She sends for approval 1 day before the conference deadline, proceeds to submit the paper with conditional approval, and waits for the actual approvals. It is common practice with one side effect: if reviewers don't like certain parts of the paper, they can ask you to withdraw it (since you don't have an option to update the paper at this stage). If the paper was submitted for approval before submitting to the conference though, then they would have some room for back-and-forth engagement with updates on the paper.

Nowhere in the account of the story from the other party anything is specified as "conditional" nor whoever issued the initial approval is mentioned at all. More weirdly, in her account of the story, the "back-and-forth" came from, tada... HR department, which is super weird.

Look, I am not necessarily picking her side in the more general story, but it is apparent this paper submission story in isolation is super weird. It seems feasible that she was in the queue for getting the axe having engaged in prior fights with the company (some mention of threat of lawsuit, etc). I also acknowledge the account of story from her side was quite cherry-picked and actively strategic, if not deceitful, and it does not even seem that Jeff was a direct player in this saga. Looks the highest level person in the loop was Megan, not Jeff, and Jeff is simply dragged into the mix for the opportunity to throw a punch at his reputation. That, however, does not minimize the weirdness of putting the whole thing on this two-week paper submission policy.

I agree with you for almost everything you said. This case is definitely unusual. What I mean by conditional is that the person who approved it initially is not an actual reviewer.

For your last sentence, I think Jeff uses that 2-week policy to state that his position is "technically" right.

I agree -- the passive voice here (intentionally?) makes it impossible to tell whether the external submission was done in good faith:

> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

If (to the best of her knowledge) she got approval through the correct process, and then an unidentified party opaquely removed the approval after the fact, I think her questions are justified.

I found the quoted sentence to be very unclear, which is surprising because it is the crux of the matter. From it, I can't tell the timeline between the order of when things happened and who did what. Who approved and submitted what and when?