the google docs ate my homework
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The US legal system is running out of deadlines. As one practicing lawyer wrote in an official publication for the American Bar Association, ‘[M]filing any deadline is a lawyer’s biggest nightmare. ‘
This is especially true if you represent the plaintiffs in an ’emergency declaration for accelerated declaration and emergency relief’ involving the US presidential election before a federal district court. For those who keep at home, it is two emergencies and one expedited in one motion.
All this makes this weekend’s submission of the plaintiffs’ legal team in Gohmert v. Pence particularly striking:
Plaintiffs’ uncontested motion to respond briefly
Come now the plaintiffs, U.S. Attorney 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 , by and through their undersigned counsel, requesting that the court allow plaintiffs to file their response order one hour late. In support of this, plaintiffs state:
Plaintiffs hired a team of attorneys to draft their response. In the course of the preparation, the claim of lawyers experienced numerous technical incompatibilities in the software versions between Google Docs and Microsoft Word, which resulted in editing problems and text issues.
Therefore, plaintiffs claim the one-hour extension period from the deadline for submitting their responsive assignment.
[emphasis added]
I read it and had to rub and reread my eyes about five more times to make sure I really see a federal court if the lawyers for a sitting member of the U.S. Congress, who is suing the Vice President of the United States , told a federal district court that they needed an extension of one hour because they were having trouble playing Google Docs and Microsoft Word together.
The most surprising thing was finding a lawyer who even recognized 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 U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, for example, notes on its Lawyer Information page that it is “a Microsoft Word-only court.” (The page contains helpful Word document templates in different fonts, none of which are Comic Sans, as well as instructions for saving WordPerfect documents in Word format.)
On Twitter I have a informal investigation of lawyers, and the results were crucial. Out of 69 responses, 57 (83%) said that they and their law firms are used exclusively. This remark from a lawyer in New Jersey was representative: “I have never used Google Docs on a law school or as a lawyer. We always use Word. No court or firm I have worked for uses Google Docs. “
A lawyer in Pennsylvania added: “I find Google Docs useless for legal work. It’s too difficult to make the final format work, especially if you’re working with other lawyers. Maybe I can correct it by spending hours on it. “But, well, I’m not going. So it’s so.”
Another five respondents said they used the previous legal standard, WordPerfect. Five lawyers said they both use. This remark was typical: “Google Docs is 95% of the time (that’s what we run our office with). We use Word for documents like appeal letters that need more sophisticated formatting.”
Either way, in the current case, it sounds like the problem is that the document file is repeatedly converted from Google Docs to Word and back again, while being transferred from hand to hand, probably as a series of email attachments. The problem is especially acute when you add footnotes, endnotes and a table with authorities.
So where did the learned advocate for the plaintiffs go wrong, and how can you avoid making similar mistakes the next time your dispersed team collaborates on a very important project with a very strict deadline?
I have three recommendations:
Choose one editing platform for the project. Period. Point. Stay in Google Docs when you start editing in Google Docs. If you are starting out in Microsoft Word, stay in Word. Every time you convert a document to a different format, you run the risk of merging your document in subtle ways that you may only notice until it is too late. Performing multiple return conversions is a recipe for chaos.
Use cloud storage for real-time collaboration. We are well into the 21st century, and anyone trying to run a group editing project with email attachments should catch up. If you use Microsoft Word, you can share your documents with OneDrive for Business, or Dropbox, or Box, with all the add-ons that allow you to open and save files directly from Word. (Tip: Google has detailed instructions on how to save Office documents to Google Drive and use Word to edit them.)
Do not cross the streams. If one team member (or an outside contributor) insists on using their preferred platform rather than the standard you have decided on, you should quarantine their contributions. Have them turn on Track Changes mode and then designate another team member to transfer their changes to the main document.
In the case of Gohmert v. Pence, the plaintiffs’ legal team received their one-hour extension, but it did them little good because the court denied their motion in less time than necessary to convert a Google Doc to Word format.
Maybe they should have turned on spelling test as well. It probably did not help their case that the header, in BOLD CAPS at the top of the first page, misspelled the name of the district court. Oops.