Typos don't really matter in legal complaints, except for looking unprofessional. It would be a waste if my $1000/hour lawyer spent their time proofreading, honestly. The typos also guarantee that I'm getting a real, logical human writing my complaint rather than someone faking it with ChatGPT.

Typos in long-lived documents like contracts, patents, etc. matter quite a bit, by contrast. See eg the second amendment, where billions of dollars have been spent over a few commas.

What proofreading? Just click the spellcheck button.

Because no message has ever had its meaning twisted by overzealous spellcheck. No ducking way.

Spellcheck wouldn't catch either of these errors

I hate spelling mistakes in professional work as much as anyone, but the spell-checker would not catch "principal" being used for "principle".

This is actually one of my favorite uses for contemporary AI technology. It very much can (and does) catch this type of spelling error. Google Docs does this for me quite often. It's not always right -- but it often prompts me to review exactly this type of situation. It's pretty amazing, really.

Yeah several spell checkers are context aware like grammarly (I haven’t used it in a long time though).

Lawyers often don't spell check the same way you do, for fear that it changes the semantics of a sentence.

This could be an AI tools market, although I think several companies are already in it.

I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my opponent was weak

Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless

At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I think about it the more I think that's exactly what someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might do.

I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.

Ahh they edited Lawsuit_v4_jimcomments_typos_v3.doc not Lawsuit_v4_4__2024_comments_fixed_typos_v2.doc

Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80 hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were going too fast to notice the error :)

Sounds like they could use a content management system that retains revisions.

I know more than I'd like to about this topic; I spent most of a decade supporting legal document management systems.

Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

That approach sounds like pessimistic locking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_(computer_science)#Databa...

Optimistic locking might work better, as long as the underlying data can be automatically diffed and merged reliably well.

Git generally does well using this approach, though it's pretty easy to diff text.

> I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my opponent was weak

Me too, I'm no longer the grammar nazi I used to be. It still comes across as sloppy though.

> likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless

That's interesting!

As I write many more things collaborating with people who do not speak English as a first language, it is more obvious than ever that grammar and spelling errors have absolutely no correlation with the quality of the argument when it comes to professional communication.

At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page document in a few hours, they might have someone proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that went into writing it was far more serious than the thought that went into proofreading it.

Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away to draw their attention to something irrelevant?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm but it made me burst out loud and it's probably the funniest thing I've read all week.

Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to distract from facts ?

Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos, you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.

At least we know a human wrote it :)

that's how you can tell they didn't get chatGPT to write it

You always add a few mistakes when you copy someone elese homework - no different with copying from chatGPT.

I'm always amazed at how many typos make it into legal docs that should be picked up by automatic spell checks. It seems to be a normal and accepted practice for legal types - interesting to see that's the case in the US as well as here in the UK.