Law firm mistakes number of days in month, files appeal 1 day after deadline | Hacker News Reader

Law firm mistakes number of days in month, files appeal 1 day after deadline

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39 pointsdanso37 comments

Off by one errors and issues working with dates. Sounds like writing software to me.

IIRC a Ronco YC talk where he declared "procrastination is the devil".

Except for unusual circumstances, waiting until the last day on a legal matter is unprofessional. I feel like I am misunderstanding this post.

Sometimes it is legal tactics... Some court cases are cheaper than the money you are earning before the result of the court case ends your business...

Yeah, it’s usually not procrastination when it comes to legal deadlines. It is very common in many practices to purposely file on the deadline for a variety of reasons. Ripe for mistakes.

Even disregarding legal tactics, unless you're actively loosing money waiting on a result, there is little benefit in filing early. Legal research is never really finished. It would really suck to file your appeal, then have someone stumble upon some other argument you should have made.

This sounds like something I might do. I am sure I am a special kind of 'date dyslexic'. I have very little concept of when things are happening. I refuse to discuss dates without my diary in front of me, because I have no concept of whether the date they gave me is weeks away or months away. If you told me now that I had to get something done by mid-November, that feels like an age away, the fact that I am on holiday for the next week wouldn't cross my mind either. I recently got undone by a calendar which had Sunday at the start of the week, visually speaking...unlike my normal Outlook calendar. It gives me a lot of anxiety, because I have some things I have to do (like authorising payroll, or filing tax returns) on certain days.

Is this a real condition, or am I just disorganised?

> I recently got undone by a calendar which had Sunday at the start of the week,

This used to be quite common. It seems to have fallen out of favour in the last 30 or 40 years.

Do your calendars use a Min-Sun scheme? All of mine (US based) are Sun-Sat.

European calendars are typically Mon-Sun, UK/AUS/US/CA etc typically Sun-Sat. Just as the more-common-in-Europe 24 hour times have been seeping into UK for decades, perhaps you're seeing the Mon-Sun calendar doing the same thing?

AUS is also Mon - Sun

It is now. Australia is moving towards international norms (thank goodness -- let's hope that happens with climate policy as well!).

When I was a little kid Australia was not metric, still used pounds, shillings and sixpences, and yes, the calendar had Sunday first on the left.

Might be due to an ISO standard that has declared Monday to be the first day of the week. I strongly disagree: Sunday has always been the first day of the week, and Saturday the last. There was no good reason why this needed to be changed. The new standard didn't fix any problems with how weeks worked, and it breaks historical definitions (sabbath being the last day of the week, for example).

There's a children's song about the days of the week by a singer we like who starts his week on Monday, and my son dutifully corrects him every time he hears the song.

UK is most definitely Mon-Sun

It is now, but that was the phenomenon I was responding to. When I was a kid in the 60s it was most clearly sun-sat

AFAIK, traditional Arabic/Jewish week starts at Sunday Therefore: Ahad (Day 1) for Sunday. Sabbath/Sabt (Day 7) for Saturday.

Huh me too. This is the first time someone else has described this which ive found. I like the analogy to dyslexia.

It amazes me when people say things like "oh in april two years ago such and such". To me thats about the same as saying 25.535E6 seconds ago. Mostly meaningless

I was just enjoying that our clocks have changed back to UTC for the winter. I do some activities where times are in UTC all year. How can I struggle with adding or removing an hour?

> It amazes me...

Exactly this!

I am sure this happens with lawyers routinely. Usually a deadline will be expressed in number of days from some event, like “90 days from the date of agreement” or something. If it is an important deadline, do not trust your lawyer to do this day count correctly. Ensure all of the assumptions are correct (date and time of events, whether it is business days or calendar days, etc) and triple check the day counts on a calendar yourself.

Yeah, I've had the court skip right over my time to respond, with the judge ruling in favor of his previous employer.

I have absolutely no faith left in the courts.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't understand why you would file it on the last day anyway. If you're appealing wouldn't you want to file just as soon as you're ready? Filing at the last minute doesn't give a bad impression to everyone involved and in doing so harm your case?

It probably depends on knowing your chances for the appeal to stand. If you know the appeal is not going to stand and appeal simply to delay final judgement (penalties, basically), you are going to wait until the last moment.

> If you're appealing wouldn't you want to file just as soon as you're ready?

No, because everything starts a timeline for the next thing, and the way you get the most time for the next thing (which you might need as much as you can get) is to do everything possible without penalty to do the current thing as late as possible. Just because you are ready for the current thing doesn't mean you want to sacrifice time on the next thing.

There's also interest in not giving your opponent information earlier than necessary in their cycle for things whose timing isn't keyed off your filing.

This all sounds needlessly adversarial. Maybe the new deadline should be based on the old deadline, rather than the new filing date that's subject to the old deadline.

Reading the other comments, it seems that this is a somewhat standard practice to file at the last possible moment? If so, could there be a possible opportunity here for a software that files right before deadline making sure that mistakes like above do not occur?

Unless your software can walk itself down to the courthouse, probably not. Courts are, to be generous, a bit behind the times.

Many courts have allowed parties to file documents by email for years and federal courts have their own e-filing docket that (some federal district) courts mandate.

Many is not all.

Yup, and legal calendaring software is a medium size cottage industry in itself. It’s fairly standard, and that this firm wasn’t using something that automatically and verifiably counts dates and deadlines correctly is ... lackluster.

Was there a reason to wait until what they thought was the last day?

Maybe opportunity cost? Other deadlines looming closer? Giv8ng less time to the counterparty to counter-sue? Who knows?

I know I'm guilty of waiting until the last minute myself -- but could they not file earlier? Why schedule the filing at the last possible moment, why not even a day earlier?

Not an expert, but I would guess it gives them more time to prepare the appeal case?

Typically when you file anything that is going to trigger a new set of due dates for you based on the date of filing, so it is standard practice to file everything the day it is due, or perhaps the day before at most. That being said it is also standard practice to use docketing software to handle calculating due dates, it isn’t the sort of thing you would ever want to handle manually so I wonder how the screw up occurred.

Any US lawyers know whether the attempted-appellant has a cause of action against his lawyers for professional negligence here?

Yes, they do.

The lawyers can also look forward to a bar association malpractice investigation, though unless this is part of a pattern, the likely disciplinary action will be relatively mild (i.e., no suspension or disbarment).

Why not state the deadline as a date rather than a number of days?

This is why I always file the day before the deadline.

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