[luckylion]

I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.

[tjalfi]

I know more than I'd like to about this topic; I spent most of a decade supporting legal document management systems.

Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

[justinclift]

That approach sounds like pessimistic locking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_(computer_science)#Databa...

Optimistic locking might work better, as long as the underlying data can be automatically diffed and merged reliably well.

Git generally does well using this approach, though it's pretty easy to diff text.

[blitzar]

Ahh they edited Lawsuit_v4_jimcomments_typos_v3.doc not Lawsuit_v4_4__2024_comments_fixed_typos_v2.doc

[adolph]

Sounds like they could use a content management system that retains revisions.

[pc86]

Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80 hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were going too fast to notice the error :)