> That so feels like a mistake...

Easy to test.

1. Send back the document he sent with a copy of your most recent edits and ask him to confirm if his document is correct.

2. But, make note of at ONE error, and see if he fixes all of them.

3. If he only fixes only the one, then he's either really lazy or trying to keep up the deceit.

4. Repeat steps 1 to 3, be sure to CC everyone involved. If he's lazy he will be ashamed and be more careful. If he's a sneaky bastard he will most likely get angry.

Not foolproof, but will sure make everyone aware of what is going on. (regardless of the motives)

You must have had your share of weasels during contract negotiations.

I have dealt with some horrible people over the years. It's incredible what they will do to get away with stuff.

Standing your ground while maintaining a logical and rational approach is the only way to deal with them.

Most of them like a fight, so you simply can't pick one with them.

Assuming there is an external person arbitrating (which is usually the case when dealing with internal politics at least -- one or two levels up from you), it's so important in these cases to stay reasonable. Virtually every single time, the person that likes to fight will cross the line in the hopes of goading you into a fight. But it's exactly at that time that you win. You send a very reasonable email to the arbitrating person saying, "I'm really trying my best to get this working, but I'm having trouble. Could you please give me a hand." Since the arbitrating person really would rather do nothing, they will look at the situation and say, "A is completely reasonable. B is not. B, you need to change."

I remember one time where I was discussing a problem with a manager in another team. Every single email he sent, he CC'd the management 2 levels up. Every single email I sent, I sent directly to him only. My colleague was panicking. He felt that I needed to show my side of the story to upper management or else I would be in trouble.

Eventually the management 2 levels up got frustrated: "Why am I getting all of these emails? Why can't you people sort out this problem yourself?" To which I reasonably replied, "I'm very sorry that you've been bothered, and I'm not sure why this person is being so difficult. Now that you are here, would you mind giving us a hand?" Problem solved.

You have a good point about CC'ing too many people. And that care should be taken when including others in a discussion that could affect their reputation.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Why the indirectness? Is there a downside to directly confronting the lawyer?

You may never know. "Oh, my mistake. Sorry, I'll have the correct draft for you this afternoon."

Exactly this. I want to know and reveal motives (it's not foolproof) not just escape one incident.

They are likely to repeat the attempt if they think they can get away with it on you.

It's not that easy to accept only your own changes though. You can accept all changes, or reject all changes, but accepting only your own and rejecting others, at least in Word, takes specific effort.

I attribute user error and stupidity when most people attribute malicious intent. 99% of the time, I am correct.

I'm betting that, if the lawyer was not acting maliciously, s/he used the wrong version of the document to accept changes.

Fair point. On the other hand, I'm not much more inclined to work with a stupid lawyer than a malicious one. If he opens by screwing up this badly, what's he going to do next?

There are some cases in which granting the benefit of the doubt is too much of a risk to be worth taking.

Be careful with how you as a non-attorney assess the intelligence of attorneys.

With a sufficiently big organization, it's common for some sort of higher precedence, non-negotiable appendix to render most of this stuff moot anyway. Corporate attorneys on the sell-side, even at surprisingly big companies frequently screw this up, often when making snide comments through the salespeople.

My buddy tells a story from when he was an SE many years ago and his company's attorneys were going to kill a deal over an NDA requirement. The customer ended up getting them to agree to "blah blah blah, subject to applicable law". One problem: the customer was a city, subject to freedom of information law in that state!

Experienced salespeople usually get it but eye-roll, as they have an incentive to STFU.

Unfortunately, as with all cases of information asymmetry, I lack the tools on which to assess them. But since it's required that I do make an assessment, I am going to have to take an extremely self-defensive posture.

The attorney is the expert. I am not. If the attorney makes a mistake, I have no tools with which to judge whether it was stupidity or malice. I have to assume that it's both. My own attorney may better be able to make that assessment, and I'll respect their judgment. But until then, an opposing attorney has to be assumed to have all of the power and every reason to use it.

Oh, absolutely. Making a stupid mistake isn't necessarily better than malicious intent. I wouldn't work with either of those people, especially if my livelihood is involved.

I was just saying that I tend to err on the side of stupidity. Most people are stupid. Very few are bad actors in their day-to-day lives.

I double read most of my emails with more than 3 bullet points.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."

No. This can't be attributed to stupidity.

He's an attorney. Contract version control is part of his job. Selectively discarding counterparty edits is blatant.

> That so feels like a mistake because that's the sort of tactic that would completely and utterly remove your capability of ever working as a corporate lawyer ever again for any company.

No, that's basically SOP for big corporate lawyers.

No it isn't.

You both have different experiences, and the reality is somewhere in the middle........

Be careful with this line of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

I'm often curious about the relationship between this concept to solipsism.

No, it's not. This is something that is easily proven and could be a cause for disbarment. No big corporate lawyer is risking their career over this. Maybe something like this can happen by mistake or with some idiot with an office in a strip mall, but the idea that this is a normal stunt is silly.

you are badly naive here .. far, far worse is common in certain markets