google docs ate my homework
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The American legal system works with deadlines. As a practicing lawyer wrote in an official publication of the American Bar Association, “[M]issuing any filing deadline is a lawyer’s worst nightmare. “
This is especially true if you are representing the plaintiffs in an “emergency complaint for precautionary declaratory and emergency measures” involving the United States presidential election before a Federal District Court. For those who are scoring points at home, there are two Emergencies and one Accelerated in a single movement.
All of this makes this weekend’s filing of the plaintiffs’ legal team in Gohmert v. Pence particularly attractive:
Motion unopposed by the plaintiffs to present a delayed briefing
Come the Claimants, US Representative Louie Gohmert (TX-1), Tyler Bowyer, Nancy Cottle, Jake Hoffman, Anthony Kern, James R. Lamon, Sam Moorhead, Robert Montgomery, Loraine Pellegrino, Greg Safsten, Kelli Ward and Michael Ward , through their undersigned lawyer, and request that this Court allow the Claimants to submit their response briefing one hour late. In support of this, the Applicants declare:
The plaintiffs hired a team of lawyers to prepare their response brief. During the course of preparation, the Plaintiffs’ attorney encountered numerous technical incompatibilities in the software versions between Google Docs and Microsoft Word, resulting in editing difficulties and text problems.
THEREFORE, the Claimants request an extension of one hour for the deadline for submitting the response brief.
[emphasis added]
I read this and had to rub my eyes and reread five more times to make sure I was actually seeing a federal court case in which lawyers for a full member of the United States Congress suing the United States vice president, said to a Federal District Court who needed an hour extension because they were having trouble making Google Docs and Microsoft Word work well together.
The most surprising thing was finding a lawyer who even recognized the use of Google Docs. For those in the legal community, Microsoft Word is not just a de facto standard; in many cases, it is also the de jure standard. The United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, for example, notes on its Attorney Info page that it is “a Microsoft Word-only court.” (The page usefully includes templates for Word documents from different sources, none of which are Comic Sans, as well as instructions for saving WordPerfect documents in Word format.)
On Twitter, I conducted a informal lawyer survey, and the results were decisive. Of the 69 responses, 57 (83%) said that they and their law firms use Word exclusively. This comment, from a New Jersey lawyer, was representative: “I never used Google Docs in law school or as a lawyer. We always use Word. No court or company I worked for uses Google Docs.”
A Pennsylvania lawyer added: “I find Google Docs unusable for legal work, it’s very difficult to make the final formatting work, especially if you’re working with other lawyers. Maybe I could fix this by investing hours to understand it, but, well , I won’t. So Word is. “
Another five respondents said they use the previous legal standard, WordPerfect. Five lawyers said they use both. This comment was typical: “Google Docs 95% of the time (G Suite is what we run our office in.) We use Word for documents as appeal summaries that need more sophisticated formatting.”
Anyway, in the present case, it seems that the problem is that the document file was being repeatedly converted from Google Docs to Word and vice versa as it passed from hand to hand, probably as a series of email attachments. The problem is especially acute when you add footnotes, endnotes and an authority table.
So where did the plaintiffs’ learned advice go wrong and how can you avoid making similar mistakes the next time your widely dispersed team is collaborating on a very important project with a very tight deadline?
I have three recommendations:
Choose an editing platform for the project. Period. End. If you start editing in Google Docs, continue with Google Docs. If you start in Microsoft Word, stay in Word. Whenever you convert a document to another format, you risk modifying it in subtle ways that you may not notice until it is too late. Doing multiple round-trip conversions is a recipe for chaos.
Use cloud-based storage for real-time collaboration. We are in the 21st century and anyone trying to manage a group editing project with email attachments needs to update. If you’re using Microsoft Word, you can share your documents using OneDrive for Business, or Dropbox or Box, all of which have add-ins that allow you to open and save files directly from Word. (Tip: Google has detailed instructions on how to store Office documents in Google Drive and use Word to edit them.)
Do not cross the streams. If a team member (or an outside contributor) insists on using your preferred platform instead of the standard you set, quarantine your contributions. Have them activate Track Changes mode and designate another team member to transfer their changes to the master document.
In case of Gohmert v. Pence, the plaintiffs’ legal team obtained an hour-long extension, but it did not help much, as the court denied the motion in less time than it takes to convert a Google document to Word format.
Perhaps they should also have enabled spell checking. It probably didn’t help their cause that the heading, in CAPITALS at the top of the first page, contained the name of the District Court incorrectly. Oops.