Lawyer divorces wrong couple through dropdown selection error | Hacker News Reader

Lawyer divorces wrong couple through dropdown selection error

lawgazette.co.uk

98 pointsjackweirdy31 comments

You can see the UI for UK's divorce lawyers in this training document[1] pdf. It's not actually that bad, but the payment flow only shows case numbers, not names.

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However, the headline for this article is a bit misleading. It sounds like the lawyers just divorced a random married couple, and the judge refused to undo it.

But if you go through the article, and put together the clues like a game of Dog Crimes, you get the following sequence of events:

1) The wife hired a speciality divorce law firm. 2) The law firm had already completed all divorce paperwork and uploaded documents into court web system for the wife divorcing the husband. 3) The law firm accidentally selected this "case" to submit and pay for, rather than another intended case. 4) Per UK law the husband would have been officially notified of the completion of the divorce. 5) The wife was not happy about this surprise. 6) The wife's law firm went to court to undo the divorce. 7) The husband hired his own lawyers to keep the divorce. 8) Given that all the paperwork was correct filed, and one member of the couple wanted to keep the divorce the judge let it stand.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

So only issue really was that wife's filing went active earlier than she would have wanted... And husband sensibly decide just to take the opportunity...

Happy little accident.

No, it sounds like her lawyer essentially agreed to an unfavourable divorce settlement that was still being negotiated. She may have lost out anything from custody of her children to millions of dollars.

I don't know about UK law, but my understanding of the law around here is:

For custody issues, absent extreme circumstances, custody cases don't end until at least the child turns 18. Getting an unfavorable settlement here is a problem, but likely isn't unrecoverable. Typically a judge won't modify a custody arrangement without a change of circumstance; but they do have considerable discretion.

For the financial issues; this is what lawsuits are for. If her law firm does not make her whole on their own, she should hire a legal malpractice attorney who will probably be able to convince them.

If your lawyer makes a mistake, sue them I suppose. But we can't have people arguing "oops!" and unwinding settled court deals easily can we?

Yet we have to type the name of our repo in GitHub to confirm a deletion...

Imagine the headaches if a life event happened in between the divorce and un-divorce. Oops.

> Vardag said the mistake happened after the wrong name was clicked on from a drop-down menu on the divorce portal. She claimed that court staff had admitted this had happened a few times and that it felt like a design flaw.

I don’t know enough, but it looks like software engineers will be blamed in short order.

Good luck!

Or the UX designer… or the lack of a UX designer

Are you sure you want to delete the marriage of XXX and YYY?

Yes / No

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045262

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40047102

That is the Idiocracy in real life.

Hilarious how that movie mocks youth but society being like this today is not really due to the youth

It’s almost like it was some adults having a laugh at others expense not realizing even making such a movie is bread and circuses

Our vanity won’t let us believe we’re just like prior generations of people with fancier technology. Just the same old idiocy, mockery, cynicism, poor effort across contexts (most of which are made up social hallucinations); poor stewards of social and environmental reality

I don't understand, aren't signatures from parties involved required for this?

My understanding is that the lawyer was authorized to act on the behalf of one party, and the other party was happy to sign the agreement that they were sent.

Clicking "send" or "buy" is signing stuff nowadays.

Well, in most civilised countries; perhaps not in the most backwards of them.

A signature is merely evidence. It's neither sufficient or necessary for agreements. It just happens to be very strong evidence so we tend to think of it as the absolute sign of agreement but legally that isn't the case.

I am with the High Court judge on this one. There was no procedural flaw in the process; it was purely the mistake of the lawyer. The system should not be blamed, when the lawyer could have acted carefully. Hundreds of divorces can proceed a day without issue; why is one fatal mistake by one lawyer suddenly cause to blame the system entirely?

And let's not be mistaken - the lawyer was negligent. Observe the grandstanding of the boss, however:

> Vardag said: 'The young lawyer who made the slip with the drop down menu on the new divorce portal is one of the best of the next generation. Not sloppy, not careless. Totally committed, extremely able. That young lawyer, our brilliant young lawyer, genuinely needs support to deal with the trauma of it all.

...Is all that posturing necessary? "...one of the best of the next generation", really? A "brilliant" lawyer making this sort of mistake, which could have been avoided had the lawyer actually paid attention?

If the junior was mistaken, there is no need for this sort of grandstanding. Negligence need not to be glossed over, or made as if it was not.

Bad UI can ruin lives.

The law itself feels like a bunch of bad spaghetti code that professional grifters live off of

They lawyer has not even agreed to fix their error.

This is another reason society is better off without the people who become lawyers.

I believe the lawyers who were at fault went to court to try and have the judgement set aside but it was the judge that refused

Then the lawyer is at fault and should be forced to cover any damages resulting from this error to their client.

Yes, that's what the court eventually ruled.

> They lawyer has not even agreed to fix their error.

How do you suggest the lawyer fix their error?

Marry the client?

Presumably lawyers can figure that out. That's what they were hired for in the first place.

My guess is that a lawsuit would follow and whomever messed up would be on the hook for any losses between what the final divorce settlement was and what it most likely would have been had it been properly negotiated, plus any emotional damages coming from misapplied parenting rights agreements and the like.

Given that they were using online lawyers, likely that is not very much.

If this was in America, depending on the couple's total wealth and circumstances it could run into the several hundred thousand / low millions.

I don't know the laws in the UK or how that would play out there though.

England and Wales allow unilateral divorce, and at least the husband wanted to divorce, so even without this mistake the result would be divorce. The mistake must be in the details of the settlement, so there's a good chance it's a material cost that the lawyer who made the mistake or their firm can compensate for monetarily

Financial orders are separate from the granting of the divorce itself in England and Wales and the two can be done in (sort of) either order, confusingly.

It's usually thought of to be in the interest of one (or both) parties not to finalise the divorce until a financial order is made (eg if one party dies in the period between then the other may never get assets they would have done in a financial order; or there may be tax consequences if assets end up with the wrong party for a period). In this instance it seems like this disadvantaged the former wife because she ended up divorced without a financial order in place.

Why? This was an administration error. The fact that the decree was acted upon incorrectly doesn't invalidate the decree itself, which says "These two people should get divorced". If the firm needs an additional decree so that they can divorce the right people (e.g. because the original decree has been executed and is no longer valid), then that's what they can ask the judge for.

Otherwise, the victims in this case have the UK tort system available to them to seek a remedy for any damages they may have suffered. They can also just get re-married and ask the firm to cover those associated costs.

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