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An Excel goof got a Cleary Gottlieb associate in hot water recently. |
10/14/08
That's what happened to some poor soul at Cleary Gottlieb. Cleary was advising on the acquisition of some of Lehman Brothers' assets by Barclays, a firm out of London. Since Lehman was in bankruptcy, time was of the essence.
A first-year associate for Cleary was assigned to help format an Excel spreadsheet created by another associate. The spreadsheet was a list of critical contracts to be assumed and assigned in bankruptcy on the closing date of the Lehman-Barclay's sale. So, the spreadsheet came in late at night, around 9pm or so, and got sent back around 11:30, with the assigning associate forwarding the reformatted spreadsheet to Barclays immediately.
The problem was that said list had over 150 contracts that weren't supposed to be included. They had been marked as ''hidden.'' During reformatting, however, that designation got lost. So the court got the list with those contracts on it, and the mistake was discovered seven days later.
Motions were made, etc., but the lessons are clear.
First, there was a massive failure all the way down the line. The first-year associate made the error, but the work also wasn't reviewed by the assigning associate or a partner. Firms pay large sums of money for this kind of thing to be done right, even if there is a rush.
Second: learn your tools, people! Attorneys should know all about Word and Excel and whatever else they're using. What kind of data do these documents have? It wasn't too long ago that a New York attorney got burned with some meta data in Word that got left in and enabled some sort of discovery snafu.
Finally, if all else fails, ask a paralegal to look a document over. They usually can tell when something is wrong.
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