for the company.
In 1962, the code directing NASA’s unmanned Mariner 1 space probe had a
missing hyphen. Due to this error, instead of flying to Venus to collect data
as it was supposed to, the Mariner 1 exploded within five minutes of its
launch. The mistake cost NASA a cool $18.5 million. In 2019, this translates to
about $150 million!
Errors are not always typos. Even poor punctuation can cause financial havoc!
The lack of a comma in a state law forced a Maine dairy company to settle an overtime dispute with its workers. The settlement cost them $5 million.
These mistakes can set a company’s financial health back by years or even decades. However, these are often not the most important or the longest-lasting losses. After all, lost money can be earned back. What is extremely difficult to earn back is trust.
Which brings us to…
Document Errors: Reputation Costs
Errors in a legal contract might entirely change the interpretation of that contract. It will also change the opinion of the reader regarding the skill
level of the lawyer who drafted it. This opinion may also extend to the law firm – a problem that can seriously damage its reputation and good standing.
People must be able to trust their lawyer and law firm. Without this trust, clients won’t be forthcoming about difficult facts. Consequently, a law firm won’t be able to competently represent that client. If they end up losing the case, they will only re-affirm what the client thought in the first place – this lawyer and law firm cannot be trusted. This self-fulfilling problem is very difficult to resolve – and all because the lawyer lacked the attention to detail to spot his errors (or avoid them in the first place).
The solution to document errors: A comprehensive document drafting lifecycle
Litera Microsystems understands the entire drafting lifecycle for legal documents; from initial creation through checking and proofreading, into end-stage collaboration and even secure sharing. Its smart technology can help lawyers at every stage, automatically detecting and flagging potentially damaging errors, not only in terminology and consistency but usage and cross-referencing as well.
This eliminates document errors and helps ensure that the financial and reputational losses they might cause are avoided.
